TNT Jackson: The Kung-Fu Blaxploitation Heroine

TNT Jackson runs about seventy-two minutes and contains roughly four minutes of competent martial arts. This is a film that knows what it has, knows what it lacks, and gets out of the building before you can total the two.

Cirio H. Santiago directed it in 1974 for New World Pictures, shooting in the Philippines while the script insists we are in Hong Kong. Jeanne Bell plays Diana Jackson, who has come looking for her missing brother Stack and finds a heroin operation instead. The screenplay is credited to Dick Miller and Ken Metcalfe, and that first name is the reason a certain kind of viewer sits up: Dick Miller, the Corman stock player, the man from A Bucket of Blood and The Little Shop of Horrors and later every Joe Dante film ever made, wrote a blaxploitation kung-fu picture. Working for Roger Corman meant working, and the work was whatever was needed that month.

I found my copy on a market stall in a box of unlabelled tapes, third generation, tracking lines through the fight scenes. It is possible this is the correct format.

The film is fast because it has to be

Santiago’s method is worth taking seriously, because it produced dozens of films and almost all of them move.

The rule is that nothing is established twice. Diana arrives, asks about her brother, gets a lead, follows it, fights someone, gets a better lead. There is no second scene of anyone standing around confirming what we already know. The plot advances every ninety seconds because there is no money to stand still — a static scene costs the same as a moving one and buys less, so Santiago simply never shoots one. By the time you notice the story is nonsense, it has already handed you the next thing.

Watch the transitions and you can see the whole philosophy. Santiago cuts out of scenes the instant the necessary information has landed, frequently before the actor has finished the reaction. It gives the film a clipped, breathless quality that reads today as style and was originally arithmetic: every foot of film he did not shoot was money he still had. Cutting early is free. Coverage is not. Forty years of low-budget American cinema was built on that single insight, and Santiago applied it more ruthlessly than almost anybody.

The trick is visible in how he shoots the fights, too. Bell had no martial-arts background, so Santiago builds around her: cut fast, shoot from behind, use a double for anything requiring flexibility, hold on Bell’s face for the reactions and her hands for the contact. It is the same toolkit Hollywood uses on every star who cannot fight, deployed forty years earlier with a hundredth of the budget. The joins show. They show in a way that is genuinely endearing, because the film is so unbothered by them.

And Bell is good. The film never persuades you for a second that she could physically take the men she takes; her value is entirely presence. She is funny, she is bored by the men around her in exactly the right way, and she carries the picture on charm while the choreography does its best to sabotage her. Bell had come out of modelling and a Playboy centrefold with no fighting background at all, which by the standards of 1974 casting made her roughly as qualified as half the men in the genre.

The famous scene, and why it works

There is one sequence everybody knows: Diana fights a man in a pitch-dark room, topless, with only a shaft of light from a doorway to see by.

It is obviously there for the reason you think it is there. It is also, purely as construction, the best thing in the film — and it works for a reason that has nothing to do with the nudity.

Darkness is the cheapest special effect in cinema. In the dark, Santiago does not have to prove that Bell can fight, because you cannot see either fighter clearly enough to judge. He can cut on shadow, he can use a stunt double freely, he can let a blow land offscreen and sell it on sound. The scene is a technical dodge that happens to be atmospheric, which is the exact same discovery Val Lewton made at RKO thirty years earlier for the same budgetary reason. The exploitation film and the poetic B-picture arrive at identical solutions when neither can afford to show you anything.

The scene also gives the film its one image. Everything else in TNT Jackson looks like a Manila industrial estate in flat sunlight. This looks composed.

There is a second lesson in the sequence about what the exploitation film actually sells. The dark room delivers the nudity the poster promised while showing you almost nothing, and it delivers the fight the title promised while proving nothing. Both obligations are discharged in the same ninety seconds using the same absence of light. Call it a producer’s solution executed by a director who understood that the audience wants the promise kept more than it wants the promise fulfilled.

The ancestor

The obvious parent is Coffy, released the year before, which established that a woman could headline this material and take a genre picture to the bank. Every producer in Los Angeles read those grosses, and TNT Jackson is one of a dozen films made by people who had.

The truer ancestor is the New World production line itself. Corman had been running the Philippines operation for years, and Santiago was the man on the ground: the same crews, the same jungle, the same handful of American actors flown out to fill the English-speaking roles. This film is a sibling of Black Mama, White Mama and The Big Doll House — same country, same economics, different hook. The full machinery is laid out in Roger Corman: the mogul of the margins, and TNT Jackson is what that machinery produces when you feed it a martial-arts boom.

The third bloodline is the one that matters commercially: Enter the Dragon had come out in 1973 and detonated. Every studio and every exploitation outfit spent the following two years trying to reverse-engineer it, and blaxploitation had the most direct route, because Jim Kelly was already in it. The martial-arts strand runs from him through Black Belt Jones and out to the Filipino cheapies, where the ambition drops and the speed increases.

Santiago liked the formula enough to make it twice more. Firecracker in 1981 and Angelfist in 1993 reuse the same plot, and Firecracker reportedly reuses actual footage. The exploitation shelf is full of this — a film is a set of assets, and assets get reused.

The case against

The case against is not difficult to make.

The film is incompetent in most of the ways a film can be. The dubbing wanders. The continuity collapses regularly. The Hong Kong of the title is a handful of signs and a lot of hoping. The villains are indistinguishable from one another. The plot resolves by having someone explain it.

The gender politics are exactly what a 1974 New World picture’s gender politics are: Diana is a capable heroine who is also required to be undressed on a schedule, and the film’s interest in her competence is real but strictly secondary to its interest in her body. Arguing this into a feminist text takes more work than the text can bear.

The film’s relationship with geography is its funniest failing. Manila plays Hong Kong with no effort whatsoever: the signage is wrong, the streets are wrong, the extras are wrong, and at one point the film simply asks you to accept a warehouse. Santiago clearly assumed his audience had never been to either city and would not care, and he was right on both counts. It is a useful reminder that the exploitation film’s contract with the drive-in was never about credibility.

And it is slight. Seventy-two minutes leaves no room for anything to develop, and nothing does. Diana at the end is Diana at the start. The film has one idea about her — she is dangerous and everyone underestimates her — and it plays that idea eleven times.

The verdict: it is a good bad film in the strict sense, which means the pleasure is real and the pleasure is not the one intended. Watch it for Jeanne Bell, who is better than the film deserves. Watch it for the dark-room fight, which is a piece of genuine low-budget invention. Watch it for the writing credit, which tells you more about how American genre cinema actually functioned in 1974 than any number of respectful documentaries. What you will not get is a martial-arts film, and the picture is honest enough about that within the first reel.

Where to find it: it turns up in the budget box sets, on the free ad-supported streaming channels, and on a handful of catalogue discs. Print quality varies from acceptable to archaeological. For the shelf around it, the blaxploitation canon is where I make the case for what survives.

Spoilers below

The plot, such as it is, resolves with the revelation that Charlie — the character who has been closest to Diana throughout, played by Stan Shaw — is working for the operation that killed her brother.

The twist is telegraphed from his first scene and the film makes no serious attempt to hide it, which is the correct decision for a picture running seventy-two minutes. Suspense requires time. Santiago has none, so he plays the betrayal as an inevitability and gets his value out of the confrontation instead.

Diana kills him. She kills the rest of them. She leaves.

What stays with me is the last stretch’s total absence of consequence. The brother is dead when the film starts and stays dead. No relationship survives. Diana takes nothing out of the picture except the information she came for, and the film ends on her walking away from a body count with no discernible feeling about any of it. Sixteen years before the genre discovered the word “closure”, a seventy-two-minute Filipino cheapie had worked out that a revenge film can simply stop when the revenge does, and that the emptiness afterwards is the only honest note available.

I doubt anybody involved intended it. It lands anyway.