Velvet Smooth (1976)

Velvet Smooth (1976)

Starring: Johnnie Hill-Hudgins, Owen Watson, Emerson Boozer, René Van Clief, Elsie Roman, Moses Lyllia, Frank Ruiz, James Durrah
Director: Michael Fink
Action Director: Owen Watson

I have been a follower of the B-Masters since the late 1990s. They are (or in a number of cases, “were”) a cabal of websites dedicated to reviewing B-movies, genre films, and sometimes just the “worst of the worst.” The original line-up included Cold Fusion Video (who hosted my site from 2009 – 2013); Stomp Tokyo; The Bad Movie Report; Jabootu; And You Call Yourself a Scientist; Teleport City; B-Movie Notes; Oh! The Humanity; and Badmovies.Org. A few of them entered “Emeritus” status in the early 2000s, being replaced by The Unknown Movies and 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

As the years passed, more and more of the member sites stopped updating consistently, to the point that today, only two member sites—The Unknown Movies and 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting—are consistently posting new reviews. I think And You Call Yourself A Scientist still updates, although Lyz doesn’t post them to the B-Masters blog.

And then there is Jabootu, who hasn’t posted a new review in a decade or more, but updates his site with Monster of the Day pix (which he'd been doing for about 15 years now). That said, Jabootu grandmaster Ken Begg stays active in the B-movie world as regular attendee of B-Fest, T-Fest, and T(ween)-Fest, plus his daily posts about monsters. He also does bi-monthly Discord (or Amazon or whatever) movie nights, in which he subjects his faithful readers and friends to crappy movies. It was in this context that I watched Velvet Smooth.

The movie doesn’t have a whole lot of plot to speak of. A group of masked goons have been going around “da’ hood” beating people up. The victims are connected in one or another to the local crime boss, Lathrop King (Owen Watson, of Force Four), who runs the local numbers racket. And yeah…do not ask me to explain how “numbers” works. I’ve seen this in a number of Blaxploitation films and I still do not get it. Whatever. Anyway, Lathrop decides to bring in some hired muscle from outside to fight off the new gang.

Enter: Velvet Smooth.

Velvet Smooth (Johnnie Hill-Hudgins, whose other claim to fame was playing Whitney Houston’s stand-in in The Preacher’s Wife, a film known for its exhilarating stuntwork) is a karate-kicking badass whose skills…well…lemme put it this way: While watching the movie, the Rev remarked, “I don’t think Michelle Yeoh is going to lose sleep at night.” I responded, “Forget Michelle Yeoh, I don’t think Sharla Cheung Man is going to lose sleep at night.” She has two fellow female fighters to join her in her mission: Frankie (René Van Clief, whom I wonder if she’s Ron’s sister) and Ria (Elsie Roman, who was the hot face of karate back in the 1970s).

The rest of the movie is a series of karate battles between the three heroines and the evil gang. There are a pair of detectives—Lt. Ramos (Frank Ruiz, of Force Four and The Devil’s Express) and Sgt. Barnes (Moses Lyllia, also of The Devil’s Express)—who are investigating the beatings and Barnes acts like a bigger asshole to Lathrop than Ramos, who is actually pretty chill. There is also a turncoat in Lathrop’s organization: Calvin (James Durrah), King’s second-in-command. Also, Velvet has a boyfriend (or boytoy) named Matt (played by the awesomely-named Emerson Boozer), but I barely know who that guy is or why I should care about him.

Velvet Smooth is a very bad movie. It is a fun film when watched in the right circumstances (i.e. with a bunch of like-minded snarky people), but there is nothing about the movie that can be construed as good. Perhaps the only praise you can give it is, “It has a lot of fight scenes,” but even that has its limitations (which I’ll get into in a moment). The story does not make much sense: bad things happen, Lathrop brings in some outside help, fights ensue (often for no reason), people find out who the bad guys are (somehow), and more fights ensue. Add goofy dialog delivered “actors” of questionable ability.

My favorite exchange goes along the lines of:

Velvet Smooth: We need to find out if there is a connection. I can just feel it.
Me: No, you dumb broad. You were hired to find that stuff out. You don’t need to feel anything. Do your damn job!

I also found it amusing when Velvet Smooth is dismissing her two homegirls for the evening and we get this exchange:

Ria: I need to go home and do laundry.
Frankie: I need to go home and undo some laundry.
(Get it? It means she’s feisty in the sack)

The fight scenes were staged by Owen Watson—who is billed as Owen Wat-son (does that make him part Chinese?)—who also played Lathrop King. Watson was a former Navy SEAL and one of the original students of the Nisei Goju-Ryu System, under the tutelage of Frank Ruiz (who plays Lt. Ramos). One of his colleagues was Ron Van Clief, who had a limited (but memorable) career in Hong Kong during the mid to late 1970s. For those who are unfamiliar with the in’s and out’s of karate, Goju-Ryu is one of the major karate systems, known for combining the “hard” elements of Okinawan native styles and the “soft” movements of Chinese kung fu, notably Fujian White Crane. I studied it for 2 years as a teenager. Other big names associated with Goju-Ryu are Japanese actress Yukari Oshima, the late Richard Norton, and The Perfect Weapon’s Jeff Speakman, who studied it before moving on to Kempo.

Sadly, despite being the “real deal” when it came to martial arts and real-life combat situations, Owen Watson was not a very good action director. What I mean is that Velvet Smooth has some of the worst martial arts sequences on record. As we all stated during the watch party: This is the sort of movie that makes Kill Squad look like Yuen Woo-Ping (personally, I found Kill Squad to be a lot of fun, even though it isn’t a very good movie). The punches and kicks delivered by lead actress Johnnie Hudgins-Hill are so weak and lacking in power that you would be right to think that Watson had asked the actors to play-spar and just film that.

The thing is, you can tell that a lot of the stuntmen are actual trained martial artists. You see them performing a few nice spin kicks and whatnot, so you know those guys know their stuff. But, that is not the case with the lead actors. I don’t know if René Van Clief was a student of Frank Ruiz like Ron was, but she is at least spirited in her fights, even if they struggle to reach the level of an early 1970s basher film. Elsie Roman was a big thing in the 1970s karate scene, and her best moment is a simple exchange of moves involving a pool cue. And the lead actress: Good lord, she’s bad.

Velvet Smooth is the sort of movie that makes you pine for TNT Jackson. That movie has questionable fight scenes, but they were better than the ones here and that movie had legitimate exploitation elements, including a legendary topless fight involving Playboy Playmate Jean Bell. Velvet Smooth just has Johnnie Hudgins-Hill fighting off scores of thugs set to choreography that suggests the filmmakers just filmed the actors’ practice sessions.