TNT Jackson (1975)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Good concept, poorly executed.

An Exercise In Nonsense

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Movies from the 1970's were different and much not to the norm and true they had plenty of action and the skin scenes and nudity combined with violence made most of them a real eye candy treat to watch. This low budget 1974 film "TNT Jackson" fits all of those themes. It featured "Playboy" playmate Jeanne Bell as TNT Jackson in this blaxploitation take which has her to travel from Harlem to Hong Kong to look for her missing brother who has gotten himself in trouble with the mob and this world involves the mob and plenty of violence. Miss Jackson poses and goes undercover as a prostitute in order to find out some information along the way this film is a fun eye candy treat of sex, nudity and action which includes topless karate. Good watch to pass a little time a nice fun independent film that gets right into it and doesn't take itself to serious.

I have to admit that I was kind of looking forward to watching TNT JACKSON after I read the description of the movie in the Leonard Maltin movie guide. But to my surprise, I found out that Maltin lied. Jeannie Bell does *not* get her shirt ripped off before the start of every fight she's involved in - it only happens once, and it's a very brief and poorly directed sequence. But what about the rest of the movie? Unfortunately, it's not that much better. Bell gives a performance that suggests she's very unhappy to be stuck in this movie, and it's clear that she's no martial artist due to her feeble moves as well as the fact that it's clear several times that the filmmakers are using a stand in for her. But it's not just the fight sequences that are tacky. The whole movie has a really cheap look and feel, not a surprise because Cirio Santiago helmed the enterprise, and he was an exploitation movie director who didn't make that many good movies in his career. The best I can say about the movie is that it's pretty short.

From Roger Corman's New World Pictures, the script was co-written by actor Dick Miller (a frequent player in Corman's films). Director Santiago worked (uncredited) on many Corman flicks, three of which starred Pam Grier. Shapely Jeanne Bell (a former "Playboy" Playmate) is just one of many Grier lookalikes Santiago would put in his later films. This is an ultra-cheap chop-socky martial arts flick with a slight twist. In what could be called "Foxy Brown in Hong Kong", the casting of two black actors, Bell and Stan Shaw, give it the appearance of a Blaxpoitation film. But the two genres never blend. The result is an awkward, implausible fish-out-of-water feeling.The derivative revenge plot unfolds with Diana "TNT" Jackson, a foxy, karate-kicking babe, roaming the mean streets of Hong Kong after her brother is killed in a drug deal. And before you know it, everybody is Kung Fu fighting -- but these cats are not "fast as lightning". In fact, this has some of the slowest and least convincing fight scenes ever filmed. It looks more like rehearsal footage. Jackson is supposedly so skilled that she routinely pummels half a dozen Chinese thugs at a time. Plus, her fighting style also includes frequent acrobatic back- flips that just look silly.Posing as a bad-ass looking for action, she infiltrates a powerful heroin smuggling ring with absurd ease. This is incongruously led by two Americans -- Sid (Ken Metcalf), a dapper white dude who looks and behaves more like a college professor, and his black henchman Charlie (Shaw). Jackson seduces Charlie, and some dated jive-talk dialog ensues -- along with several shoot-outs, fights, and a totally predictable ending.Watching Bell's flat, featureless performance, one appreciates Pam Grier all the more. Grier generated a charisma and sex appeal that jumped off the screen, even when the scripts were terrible (and they usually were). Although Bell is lovely to look at, especially in her two obligatory nude scenes, her personality and acting skills are as bland as steamed rice.Although this movie is consistently awful with nothing to recommend it, there is one scene that is hard to forget (though poorly filmed and executed). In a dark bedroom, Jackson, nude except for a pair of black bikini briefs, kicks the crap out of a gang of goons who have abducted her. An almost iconic scene. Don't be surprised if Tarantino does an homage to it some day.

A young woman nicknamed "T.N.T." for being virtual dynamite in a fight and a knockout in terms of looks to boot, goes to the most lawless part of Hong Kong in search of her missing brother Stag Jackson. When she learns he has been murdered, she decides she will bring the killer to justice in a fashion only she can.Sounds good, doesn't it. Well, there's really nothing wrong with the basic premise as a starting base for a martial arts/blaxploitation action thriller, which is what this aims to be. The leads actually prove pretty good too with Jeanne Bell fitting nicely into the role of "T.N.T." and Stan Shaw doing well as the ambitious, power-hungry Charlie. Where this fails miserably is in terms of the fighting action it offers up. The fight scenes are totally and completely unconvincing and/or sometimes so completely over the top it reaches the point of ridiculousness which doesn't at all help when the basic focus of your movie is a Kung Fu action heroine. Also the poor lighting, actors sporting accents making them hard to understand, the confusing camera-work and the sometimes poor sound doesn't help this obvious low budget effort out either any. This does deliver in one area which may delight some fans, it does offer up plenty of the T in "T & A", in fact practically every fight scene in the film is proceeded by some type of nude scene and Jeanne Bell actually does have one extended fight scene in which she is completely topless.In the end, this fails to be something you want to revisit because the fight scenes are so pathetically, laughingly bad.