Hell Up in Harlem

Fred Williamson's Tommy Gibbs survives the ending of Black Caesar and sets about rebuilding his Harlem empire, and Larry Cohen shot the whole sequel on weekends, stealing New York locations while Williamson worked another picture during the week. It shows, in the best way: the thing is scrappy, breathless and completely deranged, climaxing in an airport shootout Cohen grabbed guerrilla-style with no permits. James Brown recorded the soundtrack, Cohen rejected it for not being funky enough, and those tapes became The Payback, one of Brown's biggest albums, with Edwin Starr singing the film's songs instead. Nobody would call it coherent. It moves too fast to care.