Bad Black (Uganda, 2016)

With Who Killed Captain Alex¸ Ugandan zero-budget auteur Isaac Nabwana, aka Nabwana I.G.G., proved his marketing acumen by allowing the film to be released for free on YouTube, paving the way for it to become a meme-producing internet phenomenon. With Bad Black, he further proves his savvy with the time tested practice of putting a white American actor at the forefront of his film. Given that white American is his charismatic co-producer Alan Hofmanis, that strategy has seemed to bear fruit, as evidenced by the heat the film has generated on the festival circuit.

Nabwana also exhibits a higher level of artistic ambition with the film, along with a developing social consciousness, given he positions it, to some extent, as a gritty portrait of life on the mean streets of Wakaliga, the Ugandan slum that plays home to Nabwana’s Ramon Studios. And the portrait of Wakaliga that Nabwana paints, while affectionate, is not a pretty one.

The film starts with Swaaz, a young father, and his son committing a violent bank robbery in order to pay the hospital bills of his wife, whose life is threatened by a compromised birth. After a car chase involving many delightfully naïve miniature effect, Swaaz is killed by the police in a video-game like CG explosion. Back at the hospital, Swaaz’s wife, when informed of his death, seemingly drops dead herself.

This leaves their infant daughter Sarah an orphan. She is turned over to an older woman, whose husband, several years later, casts Sarah out onto the street. The couple already has mouths to feed and, Sarah, not being their biological child, seems like an unnecessary expense to him. Thus little Sarah walks the darkened streets of Wakaliga, where, within minutes, she is kidnapped by a Fagin-like street boss who forces her to be part of his gang of child criminals. Adjusting awkwardly to this life, she is frequently abused by the boss and is even, at one point, shot by him. It’s a pretty grim episode that is only lightened by things like one of the kids wearing a bootleg Rugrats tee-shirt, which is probably a pretty accurate representation of what a street kid in Wakaliga would wear. I could almost hear M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” welling up on the soundtrack.

Skip forward a decade or so and Sarah, now played by Nalwanga Gloria, has become Bad Black, a philanthropic gangster who shares the spoils of her wrongdoing with the city’s poor while exacting vengeance against those who made her childhood miserable. At the same time we meet Dr. Ssali (Hoffmanis), a kindly American doctor who provides free medical care to the impoverished children of the village. The product of a military family, Ssali wears the dog tags of his father, mother and brother around his neck at all times. When these are stolen by members of Bad Black’s gang, he confides the loss to his assistant, a little kid named Wesley Snipes (really). Hilariously, the kid reacts by punching Ssali in the face and telling him to stop being such a pussy. Someone from a family of commandos would not take such an offense lying down, the child admonishes him.

This launches us into the best training montage ever, as this kid constantly punches and beats the mild mannered doctor with a stick while running him through a series of calisthenics and fight maneuvers that will ultimately turn him into a badass, kung fu fighting engine of vengeance, which it of course does. Then follows an absurd sequence in which Ssali, now armed with a huge machine gun (crafted from scrap metal by the Ramon props department), goes on a violent rampage through the city in search of his stolen dog tags. This eventually brings him face-to-face with the none-too-amused Bad Black.

Bad Black owes an obvious debt to the female-fronted American Blaxploitation films of the 70s, such as Coffee and Foxy Brown. As influences goes, you could do a lot worse. But what Bad Black has that those films don’t is the presence of freeform narrator VJ Emmie, who, as he did in Captain Alex, peppers the soundtrack with his energetic yammerings. These range from heroic exhortations (“You are a commando!”) to subtle observations (“What an asshole!”) to lamenting the conditions in Wakaliga (“Poo poo everywhere!”) to rye commentary (‘This doctor needs borders!”) to Tourettes-like single word exclamations (“Subaru!” “Movie!”) This time Emmie debuts something new in his bag of tricks by loudly proclaiming a long expository scene “boring” and fast forwarding the film to the next action scene. I have to admit that, being forewarned of Emmie’s presence in the film, I found him far less jarring than I did while watching Captain Alex and even laughed at a lot of his lines. This is also because I appreciate his role in making Nabwana’s films less prone to mockery by showing that the filmmakers themselves don’t take what they present all that seriously.

During the chaotic final battle scene, VJ Emmie contents himself with simply shouting the names of various Hollywood action stars as the Ugandan characters appear on screen; “Schwarzenegger!” “Stallone! “Van Damme!” Of course, this is a symptom of the unabashed movie fandom that makes these movies so fun to watch. But when, in the battle’s aftermath, Hoffmanis delivered the kiss-off line “Don’t fuck with Americans”, it made me wonder what a Wakaliwood that was not so self-consciously in Hollywood’s shadow might look like. Even the name Wakaliwood begs the comparison.

Not that that is all bad, mind you. In Bad Black’s accompanying materials, Hoffmanis states that the film had a budget of sixty-five dollars, while acknowledging that Captain Alex, rather than the reported two hundred dollars, had a budget closer to eighty dollars. That these films can delight as much as they do is more impressive for the fact that they do so free of Hollywood’s reflexive irony and cynicism. Clearly Nabwana and his crew make movies because movies are fun, inspiring, and often empowering. I imagine those simple facts are hard to see on the opposite end of a two hundred million dollar budget.

Who Killed Captain Alex (Uganda, 2010)

Due to the amount of Internet buzz already surrounding Ugandan zero-budget action director Isaac Nabwana (aka Nabwana I.G.G.), I was tempted to avoid writing about him altogether. I eventually caved, though, because it became clear to me that I will likely be writing about Nabwana for many years to come and with growing frequency. With the increasing accessibility of digital technology making it easier than ever for filmmakers of even the most limited means and abilities to produce a professional quality product, it now falls to the poorest of nations to provide the scrappy, seat-of-the-pants style filmmaking that fans of B and pulp cinema thrive upon. Thus has Africa become the last refuge of true cult cinema, with Nabwana's Ramon Studios, located in the Ugandan slum of Wakaliga, enthusiastically leading the charge.

Of course, the nascent film industries of both Nigeria and Ghana have also pumped their share of trashy genre films into the market. But what Nabwana brings to the table is ambition of a level so inverse to his means as to seem heroic. Symptomatic of this is his dedication to the action genre, where conspicuous consumption is the rule of the day. Faced with the need for greater and greater explosions--a circumstance that would send other filmmakers to their backers with cap in hand--Nabwana instead sees an opportunity to explore even further the limits of some very primitive computer graphics software.

Nabwana’s Who Killed Captain Alex, shot in 2010 for a budget of roughly $200, has become something of a flagship for “Wakaliwood” cinema, owing both to its success at home and it becoming a viral sensation upon its release to YouTube this past April. It concerns a Ugandan Special Forces unit—lead by Kakule Wilson as the titular Captain Alex , “Uganda’s best soldier”—who sets up camp in Wakaliga with the goal of eliminating the Tiger Mafia, a paramilitary style drug gang lead by crazy-eyed crime lord Richard (Sserunya Ernest). When a jungle skirmish between the crooks and commandos leads to Alex and his men taking Richard’s brother prisoner, Richard sends his minions forth to kidnap Alex. Before this can be accomplished, however, Alex is mysteriously murdered in his bed, leading to both the gang and the soldiers launching separate investigations into the crime—albeit for very different reasons.

As action movie plots go, the idea of having two opposing sides doing battle while at the same time trying to solve the same crime is a fairly novel one. But the real novelty of Who Killed Captain Alex is in its inclusion of “audio joker” VJ Emmie, who provides loud offscreen commentary throughout the film, like a kind of cinematic hype man (just think of the shouty narrator from the trailer for the Ghanaian movie 2016 and imagine him doing that for an entire film). This ranges from excited exhortations (“Action! Action!”, “Expect the unexpectable!”), to helpful reminders (“you are watching Who Killed Captain Alex”), to pointing out changes of scene, (“Back at the Tiger Mafia base…”), to fart noises, to MST3K-style jokes at the film’s expense.

This last serves a couple of purposes. For one, it deflects mockery of the film by beating potential hecklers to the punchline. But it also gives us some idea of what watching Who Killed Captain Alex with a Ugandan audience might be like—and clues us in to the fact that the intended audience for these films might not take them as seriously as some of us might assume they do. This further serves as snark-repellent--because what fun is there in condescending to a B movie without the assumed existence of a gullible audience who takes it completely in earnest? Indeed, it may be those who regard a film like Captain Alex with a kind of “WTF” incredulity who are the real rubes.

VJ Emmie’s excited commentary often gives expression to national pride, informing us that Captain Alex is “Uganda’s first non-stop action movie” and at times just yelling “UGANDA!”. In a scene where a woman is being tortured by the Tiger Mafia, he jokes that she was “caught watching Nollywood movies” (and, indeed, I’m sure there are some who would choose torture over watching 666 (Beware the End is at Hand).) And, true to his word, there is cause for pride here: The admittedly risible sight of two ColecoVision helicopters doing battle over Kampala becomes indescribably thrilling when watched with the knowledge that Nabwana composed those effect on computers that he built himself from junk components.

Yet before we can be dazzled by such spectacle—and in the name of “non-stop action”—new combatants must be introduced. The first of these is Captain Alex’s brother, described as the “Ugandan Bruce Lee” or “Bruce U”, who comes to Wakaliga and asks to be included in the investigation of his brother’s death. The second is the unit’s new commander, who also proves to be no slouch in the kung fu department. Wakaliga being something of a hub of kung fu enthusiasm in Uganda, both of these men prove to have some legitimate skills—and Nabwana films their fights with a commendable eye toward legibility and visible cause and effect. One could easily think of a few vastly better paid Hollywood action auteurs who could learn from him.

Captain Alex ends with a prolonged pitched battle between both forces that is rife with CG blood spray and explosions. This was reportedly filmed in one two hour shoot that took place on the eve of the film’s release in Uganda. Despite the gory fx, the reckless enthusiasm and barely concealed joy of the participants gives it the feel of a backyard game of "war" played by a bunch of sugar-amped pre-teens. Of course, I mean that as a compliment; the exultant love of filmmaking that is apparent throughout Who Killed Captain Alex is nothing if not infectious. By the time it’s over, we don’t even care that no one has bothered to solve its titular mystery.

Of course, Who Killed Captain Alex bears some similarities to genre films coming out of Nigeria and Ghana—the shot-on-video look, the crude effects, the amateur actors. Yet Nabwana clearly intends for his work to be more than just a tributary into the larger body of African action cinema, as there are also some shrewd differences. The film boasts a brisk running time that contrasts pleasingly with the three hour-plus gab fests of woods Nolly and Golly, while being refreshingly free of those films’ Christian evangelicism. Nabwana also exhibits a wily understanding of social media and internet marketing (not to mention a brand savvy self-awareness resemblant of The Asylum and Troma), and clearly has an eye toward the Western market.

Indeed, I think it can be said that, with Captain Alex, Nabwana is forcing African genre cinema toward the next step in its evolution. From where I’m standing, the transition will be one that is very exciting to behold.