Review of Truck Turner (1974) by Allan C — 07 Jun 2015

Isaac Hayes plays ex-football players Mack "Truck" Turner turned bounty hunter fighting a foul mouthed madam, played by Nichelle "Lt. Uhura" Nichols, who hires killer Harvard Blue and his men (led by Yaphet Kotto as Blue) to get revenge for killing her man.

The story here isn't all that interesting, but Nichols is a terrific villain (or maybe it's the novelty of seeing the very dignified Lt. Uhura constantly spouting profanities) and the film features pretty much wall-to-wall action that's well directed by Jonathan Kaplan.

Kaplan, who'd go on to direct some quality films like "The Accused" and "Unlawful Entry," got his start with the Roger Corman school of filmmaking (same as Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis For Coppola, Joe Dante, John Sayles and many others of note) starting his career with low budget exploitation films like this.

But back to this film, you also get an excellent score by star Isaac Hayes that's every bit as good as his score for "Shaft." And one last of note, I think the hospital shootout featured more innocent bystanders getting shot than I've ever seen outside of a Hong Kong action film.