Sugar Hill (1974) has only just begun when the title character (Marki Bey), nicknamed that because a man once said she looked as sweet as sugar tastes, faces the greatest tragedy of her life so far. The man she was due to marry, a nightclub owner named Langston (Larry D. Johnson), is beaten to death by mob boss Morgan (Robert Quarry) and a fleet of his henchmen for refusing to turn over ownership of his business.
What else is a woman with revenge freshly on the brain to do than pay a visit to Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully), a white-haired, voodoo-practicing mystic in town living in a cobweb-choked mansion? Here’s what Sugar has in mind: parlaying Maitresse’s voodoo expertise to ensure the men responsible for her fiancé’s death are all dead before they can really understand what’s hit them. She’s so resolute that she’s willing to give up her soul to the lord of the dead, Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley), whom Maitresse summons to help the unyieldingly vengeful Sugar get what she wants.
The Houston-set Sugar Hill unfurls simply and more than a little monotonously: with Morgan’s men getting killed in gruesome, Samedi-assisted ways with assembly line-like consistency. Those scenes are broken up by a B plot where a cop who also used to be Sugar’s boyfriend (Richard Lawson) attempts to investigate, and a C plot where Sugar tries wresting control of Langston’s nightclub from Morgan. One guy is devoured by a pen of famished pigs; another is hexed to fatally stab himself in the stomach. A phalanx of zombies with eyes that look like pinballs is always around to either watch or actively participate in a new victim’s demise. Sugar Hill’s set pieces are over and done with so quickly that there’s neither suspense cultivated in the leadup nor much room given to us to be made properly squeamish by some of its acts of meant-to-be-satisfying violence. Paul Maslansky, who directed, is better at generating threatening ambiance than thrills. (A high point is in the early meet-up with Maitresse and Samedi, which gets its requisite feeling of otherworldliness as the former and Sugar traipse through some foggy marshes right.)
Notable for being among the handful of blaxploitation movies to infuse their pulpy thrills with horror (others include 1972’s Blacula and 1976’s J.D.’s Revenge), Sugar Hill wouldn’t be very memorable if not for Bey, who acts with a chilling steeliness that makes Sugar feel like a force even when the writing, by Tim Kelly, doesn’t let her be much more than an indomitable, endlessly clever angel of death who prefers a smart white jumpsuit to a divine set of robes. Bey would unfortunately make only one more movie before retiring from acting in 1982; she is said to have, in recent years, pivoted to a career that lets her be a different kind of angel of death: the organizer, with her husband, of murder-mystery cruises in Los Angeles. Needless to say that sounds like a lot more fun a reason to orchestrate a murder than satiating one’s vengeful anger.
Peterson Reviews 