Truck Turner

Truck Turner, a former footballer working as a bail bondsman in Los Angeles, goes after a fugitive pimp and kills him. The dead man's woman takes over his business and puts a price on Truck's head. Every hitman in the city lines up. Jonathan Kaplan directed for American International Pictures. Isaac Hayes plays Truck and also wrote the score. Nichelle Nichols plays the woman who sets the bounty; known as Uhura in Star Trek, she is in a completely opposite role here and her profane dialogue became the film's most memorable element. It belongs to the late stretch of the blaxploitation wave and runs the genre's templates fast: long car chases, a hospital shootout, crude humour. Hayes's score went on being listened to independently of the film. Quentin Tarantino's interest in it has come up repeatedly over the years. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies Black action cinema and funk. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by how the period wrote its women.