Sugar Hill Details

When her boyfriend is brutally murdered for standing up to a mafia syndicate, fashion photographer Diana “Sugar” Hill (Marki Bey) visits a voodoo queen who summons up the evil Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley) and his zombie hordes to take revenge. Mainly because first-time director Paul Maslansky learnt from producing such gruesome gems as Death Line and The She Beast, this blaxploitation horror is one of the best. The gore is leavened with a keen sense of genre ridiculousness that a knowing audience can share and a “right on” attitude is on show with the cobwebbed zombies all being former slaves. The inventive deaths are suitably nasty — various henchmen are fed alive to starving hogs, scratched to death in a massage parlor, or find themselves at the wrong end of a machete — and seventies horror icon Robert (Count Yorga) Quarry is suitably nasty as the villainous Mr Big.