No Surrender Cinema: South Beach
Winter blues got you down? Don’t worry, because No Surrender Cinema is here to take you where the weather is hot and the women are even hotter! We’re heading to the Sunshine State to figure out why there’s a psychopath going after phone sex operators, and to see what Fred “The Hammer” Williamson is gonna do about it! Let’s take a look at what’s going down in South Beach!
That little tidbit I put in the introductory paragraph about some lunatic targeting phone sex operators? South Beach wastes no time in revealing that plot point, since the film opens with an unseen person calling and tormenting one of the girls he sees on TV, who goes by the alias “Grace”, and who in real life is none other than Vanity! When our antagonist is hung up on, he pounds his (dirty) table in anger, and then…we’re on a golf course? Yes, after a full minute of a creepy sexual deviant doing his thing, we’re subjected to Mack Derringer (Williamson) and his buddy Lenny (Gary Busey, star of one of BPA’s most highly regarded films, Eye of the Tiger) hamming it up on the golf course. After watching these guys golf and bicker while wearing some of the god damn gaudiest shirts you’ll ever see, Mack has to cut things short because he has to take his Mama (Isabel Sanford, aka Weezy from The Jeffersons) shopping.
Not only does Mack have a chance to stop home and change for the outing, but luckily he’s got his gun on him, because he and Mama end up encountering a group of robbers during their big day out. Mack ends up blowing a few of the fools away, the last one with a little help from Mama, although the poor girl who was working the jewelry store is covered in a robber’s blood due to him being on the wrong end of Mack’s pistol. She’s also the only one who appears to be traumatized by the ordeal, because the mall was surprisingly vacant, Mama is proudly awaiting the chance to be on the news and tell the story of what went down, and Mack shrugs it off and asks his detective pal Ted (Robert Forster) to clean up the mess, which Ted begrudgingly agrees to do.
After the shootout, we cut back over to Vanity’s character and her 1-900 company, where the phone harassment is still ongoing. One of her girls ends up engaging the creep in some of the worst phone sex you’ll ever hear in your life, moments before he comes crashing through the window! Poor Pebbles is raped and killed (off-screen), only to be discovered the next morning by Jennifer (Vanity’s character’s real name in the film), who as it turns out is Mack Derringer’s ex-wife! The killer, a guy supposedly named Billy, is taking his unhealthy obsession with Jennifer too far, and it looks like sooner rather than later, Mack Derringer is going to have to contend with him too, because he’s watching Mack and Jennifer just as Mack has agreed to look into things. Ominous music plays, Billy crumples up the picture of Mack and Jennifer, and…now we’re at the bar? Yup, there’s no confrontation, so I guess South Beach is just building the suspense, because now it’s night time and Mack and his pal Jake (Peter Fonda) are reliving their football glory days. Not just reminiscing, mind you…they’re running plays and doing bad Howard Cosell impersonations as they roughhouse with each other. All the fun and games are interrupted by several parties; a girl named Francesca, who has been recruited by Billy, asks Mack to be her bodyguard due to an abusive ex. Then, Mack’s buddy Ted shows up to talk about what’s happening with Jennifer, and it’s revealed that Ted has always had feelings for Jennifer, and resented the fact that she ended up with Mack. Mack encourages him to just come clean with her since that’s his ex-wife, and that’s when we cut to the next day when Mack Derringer meets up with Casey, the woman he saved during the mall robbery. It turns out that the robbery was actually a shakedown, and Casey asks if she can hire Mack for protection.
Let’s just take a minute to breathe here. For those of you keeping score, here’s what South Beach has going on so far:
- Some nutcase is killing phone sex operators, and has it in for Jennifer Derringer.
- Jennifer Derringer’s ex-husband, Mack, has killed several people during an attempted robbery while taking his mother shopping.
- Mack Derringer reluctantly agrees to help his ex-wife.
- Mack Derringer has been hired to be the bodyguard of a woman who has been paid off by Billy the phone sex psycho.
- Mack Derringer has been hired for protection by Casey, the woman from the mall.
- Mack Derringer likes to reenact football plays with his pals inside their favorite watering hole.
- Mack’s detective friend seems to be tired of Mack’s crap, and is also in love with Jennifer.
- Ladies and gentlemen, all this has happened THIRTY FOUR MINUTES INTO THE MOVIE.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled NSC!
Mack Derringer sure has a lot going on, and no sooner have I written that out then Mack Derringer is framed for murder! When he’s brought to a party on a yacht by Francesca, Mack is told that the host would like to meet with him. That’s when he’s knocked out from behind, someone named Jean-Claude (not Van Damme, don’t panic) is shot dead, and when Mack wakes up, he just picks up the random gun that was planted on him! Naturally Ted is on the scene, but Mack’s alibi (Francesca) is missing. Jake bails Mack out, and their car ride contains a little more exposition; Jean-Claude was partners with someone named Santiago, and the two have been involved in some type of modeling/porn/phone sex operation. Mack and Jake do some digging at one of their studios and nearly get their heads blown off if not for the fortuitous arrival of Lenny, who has returned from vacation and fires off a few shots to send the goons running. Another bad situation is avoided by Mack, but the minute he’s by himself, he’s nearly run down! Mack leaps out of the way just in time and fires his gun into the car, which explodes with…whoever…inside of it!
How does Mack respond to his latest near-death experience? By getting involved with yet another shady character! Mack finds out from his “man on the street” Too Cool (no relation to the beloved WWF tag team, and played by 2 Live Crew rapper Brother Marquis!) that the jewelry store robbery was put in motion by a guy named Ahmed, so they decide to pay Ahmed a visit. Of course a fight breaks out and then Mack and Lenny THREATEN TO KILL AHMED’S FAMILY if he doesn’t back off! Our heroes, everybody! Then, the moment Mack is alone again, he gets thrashed by another group of henchmen who belong to Santiago (Code of Silence‘s Henry Silva). Just when you think Derringer has used up all nine of his lives, Lenny shows up out of the blue again, this time disguised as a blind homeless man, and helps Mack get away! With all of these people after him, not to mention his ex-wife is the target of an obsessed killer, Mack decides that the best course of action will be to go and have sex with Casey the jewelry store girl!
As South Beach starts counting down to its climax, Mack finally acknowledges all the bad shit that’s been happening to him, right after he rejects his ex-wife’s attempt to reconcile by telling her he loves her, but it’s a “different kind of love”. He might regret that, because after another narrow escape from one of the (many) groups of people that have it in for him, Mack finds out that Jennifer has been kidnapped by Billy, setting up a final showdown!
I remembered South Beach from its original run on cable, but I had no idea that watching it back would be such a chore. It’s no secret that I’m nostalgic for many things from my younger years and view some of those things with rose-colored glasses, but I can’t say that South Beach is one of those things. For all of the love that I have for “The Hammer” stemming from his work in the blaxploitation genre and especially for one of my favorite 90’s films, Original Gangstas, but South Beach suffers greatly from being so scattershot. There are too many side characters and sub-plots, so much so that the main angle of Billy the phone sex killer is never truly fleshed out. There’s also quite a cast for a B-film here, but Vanity and Busey’s appearances amount to extended cameos, and Forster gets as much screen time as Isabel Sanford, who serves up a (very) small does of comic relief as the mother of Williamson’s character, a role which she would find herself in again in Original Gangstas. Those that expect Busey to be Williamson’s sidekick for the duration of the film may be let down, since it’s Peter Fonda who finds himself caught up in many a Mack-caused situation. Busey does come back for the end of the film, which features a tacked on final twist that doesn’t really go anywhere. In fact, you could say that about the vast majority of South Beach; lots of stuff happens, but it never really goes anywhere.
I wanted to review one of Fred Williamson’s films this month because it ties into a lot of current events; as a major force in black cinema, it would be a fitting tribute to talk about the man during Black History Month. Williamson’s NFL career saw him play in the first Super Bowl and he played for both the 49ers and the Chiefs, the two teams who just competed in this year’s Super Bowl. Plus, next week, “The Hammer” will turn 86 years old and is still going strong with seven films in various stages of production! South Beach has been coming up on my “recommended” list on Tubi for a while, not to mention I own it on a budget compilation DVD, and I thought I was overdue for a rewatch. Oddly enough, the one part that stuck with me all these years was the final twist, and when I watched it play out again I had to ask myself why of all parts of this film was that what I remembered? Maybe it’s because South Beach bounces too fast from plot point to plot point that nothing really resonated.
As late night action fare during my teenage years, South Beach was what it was; a way to see some gunplay, explosions, and (very briefly) boobs. You’d think that a movie about a killer going after sex workers would be a little more risque, but aside from the one brief sex scene, South Beach felt more like the pilot for a cop show on cable. It’s not the worst film I’ve ever seen and the incoherence means that it doesn’t really drag, but it still felt like a waste when there’s better films from ol’ Fred out there.
South Beach is currently streaming on Tubi and can easily be found on several budget DVD releases.
