"You disgust me! Good night!"

The year 2016 is still a bad time to be famous, as I received BMX legend Dave Mirra into my custody this week. As much fun as that was, I was really excited to get Maurice White because it's Black History Month and I'm devoting all this month to writing about the accomplishments of black people in horror movies.

But alas, Maurice White was never in any scary movies. No song by Earth, Wind and Fire even turns up in the soundtrack for one, by my IMDb search. Oh well, that's the way of the world.

This week's Thursday Thriller is 1973's Scream Blacula Scream, directed by Bob Kelljan, starring William Marshall.

I skipped over Blacula and went straight to the sequel, because I thought it was a better movie. How much better? It's the difference between a B and a B+ for two reasons: Pam Grier.

...and voodoo. Sorry, my mind wanders sometimes. I'm not even sure why. Scream Blacula Scream is rated PG, so it's one of the few movies from the 1970s in which Grier kept her clothes on. More on that in a second. Let's talk about the story first.

The leader of a voodoo cult dies, and its members choose Lisa Fortier (Grier) as their new leader. The deceased's son believes he is the rightful heir, and just to show everybody what for, he procures Blacula's bones and raises him from the dead. Blacula (Marshall) immediately turns him into a vampire and enslaves him, along with some other people, but not Fortier. He needs her voodoo power to exorcise the evil from him, so that he may return to Africa and live and die in peace. 

The film only suffers two major problems, the first being the title. The early 1970s saw a wave of films we now call blaxploitation for their shameless pandering to the African-American demographic. Movie studios had a lot of success with movies like Shaft and Superfly, and realized black people would pay money to see black people in movies. Eventually, the genre collapsed under the weight of its own stereotypes.

The Blacula movies were part of this wave, and on hearing the titles, you can practically feel the distributor's elbow nudging you in the ribs. "Get it? He's like Dracula, but he's black. Black Dracula. Blacula! Get it? Come on!" As a result, instead of being revered as good vampire movies, they became the stuff of ironic pop culture references.

The second problem is the makeup. When Blacula gets all vamped out, he gets some of the weirdest face hair ever committed to celluloid. The best way I can describe it is his sideburns connect to his eyeballs.

But Marshall's performance is good. He carries himself with an air of nobility that matches Christopher Lee's characterization of Dracula in the Hammer Studios franchise that started in 1958. In fact, the raising of the vampire by means of occult ritual is reminiscent of Taste the Blood of Dracula and Dracula A.D. 1972. Scream Blacula Scream is at least as good as those, and a hell of a lot better than The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but Scream Blacula Scream remains outside of that universe. It's separate, but equal.

Scream Blacula Scream streams on Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus and YouTube, as does Blacula if you have to be a completist about it. If you want to see literally more of Pam Grier, and I suspect you might, you can find her through those same streaming sources in movies that tend to be about her escaping prison or getting revenge on the mob for messing with her man. Just look up The Big Doll House, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Friday Foster and Black Mama, White Mama. Netflix devotees, don't despair. You can catch up with William Marshall as the King of Cartoons in the Pee-Wee's Playhouse TV series.

NOTE: If you're looking for last week's review of Night of the Living Dead, it's gone. I'm not sure what happened. I think the mailer-daemons got it. It's hard to maintain a blog in Hell. Here's a quick summary: Night of the Living Dead is good. You should watch it.