User Reviews

There's great Blaxploitation films (Shaft, Coffy, Blacula) and then you have The Guy From Harlem. There's so much wrong with this film, where does one begin?

1) The title alone. The guy is supposedly from Harlem but the movie is filmed in Miami. So what was the point of calling him the guy from Harlem when he's not even IN Harlem?

2) Names of detectives are usually memorable (Shaft, Baretta, Kojak). Al Conners has to be the blandest detective name I've ever heard.

3) He has two assignments. Assignment 1 is being babysitter to a foreign dignitaries' wife. Assignment 2 is rescuing a gambler's daughter kidnapped by some dude named Big Daddy. Both women he rescues, both are taken to a blonde woman's apartment to hide out (Blondie gets sent to a hotel), both end up wearing the unsexiest lingerie ever, and both get sexytime with Al Conners. So the clients get some and the poor secretary and Blondie are denied some sugar?

4) Gambler apparently has a problem with his indoor voice. "GOOD MORNIN', GOOD LOOKIN'!" Good Lord, I had to turn down the volume.

5) The descriptions of Big Daddy goes like this: "Very few people ever see Big Daddy. The only thing I can tell you though, he's about six feet two inches tall, has blond, curly hair and, man, you talking about some muscles... he got some muscles on him, and he always wears bands around his muscles. That's the only thing we can tell you about Big Daddy. Nobody ever sees him. " Funny, when they cut away to the gym scene, I spotted Big Daddy in two seconds. How is this dude hard to find?

6) Fight scenes are suppose to be exciting. These fight scenes were anything BUT exciting.

7) The music sounds like it's borrowed from video games.

8) Is that an actual office or did they borrow a church basement?

9)Has anyone ever smelled a New York strip steak? Do they even exist?

10)"You tell Big Daddy nobody fools with The Guy From Harlem, you dig?" doesn't have the same oomph as "Cut the crap man, this is Shaft."

11)Aside from the hideous lingerie, the fashions are cool. The flowery wallpaper, however, is headache-educing.

12) For a detective with a calm, eloquent voice his acting is awful. I take that back; everyone's acting is awful. And the dialog: "Sweetie, I got an answer for both of those questions. You got two questions, I got one answer: NONE O' YO' DAMN BIDNESS!!" 'Nuff said.

This film probably would've worked better as a porno film because it doesn't work as a Blaxploitation film.

First things first, I have to acknowledge that this movie was a very modest production, even in comparison to other blaxploitation movies. Watching this movie might make you appreciate how much effort goes into shooting and editing them into a watchable movie since so much goes wrong in this one. Really bad sets, lighting problems, audio going between too loud and too soft, and much more are all over this movie. One thing working in its favor is that unlike some other low-budget blaxploitation movies, you don't see the boom mic slip into shots as much. Though that may be because that the crew didn't use one for many shots.

Anyways, the story is pretty straight forward. Al Connors/The Guy (played by Loye Hawkins) is a private detective in Miami whose only distinguishing feature is being from Harlem. In the movie we really don't see anything extraordinary he does, and even the fights he gets into aren't anything to show his prowess.

There are two different cases The Guy handles in the movie. The cases don't seem to relate to each other and it almost appears as if we got two different plots merged into one.

The movie starts with a woman being harassed by a mook or something. Then it abruptly cuts to The Guy driving around town with a really funky intro as he drives to his office. Unfortunately the rest of the movie doesn't hold up to the intro's funk.

The first case has The Guy get requested by some G-Men to run protection for a visiting African princess, which I suppose is to establish that The Guy is so badass that even the government goes to him for help. Anyways, he foils a kidnapping attempt (or was it assassination?) while she was getting a massage, and scores with the princess. Unfortunately it's no where near as exciting as that may sound and their intimate scene comes off as bizarre more than anything.

The second case has The Guy receive a crime boss who informs The Guy that his daughter has been kidnapped (the one who was shown at the beginning), and he needs The Guy to rescue her. So I guess half-way through the movie they decided to go full Shaft here. Also, the crime boss actor is yelling his lines the whole time which adds some unintentional humor.

Anyways, without getting too bogged down on details The Guy uses his sleuth powers in a gym to find out some hick gang is holding the mob boss's daughter in a cabin. There are some sequences leading up to this involving The Guy using his martial arts skills to defeat the mooks as he gets to the cabin. The fights are done so poorly but I can't do it justice with words, it's something you need to see.

After some more nonsense after rescuing the crime boss's daughter (who like the princess he manages to seduce as well), The Guy has a meeting with the mook gang, which includes the man he met in the gym. After their ambush on The Guy goes bad thanks to help from the crime boss's men, The Guy and Gym guy have a lame duel which the crime boss's men and the one of the remaining hicks watch. The Guy demonstrates his martial arts prowess again by knocking the Gym Guy down and then choking him to death. The remaining hick tries to make a run for it then and kicks one of the crime boss's men, and he's rewarded by being shot down in the back as he runs away. So I guess all's well that ends well for The Guy.

Some honorary mentions... -The Guy's secretary, who somehow managed to have more character than The Guy with her sass when getting hit on by the crime boss's mooks -The Guy's (former?) girlfriend whose apartment he crashes in to seduce the princess and the crime boss's daughter

I've rated this movie low but don't think that there's nothing worth watching here. This is one of those that's great to watch with friends to make fun of and just go with the flow of crappiness here. There are some dull stretches in the movie but not enough to completely ruin things.

Al (Loye Hawkins) is the title guy and is a Miami private detective....I guess from Harlem. We see him on two jobs, one is to protect a princess from Africa (Patricia Fulton) and the other is to rescue a girl (Cathy Davis) part of a gang kidnapping and ransom. Things go very smooth for Al who easily subdues the bad guys.

The sound was uneven. The lines corny. It was nice to see the 70's wood paneling style as well as bell bottoms and wide lapels. It has been a long time since I have seen 2 brothers simply shake hands without a fist bump. Available on multi-packs.

Guide: No swearing. Near rape. Sex and nudity (Cathy Davis, Patricia Fulton

Is this the worst film ever? No, because it's funny!! It is as out there as Mad TV's "Dolemite," the blaxpoitation spoof. It actually helps that Mill Creek's print has scratches, blotches, and frame jumps. "Guy" is the epic saga of private eye Al Connors, who guards African first ladies and fights Big Daddy. You get... CLASSIC 70s DECOR AND POLYESTER: dark rust shag carpets, the world's ugliest motel painting, molded blue plastic receptionists' desks, men in the kind of print suits that 5-year-old boys wear to weddings, and lovely rotary dial phones that inflate the run time. FLUFFED DIALOG (although there may have been no script; the scenes play like the amateur cast was told to hit the plot points in their own words.) There are strange pauses, especially in Steve Gallon's scenes, where the actors search for their next topic. DOWN HOME ACCENTS: Mrs. Ashanti: Tell me, where are you from? Al: Harlem. Mrs. Ashanti: Oh, wow, I spent six month in Harlem. OR...Secretary: Can I have your name and the nature of your business? Harry De Bauld: Sweetie, I got an answer for bofe of those questions. You got 2 questions, I got one answer: NONE O' YO' DAMN BIDNESS!! ACTION SCENES... staged the way 3rd graders play commando. Yes, it's mostly dialog scenes in blowsy color. But watch it for Wanda DeBauld and her kidnapper yelling "Eat s___!" back and forth. Watch Al's secretary, earth's slowest typist. Watch Harry (Steve Gallon) bellow his lines three times louder than the other actors. Dig the wah-wah guitar behind all the fight scenes. Make a guess at production costs: $2000, including the motel rooms?? Bad Movie Heaven.

It's not often that I see a movie that make "Manos: The Hands Of Fate" look good. This is one of them. "Manos" still deserves its world wide fame as one of the worst movies of all time, and categorically speaking, its clumsy attempts at horror, Thorazine-derived circular dialog, and incredibly bad dubbing make it a more ambitious failure than "The Guy From Harlem" ever tried to be.(To me, a bad horror or fantasy film will always out-suck a bad mainstream film with a similar level of talent). But the execution of "The Guy From Harlem" is actually even worse.

Roger Ebert often mentions a useful rule of thumb for judging movies. This "Siskel Test" for a movie is simple: "Is this movie more interesting than watching a candid film of the same actors having lunch?" This film fails that test drastically.

So I lowered the standards of the test, and kept lowering it until I could find one that "The Guy From Harlem" might actually pass. Is TGFH more interesting than watching a film of the same actors having lunch? Not even close. Is it more interesting than a film of the same actors standing around between takes? Oddly, no. I bet these guys found plenty to joke and josh each other about as the director and cameraman tried to set up new shots, but all natural delivery and humor ceased the instant the cameras rolled. Is it more interesting than a security camera film of the same actors buying cigarettes at the local convenience store? Closer, but still, no. I can honestly say that I would rather watch the lead actor buy cigarettes from a convenience store clerk than watch him in this movie.

That's how bad it is. And that's because as stiff and amateurish as the acting, blocking, dialog and fight choreography were, the plot and edit of the movie were even worse.

One striking aspect of the screenplay is that it is remarkably similar in spirit to a porn movie loop. No matter the situation, no matter the characters, when a man and a woman are alone in a room (with one lone exception), it's never more 60 seconds before the man either tries to put the "moves" on the woman, or tries else tear her shirt off and sexually molest her if she happens to be tied up at the time. This gives the movie an ugly vibe.

And the movie was so amateurishly put together that it repeats a scene line for line with the same actors, and the two takes appear back to back. In fact, if I remember correctly, this happens not once, but TWICE. Even Larry Buchanan and Ed Wood never let things get that far out of hand.

In fact, there doesn't appear to be any left out footage or takes at all. For instance, near the end of the film, the director spends 30 seconds of camera screen time watching a young blonde lady pick makeup items off a dresser drawer and put them in her purse. There's no dialog, no closeups of the actresses face, no soundtrack music, just long seconds of unstoppable purse stuffing action.

You can't really fault the actors in a production like this. They obviously had no idea of what they were doing, and the director couldn't tell them.Plus, they had to deal with a screenplay that seemed written by a 14 year old boy who saw "Shaft" once, and a budget that consisted of someone's pocket change.

An amazingly bad movie. It's by far the crappiest and most amateurish effort on the "Drive In Movie Classics" 50 pack that I've seen so far.

For lovers and connoisseurs of bottom-of-the-barrel remnants only.

THE GUY FROM HARLEM is an extremely low rent blaxploitation film of the late 1970s which is so cheap that the whole thing has been filmed in just a couple of locations. The story is about a black private investigator, who desperately wants to be Shaft, who is tasked with bodyguarding an African princess for 24 hours. He contends with various goons along the way, and after that storyline is finished, he randomly goes off to rescue a kidnapped girl. The whole thing is stately and slow, with poor production values and an entire lack of incident to make it the least bit interesting. They throw in a lot of skin to try to keep the attention of their viewers, but it's a waste of a film overall.

This is such a terrible movie--as someone wrote before, it's much worse than Ed Wood ever dreamed of. Obviously, no retakes, no editing except in those cases in which all of sudden we switch back to a scene and stuff has happened, so the whole thing looks choppy. Having written that, I have to say that the clothes were so psychedelic and absolutely mod and very polyester with collars out to there (and anyway, how does Al wear blue underwear without its showing through his white pants) that I would watch it again (with the sound off to mask the horrible dialogue and pathetic performances) just for that. I'm not sure how one could write a spoiler on this film--a spoiler would imply some sort of plot. I swear I think they changed Al's office halfway through the film, but I couldn't pay very close attention because I didn't want to make myself sick--like eating too much artificially buttered popcorn. I loved how the receptionist gives out Al's address to "someone from the CIA", but that little tidbit never goes anywhere. Still love the clothes, though.