Abar, the First Black Superman
Abar, the First Black Superman
| 01 March 1977 (USA)
Abar, the First Black Superman Trailers

Upon moving into a bigoted neighborhood, the scientist father of a persecuted black family gives a superpower elixir to a tough bodyguard, who thus becomes a superpowered crimefighter.

Reviews
Inclubabu

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

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Libramedi

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

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Spoonatects

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

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Mandeep Tyson

The acting in this movie is really good.

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lageee

I agree with most of the reviews here. I am the child actress Debbie Kinkad. I did not have any formal training and I'm not sure if the others did, but I think they did. I however had an amazing time and great experience filming when I was young. It truly is a bad movie, however the storyline was great!This is absolutely a low budget movie as I didn't get paid. I didn't have a clue it even was put on tape or DVD, as I had not seen the movie until I was in my forties. Someone searching my name and asked me about it. So I had to do a search for myself and it popped up under my name as the original name of the movie was changed, from SuperBlack to this.

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bkoganbing

With a cast of people that you've never heard of Abar, The First Black Superman is a film right out of the 70s, those fashions and those Afros date it as nothing else could. It's a story that I thought was going to be a social commentary then it became surreal science fiction.A black family named Kinkade where the father is a research scientist moves into an exclusive all white neighborhood where there's nothing subtle about their bigotry. Offering his protection to them is a guy named Abar who is a young community activist and looks as fit as the Rock is now. They suffer a lot of despicable acts and one family tragedy and all because dad wants to be near his work.As it turns out his work is developing a super being and Abar is recruited as the prototype. I think the creators of this film were inspired by Gary Lockwood's performance in that classic Star Trek episode where a pair of the Enterprise crew were zapped going through a nebula and get God like abilities. That's what Abar gets and you can judge for yourself how wisely he uses them.I'm not sure where this takes place. Hints that it's a southern location are in the story, but the photography screams California. The acting here is on a grade school level. The mad scientist looks like a bad version of Morgan Freeman without a 10th of his abilities.Strange, but very bad movie.

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MisterWhiplash

From the looks of Abar, the First Black Superman, not a trace of progress was made from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That doesn't stop Frank Packard from making his "statement" on race relations between whites and blacks. This is such a clumsy and badly made film, but not for one moment was I bored. At times I was flabbergasted, or yelling at the screen at a character's actions (or, more often than not, so-called performances), but never did I want to turn it off. It's a classic of fun-bad movies, only hurt somewhat by the fact that its main character doesn't turn into the First Black Superman until an hour into the film! (who really REALLY doesn't look like how he does on the re-issued cover, "In Your Face", titled for some God-awful reason).Abar is part of a black resistance, of sorts, but he only comes into play with the life of Dr. Kincade and his family when the good doctor and his kin move into a 200 grand house - in the suburbs! Oh, Whitey doesn't like that, and of course there's a "welcoming" committee waiting outside the home with signs like "N-word" this and so on, and of course Kincade doesn't feel too comfortable at it, especially when one white woman yells at one of his kids. So he gets Abar to help out as security, but it unfortunately doesn't save Kincade's quick-talking (or mumble-mouthed) son from getting run over by another Whitey in a car. Vengeance must be had! But can Kincade take the serum he's developed for rabbits to gain psychic powers? Will Abar, a volatile and possibly psychotic being with huge muscles and bad 'tude be able to take it? Tune in next week as...Oh, this is such stupid stuff. Some of the dialog is bad enough, but the performances, oh man. It's like watching an off-off-off-off-off Broadway production that is really the Community theater of a basement in Queens putting on Blaxspoitation. The lead actor, J. Walter Smith, makes me pine for Rudy Ray Moore's expert ability. His job here ranges from wildly, badly over-the-top to unnecessarily whispering every line. The kid actor playing Kincade's son, Tony Rumford, speaks his lines like he wants to rush away to go to the bathroom. And the director makes Tobar Mayo (Abar) into a kind of black El Topo in the last twenty minutes with a series of eye-close-ups that should make him SUPER BAD ASS NEGRO-MAN-THING, but is really just as silly as anything else.So why recommend it? Because it is so funny, and so tasteless that it's hard to resist. It's the kind of movie that liberally (I mean inappropriately, like at the end and at a critical point midway through) uses clips from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Did they even get the rights to this? Maybe for the good of all African-American kind they persuaded the King estate to use the clips for good use... such as highlighting a story of racial oppression where there's either dirty ghetto that can't be saved or white suburbia that won't have one black person anywhere near them. I almost hope there was a series (or at least a sequel) of these movies. Perhaps once was enough, but I can at least say it's a unequivocal guilty pleasure. It makes other campy blaxploitation subtle by comparison.

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jungophile

This is a bicameral movie, of sorts. The first two thirds is an examination of the problem of middle class blacks (Dr. Kincaide and his family) wanting to move out of his black neighborhood for security and class consciousness concerns. Abar, a vigilante type character running a kind of rogue chapter of something akin to the Black Panthers (but unarmed), challenges Dr. Kincaide to consider raising up those among his race that he is leaving behind.At this stage, the viewer may be somewhat confused, as the title makes one think they are going to see a genre superhero film, but that doesn't really happen until the last act. The first two acts flesh out the class conflict between the two main characters and their mutual enemy, the white bigots of the neighborhood who want to force Dr. Kincaide to move.To me, this was the novel and more engaging part of the movie. The last act, when Abar becomes a psycho-telekinetic "superman" is rather amusing, but it is pure fantasy rather than science fiction as it claims ("The first Black science fiction film!"). The goal seems to have been to have this catharsis for black audiences to howl over in the theaters.I think most of the reviewers here on IMDb have been too hard on this film. Sure, there are technical deficiencies and so forth, but taken on its own terms, "Abar" deserves praise for attempting to tackle a tough subject like class struggle which most blacks would prefer to slough off erroneously as a race question.

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