Any film boasting one War Hawk Tanzania as its leading man has be at least a cursory look and although Devil’s Express (also known as Gang Wars and The Phantom of the Subway) is a pretty awful film, your curiosity might just be rewarded if you have a penchant for films that never quite know what they want to be from one scene to the next. Devil’s Express ticks a number of boxes – Blaxploitation, 70s demonic horror, martial arts romp, gang drama, would-be gritty urban cop thriller… all come under the gaze of director Barry Rosen. That he proves to be equally hopeless in all of them is something akin to miraculous. Surely he could have found his forte in one of the genres he dabbles in?
A prologue in China in 200 B.C. sets up the back story. A group of Buddhist monks trap a demon in a cave using a magical amulet then kill themselves to prevent anyone learning the location of the cave. Jump forward to the 1970s where a title sequence treats us, as much of the film does, to some great period footage of New York, In one shot we see a street lined with cinemas. On one side of the street you could see a double bill of Jacques Deray’s Borsalino (1970) and Michael Caine in The Italian Job (1969) while opposite you could sample the more dubious delights of Delinquent School Girls (1975) (under the title Carnal Madness) double billed with Der Turm der verbotenen Liebe (1968), showing here as Tower of Screaming Virgins.
The main story gets under way when New York kung fu master Luke (Tanzania in a fabulous afro) and his feckless friend/student Roldan (Wilfredo Roldan – the character is named Rodan in the end credits but everyone in the film clearly calls him by the actor’s real name) travel to China for a martial arts tournament. Roldan stumbles upon the cave, steals the amulet and frees the demon which, unknown to the two men, follows them back to the States in the body of a Chinese businessman. We know he’s been possessed because the actor walks around with his eyes closed and white, staring eyes painted on his eyelids.
Once back in the States, the film takes off in several different directions at once. Roldan turns out to be part of an African American gang (despite very conspicuously not being black) called the Black Jacks (though in the end credits they become the more troubling Black Spades), fighting a turf war with local Chinese gang the Red Dragons. Tanzania disappears from the plot for a while leaving space for the cops, led by Cris (Larry Fleishman) to investigate a string of murders and down in the subway, the monster, which is understandably wary of light having been trapped in a cave for thousands of years, is ripping up anyone foolish enough to venture into the stations late at night.
Devil’s Express is a film that screams 1976 in every frame, from the fashions (all the men take every possible excuse to get their shirts off and flash their chests and Tanzania is in a permanent state of semi undress), the hairstyles, the music (the soundtrack features a number of rather good funk tracks with plenty of aggressive wah wah guitar courtesy of disco/funk producer Patrick Adams though a mawkish love song threatens the musical goodness), the attitudes and language (people “dig” things quite a lot). And of course as we were at the peak of the kung fu craze, there’s a lot of martial arts, choreographed by “Master” Frank Ruiz, founder of the Nisei GoJu-Ryu school of karate, but none of it is terribly convincing. Everyone moves very slowly, the choreography is sloppy and ugly and the brawls are remarkably polite – everyone simply waits their turn to fight one-on-one rather just wading in to get the job done.
Technically, the film is very shoddy – there’s a lengthy sequence wherein Roldan and one of his fellow Black Jacks do a drug deal that goes horribly wrong but most of their dialogue, all but two or three words, is drowned out by the soundtrack. The credits give prominence to a “consulting editor” in the shape of Jack Foster, though quite what they consulted him on given the dreadful cutting on display throughout is anyone’s guess. And when the monster finally turns up for a badly lit climactic fight with Luke in the subway (it’s been off-screen for most of the film) it disappointingly turns out to be a man in a rubbish, ill-fitting suit.
But there are just enough incidental pleasures to get you through the craziness. If you get bored of the monster stuff, hang on there’ll be some jive heavy blaxploitation along in a second; and if that doesn’t float your boat, be patient and we’ll get some cops sitting around in their office trying to work out what’s going on. There’s plenty of joy to be had in watching the baffled reactions of bemused passers-by who clearly couldn’t work out whether what they were watching was the real thing or not – one mother and her two young kids look particularly perplexed when they almost run into Roldan and friend being held at gunpoint by members of the Red Dragons. And fashionistas won’t fail to be moved by Tanzania’s fetching gold lamé, bell-bottomed dungarees that he opts to wear for his climactic battle with the forces of evil. The sharp eyed will spot cult figures Brother Theodore as a wild-eyed street preacher and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo from David E. Durston, director of I Drink Your Blood (1970) and Stigma (1972), as a businessman.
Tanzania made only one other film, Black Force, in 1975, and called time on his acting career after Devil’s Express. Hardly a surprise when you see just how uncharismatic he was as a leading man. Similarly, director Barry Rosen, making his debut here, directed just one more film, the comedy The Yum Yum Girls (1976) before becoming a prolific producer on US TV – among his credits are several episodes of the small screen versions of Highlander (1992-1998) and The Lost World (1999-2002). Incidentally, don’t be fooled by the Devil’s Express that turned up in Videoasia’s DVD box-set Tales of Voodoo: Volume 3 – that’s actually Xie Bo, aka The Devil (1981), an entirely different film altogether.
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