The Great Rudy Ray Moore

Before Richard Pryor, before Eddie Murphy, before rap, there was Rudy Ray Moore.

This comic legend from Ft. Smith, Arkansas, had been in show business for 30 years, working with Redd Foxx and others in comedy clubs, doing the “chitlin’ circuit” of black ghetto clubs and selling his own records- like Eat Out More Often, This Pussy Belongs To Me, Dolemite For President and I Can’t Believe I Ate The Whole Thing among others- which did so well commercially he produced and starred in a series of films made in the 1970s based on characters he created in his stage act. He brought along his comic colleagues, too.

Lady Reed toured with him and cut her own bawdy records. She was the notorious “Sensuous Black Woman,” whose “Black Angel” records, which instruct women how to sexually satisfy their men (“Use your grippers!”), are filthy and fabulous.

The comedy team of Leroy and Skillet appeared in Rudy Ray’s Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil’s Son-In-Law and also had their own concert film entitled Leroy And Skillet And Deborah: Don’t Hold Your Laff.

Another Rudy Ray Moore alumni Wildman Steve played the lead in Super Soul Brother (1978) which allegedly was originally titled The $6,000 N*****. (Imagine the poor soul having to put those letters up on a marquee).

Rudy broke into Blaxploitation films populated by such cinematic luminaries as Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and Ron O’Neal with a difference- he was the Kung-Fu Comedian. An imposing figure- weighing over 200 pounds- he was not the most graceful of movie kickboxers, but aside from the requisite mustache and modest Afro his wide, kind face and stream-of-conscious rhyming, sing-song rap delivery, periodically punctuated by the word “motherfucker,” and his ludicrous 70’s pimp attire evidently struck a chord with audiences- his films were big hits in inner city theaters in Chicago and Atlanta. Ray’s inimitable X-rated riffs have been appropriated by comedians since the 70s and, from what I’ve read, he was quite bitter that the fame of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy eluded him. (It’s quite ironic that Eddie Murphy has proposed a bio-pic about him).

Thanks to the recent Blu-ray restorations of Moore’s films by Vinegar Syndrome you can now view this comic innovator properly. And, trust me, you haven’t seen anything like these films. In the words of Rudy Ray Moore, “I aint lyin’.”

Dolemite (1975) was his first film, based on his top-selling record. It was actually inspired by an old wino who would come into the record store Moore managed and go into this hilarious rap for spare change. Moore plays Dolemite, a nightclub entertainer serving a 20-year prison sentence for possession of stolen furs and narcotics. But a rival club owner, Willie Green (D’Urville Martin), had set him up, so whorehouse madam Queen Bee (Lady Reed) makes a deal with the FBI and gets Dolemite out of jail to prove his innocence. With a stable of Kung-Fu trained hookers, they go after that bad Willie Green in high fashion. “Bone-crushing, skull-splitting, brain-blasting action!” screamed the ads, and God knows there’s a lot of that.

Plus, those God-awful 70s fashions- Dolemite wears big hats and turquoise suits with flared bellbottoms, platform shoes and carries a cane. Sometimes he just stops in a parking lot and goes into his comedy routine.

Dolemite returns in the astounding The Human Tornado (1976) directed by Cliff Roquemore. Caught in bed with the white wife of a redneck racist sheriff, he is forced to jump out of a window and roll naked down a hill (which is shown in “instant replay”). He and a few friends hijack a car driven by a nelly queen and force him to accompany them to see their own Queen Bee in sunny California. But Queen Bee (Lady Reed) has trouble of her own. A mafia club owner named Caveletti sends his goons over to smash up her club, rough her up and kidnap two of her girls whom they bring to a cob-webbed basement in Pasadena where an old crone tortures them with snakes, live hand grenades and weighted boards with spikes dangling over their head. There are plenty of high-stepping musical numbers and bizarre touches: Caveletti’s mistress fantasizes black musclemen diving nude down a child’s playground slide into her awaiting arms, Queen Bee’s martial-arts trained gals, the redneck sheriff, a sympathetic black cop named Mannix and some crotch-eating rats.

Then there’s Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil’s Son-In-Law (1977). Once again directed by Cliff Roquemore with a bizarre opening in a sharecropper shack in the south. A woman is giving birth during a hurricane, and the doctor first pulls out a watermelon from between her legs (!), followed by a fully-grown boy who immediately starts to beat up the father for disturbing his sleep in the womb. As a picked-on child Petey meets a kindly Zen master who teaches him the art of self-defense and encourages his dreams of being a successful nightclub comedian. Leroy and Skillet play vengeful club owners. Petey Wheatstraw makes a deal with Lucifer (which involves him marrying the devil’s ugly daughter) who gives him a magic cane that he uses to rain money down from the sky and make fat women thin.

Then Disco Godfather (1979), where Rudy plays Tucker Williams, a former cop who spins records at his club Blueberry Hill. He wears outrageous sequined-studded jumpsuits and as DJ screams “Put your weight on it!” while playing records. His nephew gets a bad dose of PCP and goes berserk, dribbling imaginary basketballs and hallucinating skeletons and witches, so Tucker goes undercover to “attack the wack” and bring down the pushers. This PG-rated classic has some amazing scenes in the PCP psycho ward of people screaming, whipping the air, crawling on all fours. Made at the height of the disco craze, there’s even a scene where people at a party are snorting cocaine off the soundtrack album of Saturday Night Fever. During the final shootout in the drug factory, Tucker is forced to inhale a gas mask full of angel dust and hallucinates the same damn witch his nephew saw, and screams, “I hate you, Aunt Betty!”

I interviewed Rudy Ray Moore over the phone and he was generous, incredibly funny, and told fascinating stories of the old comedy club circuit and the making of his films. He even sent me a 45 record of Dolemite which I cherish. I even got to meet the legend at a Chiller Theatre convention in New Jersey.

Moore died in 2008. But there really was no one like him. He was, in his own words, the man that “killed Monday, whupped Tuesday, put Wednesday in the hospital, called up Thursday to tell Friday not to bury Saturday on Sunday. “