Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Prismark10 Super Fly is a low budget seminal blaxploitation film. It is also rather amateurish and uneven. The movie is helped by a funky soundtrack from Curtis Mayfield as well as a virile and swaggering performance from Ron O'Neal.O'Neal plays Youngblood Priest, decked out like a pimp and drives a fancy cadillac but he does not seem to get stopped by the police too much. Priest is a cocaine dealer, he wears a crucifix which he uses to snort some coke for himself.Priest is smart enough to know that the time has come to get out but this is not an industry you can leave easily. He plans to make one big coke deal and run away with the money for good. However getting out is not so easy when the police are hot on your trail.The film is grittily shot in the streets of Harlem. The cops are crooked and Priest just wants to survive, luckily he has a plan. He is no hero, he cares only for himself but he is clever and ruthless. When one man cannot pay for the drugs, he tells him point blank to go out and deal or send his wife out to whore row.

untergeek Super Fly is a movie that is very much of its time. The film, directed by Gordon Parks, Jr, and released in 1972, is about a (light-skinned) black cocaine dealer in Harlem who is out to make one last killing before the life he is living - or the crooked New York cops - make HIM the one killed.Super Fly opens with its protagonist, Priest (played by Ron O'Neal), as the attempted victim of a robbery by a strung-out junkie. From the get-go, Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack is magnificent. His song Junkie Chase works well as the soundtrack to Priest's pursuit of the dope fiend who has robbed him. In fact, Mayfield's soundtrack is, by far, the best thing about Super Fly; this would be much less of a film without it. Mayfield's lyrics show the lie behind the movie's attempted glorification of Priest's world - "Secret stash, heavy bread, baddest bitches in the bed" - and show that Priest is as lost as everyone else in his world, including the doomed Freddie (of Freddie's Dead). From the title song: "Ask him his dream / What does it mean? He wouldn't know / Can't be like the rest is the most he'll confess". a pathetic waste of life.Nobody wins in Super Fly. Yes, Priest does "stick it to the man" - the white detective who wants to betray and kill him. Priest wins that battle, but the war cannot be won. Mayfield makes that clear. The soundtrack is a response to the film's exaltation of street life, showing the degradation and death at that life's end. The message of blaxploitation movies was that black men could succeed in life only if they were willing to be violent criminals or violent detectives; black women were born to be their playthings - their "bitches". How much has changed in 40 years? Listen to certain current rap lyrics.Since it is that long since the film was in theatres, I can acknowledge my own ties to "the life" at the time. I was fortunate: I got out. It's not fun, it's not glamorous, neither for black dealers or white wanna-be Mafiosi. You kill time until it kills you. It seems cool until you're sufficiently distanced to see with clear eyes (And yes, the characters in Super Fly were real people, if not based on specific individuals).So I'll stick with Curtis Mayfield's brilliant soundtrack and pass on buying the DVD. The soundtrack to Super Fly may have been the best of its era; it certainly is the best of the blaxploitation soundtracks, which says a lot, because some great music came out of those movies (think Isaac Hayes; Earth, Wind & Fire; Joe Simon; Millie Jackson; Bobby Womack, etc.). Instead, let me suggest the Wayans' satire I'm Gonna Get You Sucka or two films with Godfrey Cambridge, Watermelon Man and 1970's Cotton Comes to Harlem, which give respect to their characters, black, white and everyone else.

kjphyland Well...where to start...if it wasn't for Curtis Mayfield occasionally doing some tricks I may have nodded off throughout the first hour...but then it dawned on me...this was 1972 and we hafta stick it to da man! As a piece of cinematic history it is worth the effort...as anything else it is just an appalling piece of garbage. The acting is very wooden and the script has more N words than the Oxford dictionary. At least we now know that it applies to African Americans...of any colour. It has a quite juicy softcore approach to intimate scenes however...no matter how forced they seem. The upshot is...selling toot is a very dodgy business...but it has its merits...you can get a very cool car, some appalling dressage and bad hats. I give it 5/10 just for the concept of getting "outa the business". Hoo-rah!

bob the moo Priest is a drug pusher and pimp on the rough streets of New York but he has come to realise that he is going to end his days either in jail or dead on the same streets that he came up on. For this reason he comes up with a four-month plan to make a million dollars and retire with cool half-mil each for him and his business partner. Priest sets out to purchase 30 kilos of high-grade cocaine and get it quickly distributed on the streets, make the money and get out. However getting his hands on that much weight is only his first problem in a business that generally doesn't "do" retirement plans.As everyone knows, studios will make anything for anyone as long as it will earn them money. Blaxploitation is the label given to the urban films of the 1970's that were marketed towards inner-city Afro-American audiences and Super Fly is one of the leading examples of the genre. Putting the label on it makes it seem cheap and like it is an exploitative film but, having seen Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Spiderman 3 this summer, I am sorely aware that studios seeking to make money out of target audiences is all exploitation and often produces an inferior product, so quite why we have identified some of them by race I'm not sure.Anyway, with the wider awareness that the vast majority of films exist to make money, I sat to watch this without looking at it as a blaxploitation film so much as just a film. The first thing that strikes you is the sense of style and culture, which is key in the delivery of the film because god knows there is surprisingly little content in here. The fashion, the cars, the music, the lingo all make for a convincing world and perhaps this was sufficient for urban audiences who felt they had never been put on screen in a way they respected. However my concern was that the story was paper thin at times. Some scenes seem stretched in order to fill out time and even some specific shots appear to be lingering for the sake of it. Here and there the effect produces some style (best illustrated in the montage of stills played out at one point) but too often it just is unnecessary slack in the delivery.Without the material it is hard to really care about the characters; the "getting out with one last score" theme is nothing we have not seen a million times before and since but here I struggled to feel anything for Priest. He is not sympathetic enough to care about or intense enough to hate, nor does he really come across as much of a real person. O'Neal does what he can but mostly he is style rather than performance, which suits the film but doesn't do much else. The support cast is much the same with serviceable performances from Lee, McGregor and others (typically the women are sexual beings who exist to please the men – which perhaps shows how little this aspect of the genre has moved forward). The only real star is Curtis Mayfield's cool and funky soundtrack, which is the main tool used to fill out scenes.Worth seeing as part of education about the blaxploitation film genre but you mustn't come into it expecting it to be a good film outside of the limitations of that genre.