Friday Foster Reviews

After making her reputation in a string of brutal and explicit blaxploitation films, Pam Grier was ready for something softer by 1975. FRIDAY FOSTER, based on a syndicated comic strip, is softer alright, and duller, and only nominally entertaining. Upbeat and vivacious Friday Foster (Pam Grier) is on assignment from Glance magazine to photograph Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala)--a wealthy recluse known as the "black Howard Hughes." As she snaps away, he is ambushed by several unknown men who flee after failing to kill him. One of the men stumbles back to his girlfriend only to drop dead of gunshot wounds. The next day, Friday attends a fashion show featuring her friend Cloris (Rosalind Miles), coincidentally the girlfriend of the slain gunman. During the fashion, show Cloris is killed by an unknown assailant, but not before mumbling to Friday something about a "black widow." Discovering that Cloris had connections in Washington DC, Friday flies to the capital with her right-hand man, private detective Colt Hawkins (Yaphet Kotto). There, she meets and has a fling with Cloris's friend Senator Hart (Paul Benjamin); he informs her that Blake Tarr is behind all the deaths. After several more people are killed, including one of the original gunmen (who had been stalking Friday), she meets with Blake Tarr. He insists that Senator Hart is responsible for the deaths, and after Tarr and Friday have a fling, she eludes some pursuers, steals a milk truck, and crashes into the compound where the Senator is meeting with all the nation's top black leaders. It turns out that the whole thing was a plot engineered to kill the black leaders, while turning Tarr and the Senator against one another. Instead, Tarr shows up in his helicopter with Hawkins, and the black men join together to wipe out the bad guys. Totally implausible and chock full of loose ends, FRIDAY FOSTER seems like an overlong, overcomplicated story made shorter by yanking out random chunks of exposition. Nothing makes sense or follows logically. The black widow business is never explained. Characters are introduced with no purpose in the plot, solely to be killed in various uninteresting ways. Jim Backus appears in a cameo shoehorned into the middle of the film, simply to give the piece a white villain--although he has nothing to do with the climactic confrontations. Ted Lange appears twice as a comic pimp with no relation to anything. Scatman Crothers plays a lusty reverend, at whose compound the end takes place. (Luckily he's the kind of reverend that keeps an arsenal of heavy weaponry close at hand.) Eartha Kitt is hyper-campy as a fashion designer, clearly still playing the Catwoman from "Batman" minus the outfit. Godfrey Cambridge, in one of his last roles (he died of a heart attack the following year while making Victory at Entebbe for TV), portrays a flamboyantly gay rival designer crushed by a truck for no particular reason. Carl Weathers, in one of his first roles after retiring from pro football (he would make his name the following year as Apollo Creed in ROCKY), plays a very bad hitman who surprises Friday during her shower scene and chases her down a hallway. When a passing neighbor with children scolds them for lascivious behavior, Friday and her pursuer stop, ashamed. Friday never mentions that the man is an assassin as the clucking neighbor steps inside her apartment leaving them alone again; the killer then simply turns and walks away. Totally ludicrous--as is the purportedly intelligent Friday chasing the known killer into an abandoned building alone, or hiding information from Hawkins in order to check out a lead on a rooftop by herself. In the end, she stands proudly holding onto both black leaders with whom she's had recent sex, while her man Hawkins grins alongside. Audiences didn't buy any of it and the film was a commercial disappointment. Director Marks, a former cinematographer who had made a number of earlier exploitation potboilers with some of the same production crew (such as composer Luchi De Jesus, whose score for FRIDAY FOSTER makes extensive use of an irritating voicebox straight out of Frampton Comes Alive), continued to crank out blaxploitation films through the 1970s, including THE MONKEY HUSTLE (1976), starring Yaphet Kotto and Rudy Ray Moore. Meanwhile Grier, anxious to step out of the exploitation ghetto, managed to gradually move into more serious fare like ROOTS: THE NEXT GENERATION (1979) and FORT APACHE: THE BRONX (1981). (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity.)