***SPOILERS*** A nicer and less radical Fred Williamson is down in the dumps private eye Shep Stone who gets himself involved in a drug ring that uses religion as a front to push its sh*t to the public;especially the hippie and disgruntled youth by claiming to save them. Stone gets involved in all this by being hired by Mr. Dole, Richard Anderson, to track down his hippie teenage daughter Amy,Susan Arnold,who joined the religious cult in order to find herself and ended up pushing drugs as well as getting addicted to them.Stone besides all his other problems, like paying his bills,is stuck with a lesbian girlfriend Cynthia, Tresa Graves, who flaunts her lesbianism in front of him that totally confuses him and makes him feel, can it be possible, inadequate with the opposite sex. Stone's involvement in all this happened when he obtained this silver tipped walking stick that once contained 50 G's of heroin in it from Hollwood memorabilia collector Bowen, Richard X. Battery, who left it at the cemetery while attending a funeral. It was hooker Vera, Nancy Fisher, who swiped it while the absent minded Bowen forgot to pick it up and ended up getting murdered by hit-man Chess, Frank Ashmore, who Bowen hired to retrieve it. This not only ended with Bowen later losing the walking stick and its contents but his life as well.***SPOILERS*** Williamson does his best to keep this turkey of a movie afloat with a number of fight and car chase scenes but its the plot that's too long and complicated for anyone to follow that ends up sinking it. We do get what seems like a surprise ending and climatic chase scene in the beach that exposes the real bad guy in the movie who ends up getting dumped by Stone in the Pacific Ocean. The biggest surprise is not who the drug kingpin is but who he isn't.

I've read a lot about how Fred Williamson was one of the primary blaxploitation stars back in the '70s. His sideburns give him an extra cool look. He also appeared in "The Inglorious Bastards" (whose title Quentin Tarantino famously borrowed) and "From Dusk Til Dawn". "Black Eye" doesn't really come across as a blaxploitation flick. It's got some of the things generally associated with the genre, but it's too low-key to authentically belong in the same category as "Shaft" and "Superfly". Maybe it's just in the wrong hands: director Jack Arnold notably directed movies like "The Incredible Shrinking Man". It's not a bad movie but I don't think it correct to call it blaxploitation.

Towards the end of his career Jack Arnold, a very efficient director who gave us such classic 50's creature features as "It Came from Outer Space," "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," and "Tarantula," teamed up with former football star turned top 70's blaxploitation film headliner Fred "the Hammer" Williamson for a pair of movies, producing the amiable, if unremarkable Western "The Black Bounty Hunter" and this refreshingly breezy, clever and highly entertaining 70's black action variant on your standard 40's film noir down-at-the-heels private detective yarn.Williamson displays a charming combination of dry, self-deprecating humor and relaxed, easygoing self-confidence as Shep Stone, a cheap, affable, and forever in debt erstwhile Los Angeles cop turned private investigator. Stone's so hard-up for cash that he uses a bar as his business office and just barely makes ends meet doing penny-ante low-paying minor cases that the police don't want to bother with. While pounding the pavement for one of these deceptively simple gigs (Stone's trying to find some guy's runaway teenage daughter who's hiding somewhere in Hollywood), Stone finds himself elbow deep in a complex, dangerous, seemingly bottomless criminal plot which includes a flipped-out Jesus freak religious cult, assorted deadhead hippie dopers, a sordid porno ring, a priceless missing gold-tipped cane that belonged to a legendary silent movie star, a nefarious underground drug smuggling operation, and an ever-growing number of fresh corpses.While lacking the wickedly playful, mischievous ingenuity of Robert Altman's masterful "The Long Goodbye" or the haunting, unremitting pessimism of Arthur Penn's beautifully bleak "Night Moves," "Black Eye" nonetheless still makes the grade as a highly successful hip'n'flip 70's spin on 40's mystery suspense thrillers. Arnold's capable direction keeps the pace moving at a nice, steady clip, punctuated with sporadic exciting mano-a-mano bare knuckle fight scenes and excellent use of various colorfully seedy L.A. locations (the rundown abandoned amusement park at the film's conclusion is especially effective). The script by Mark Haggard and Jim Martin supplies a goodly amount of fairly complicated and often genuinely surprising plot twists. And the expected array of quirky, rough-around-the-edges secondary characters are an interesting oddball bunch, with particularly notable turns by Rosemary Forsyth as an alluring, powerful lesbian model agency owner (Forsyth has the picture's best line, boasting to Stone when she first meets him, "I'm a whole lot of woman"), Teresa Graves of "Get Christie Love" TV show fame as Stone's loyal bisexual girlfriend (the film's casual, nonjudgmental depiction of both Foryth's unconventional femme fatale and Graves' equally atypical gal Friday is one of its strongest assets), and Bret Morrison, who did the voice of radio's "The Shadow" in the 40's, as a smugly sleazy porno filmmaker. All in all, it's a modest, yet surefire winner.

Fred Williamson ('Black Caesar', 'Vigilante', 'From Dusk Til Dawn') was one of the coolest and most charismatic blaxploitation stars of the 1970s, but 'Black Eye' is by no means one of his best movies. Williamson himself is pretty good as always, but the pedestrian script and lacklustre direction (by Jack Arnold, who later worked with Williamson on the lame Western comedy 'Boss N*igger') don't do him any favours. Arnold directed 1950s classic 'Creature From The Black Lagoon' and 'The Incredible Shrinking Man', but had been mainly working in TV, and I think it really shows. 'Black Eye' feels like a TV pilot. It's like blaxploitation-lite. Williamson plays an ex-cop investigating the murder of a call girl and the theft of a walking stick she had stolen from a recently deceased Hollywood movie star. The trail leads him to a drug ring, porno movies and a religious cult, which sounds very Dashiell Hammett and interesting, but it isn't. It's very dull and never picks up steam. The supporting cast includes two actors familiar to 70s TV viewers, Richard Anderson ('The Six Million Dollar Man's Oscar Goldman), and the foxy Teresa Graves ('Get Christie Love'). Graves had previously co-starred with Fred Williamson in 'That Man Bolt', which may not be my favourite Williamson vehicle, but it was a damn site more entertaining than this! I say give 'Black Eye' a miss unless you're an obsessive fan of "The Hammer". If you haven't seen it, you really aren't missing much. Newcomers to Williamson are advised to go directly to Larry Cohen's brilliant 'Black Caesar' which features a dynamite Williamson performance, and a super cool score from The Godfather Of Soul James Brown.