Thanks for the memories!

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Take my rating on this film with a very large grain of salt, since most people would probably find it mediocre at best if they aren't subject to 1970s nostalgia.It plays like a decent trashy TV movie from the '70s (I know, because I was there), albeit with some swearing that would never have been allowed on the air. The plot is actually pretty good and reasonably convoluted and, I think, worthy of a skilled remake (except, please, for the absurdly drawn out shootout near the end), but the execution is really, really dated. This movie is notable for having the worst "blood" special effects I have ever seen. When shot, the victims appear to have been hit by a paintball gun loaded with red fluorescent paint. Also, I never personally ever heard any real person use the term "Honky" in the '70s, yet it is used constantly here, so that seemed a bit weird to me. In summary, this movie is a long way from being great filmmaking, and I would only recommend it if you wanted to see an old OK blaxsploitation flick, since as far as that goes, you could do a lot worse.

After a fundraiser for a black politician is robbed, Detroit police put two detectives, one white (Alex Rocco) and one black (Hari Rhodes), on the case, who try to work together under boiling political pressure.Although Orville H. Hampton worked mostly in lower budget films, he actually had an Oscar nomination under his belt by the time he wrote this script. Hampton had written the now-forgotten "One Potato, Two Potato" (1964). Marks was responsible for bringing in Rocco, who he had worked with on "Bonnie's Kids". Although he plays a policeman here, Rocco had actually grown up among Boston's Winter Hill Gang.Hari Rhodes is a perfect choice for the role here. In a film about racial politics, he is more knowledgeable than most. While any person of color has experienced racism at some point, Rhodes literally wrote the book on it: "A Chosen Few", which was published in 1965.Scatman Crothers is a pleasant surprise, even if his role is not as large as it could be. And the idea of "Buzz the Fuzz" is awfully clever, perhaps something more big cities ought to think about. This film shows the racial politics between police and the black community, and this certainly has not changed in the forty years since this film debuted. If anything, it is something we are even more acutely aware of now.

Another entry into the blaxploitation genre, Arthur Marks's "Detroit 9000" has a black detective and a white detective cooperating to investigate the theft of some jewels from a congressman's fund raiser in the Motor City. For the most part the movie has a lot of the things that we expect to see in a blaxploitation flick, although they put an interesting twist on racial stereotypes: the black detective is the refined character while the white detective is the streetwise one. There was even a line or two that they obviously lifted from "Dirty Harry". Otherwise, it was just a fun movie with a funk soundtrack. Among the cast members are Hari Rhodes, Alex Rocco (Moe Greene in "The Godfather"), Vonetta McGee and Scatman Crothers (Dick Hallorann in "The Shining").Detroit was long seen as the backbone of the US economy and now it's bankrupt. Geez.

Arthur Marks somehow knew how to do it: combining the tough and thoughtful police-thriller with a seeming exploitation (or blaxploitation) flick into something worthwhile. It may not be for some; matter of fact, from all I can tell looking at various reviews it's made little of an impression aside from negative. But I was drawn into this seedy, multi-racial tale of dirty criminals and (some) dirty cops and a dirty politician because of the simple strengths of the acting and (most of) the writing, not to mention an explosive climax and a nifty opening heist scene. It's even more than nifty; Marks somehow has the cojones to make a poignant moment in this scene, as well as a couple of other times in the film (i.e. Ruby dying in Jessie's arms), where the singer who's doing a number gets cut-off by the tape recording telling everyone to get down and fork over the cash and jewels... and she just goes on singing, and a song sung with a mournful voice.The nuts and the bolts of the plot are that in Detroit, where according to officer/athlete Jessie Williams (Hari Rhodes) his new partner Danny Bassett (Alex Rocco) is in the minority in the black-dominant area, a heist has taken place during a fund-raiser for an up-and-coming politician (perfectly one-note Rudy Challenger), and there's already tension: is it an all-black gang, or all-white? Can there be a crack when those the cops find immediately shoot back and end up shot dead? It all leads down to a pimp and his girl, or so it's thought, and not everything is what it seems with tough/smart cop Bassett, yada yada. Describing a lot of the plot isn't necessary, as much of the interest in Detroit 9000 are in scenes of pure attitude, of this time and place in this city a microcosm of racial strife and unrest. If anything it's not even a blaxploitation movie, per say, but something of a black pride movie in a strange way. And there's at the least some equality: the gang is found to be multi-racial, including a dead) Indian from Canada! There are ways this movie can get cheesy or stuck in its 1973 time-frame, and of course the clothes, the slang, and the soundtrack all speak to that. But I enjoyed how Hampton's screenplay struck a line between giving many of these characters, including supporting ones like Ruby Harris and Ferby some personality past their stock characters, or how the wit creeps up as really unexpected (the line Clayton's "assistant" gives to a prostitute is so classic QT lifted it for Jackie Brown). And Rhodes and Rocco, otherwise usually relegated to supporting and character-actor parts in other movies, get to show what their made of as cops on a dirty case that just gets dirtier. Lastly, without sacrificing some sophistication in the writing or a refreshingly bittersweet ending, Marks tops it all off with that big chase going six or seven ways across the railroad tracks and fields and cemeteries of *really* gritty parts of Detroit and put to a raucous, spot-on soundtrack.In a word (and I can almost hear a James Lipton voice saying this as I type this): under-rated.