Blaxploitation Education: Terminal Island

Does an exploitation movie starring Black people fall under the category of Blaxploitation?

Terminal Island
Written by Jim Barnett, Charles S. Swartz, and Stephanie Rothman
Directed by Stephanie Rothman
1973

There were plenty of low-budget exploitation movies that came out in the 1970s, and while many of them consisted of rudimentary plots that strung together acts of sex and violence, the filmmakers could still try to sneak in some social commentary. That’s one of the best parts of watching Blaxploitation movies, which focused on the concerns of the Black community while also delivering entertaining plots. However, some exploitation movies didn’t even rise to that level, barely delivering on the expected entertainment while also failing to have anything to say. In fact, Terminal Island, an exploitation movie that features several Black performers in key roles, is hard to categorize as Blaxploitation due to its complete failure to delve into any issues that may affect actual Black people.

The premise of Terminal Island seems to be a response to the 1972 Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia, which temporarily placed a moratorium on the death penalty in the United States. It didn’t last long; a 1976 case, Gregg v. Georgia, let our amazing justice system get back to killing people. But in the meantime, certain elements of society seem to have freaked out, wondering how society could function without state-sanctioned murder. In the fictional world of this film, the state of California responded by sending all the men and women on death row to a secluded island prison and just leaving them there to fend for themselves. An opening scene with some reporters putting together an expositional newscast explains that the state felt that it had no other choice, since apparently keeping these prisoners in jail for the rest of their lives just wasn’t possible.

That’s some pretty shaky reasoning, but it has the potential to serve as a vehicle for some commentary about the arbitrary and capricious nature of the justice system. It could have been about the way prisoners are no longer treated as human, how nobody really cares about their rights, and how the focus on punishment leads us to commit worse atrocities than convicted criminals, many of whom suffer from mental illnesses and addictions, ever committed in the first place. The story is rife with possibility, and it could have focused on the ways the United States failed these prisoners, railroading them into a horrific situation and then looking the other way as the seeds it planted bore some especially ugly fruit.

Unfortunately, this movie does exactly none of that. The filmmakers apparently came up with the premise of “prison island” and didn’t bother to think through its implications, instead just presenting a series of violent battles with little point. Out of all the prisoners featured, we only learn the backstory of one (with a few vague hints about a couple of the others). That would be Dr. Norman Milford, played by a young Tom Selleck, who was convicted of murder after he took a brain-dead patient off life support. Everyone else is apparently just a remorseless killer, so it’s okay if they die left and right.

Milford is actually a fairly minor character, and if the movie has a main protagonist, it’s Carmen Simms (Ena Hartman), a Black woman who is the newest arrival on the island. When she gets there, she learns that most of the prisoners live in a makeshift village that’s lorded over by a guy named Bobby (Sean Kenney), who doesn’t seem like he has either the charisma or the force of will to keep all these other murderers under his control. Maybe he maintains control with the help of his right hand man Monk (Roger E. Mosley, who was in Hit Man and The Mack and also starred alongside Selleck in the 1980s TV show Magnum, P.I.), a guy who is especially violent and aggressive, and who we’re maybe supposed to think is gay due to the nose ring he wears. For whatever reason, everyone else follows Bobby’s orders, including a group of women who basically function as sex slaves.

That provides another element in which the movie doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. It doesn’t bother to make this situation seem especially difficult for these women, other than the fact that the men are all rude to them. A scene in which the women are told that they’re each going to have to have sex with several men during the night sees them complain about the situation as if it’s a minor inconvenience, then simply cuts to the next day. While the movie didn’t have to go out of its way to depict a series of violent sexual assaults, it could have at least acknowledged how horrific the situation is for these women and the emotional toll that this would take on them. The closest the movie comes to doing so is when Bobby brings the non-verbal Bunny (Barbara Leigh), who we’re told hasn’t spoken since she killed her parents, into his tent and tells her that if she just says no, he won’t do anything to her.

Later, the women are outside the camp washing clothes in a creek (because that’s women’s work, of course), when some of the island’s other inhabitants stage a surprise attack, kill the men guarding them, and run off with them into the forest. It turns out there’s another group of prisoners on the island who don’t go along with Bobby’s tyranny, but since they’re outnumbered, they have to keep moving, never staying in one place for long. They’re led by A.J. (Don Marshall, who will show up in at least one other Blaxploitation movie), and along with the women’s help, they manage to stage an effective resistance, leading to a sort of small-scale war against Bobby and his minions.

And, well, that’s about all there is to the movie. There are various acts of violence as the two factions attack each other (there are a bunch of knife fights with almost nonexistent choreography, and characters usually scream very loudly after being stabbed), as well as a very slight bit of personal drama involving the women’s relationships with various men in the resistance. There’s a supposedly funny scene in which one of the women gets back at a man for an attempted sexual assault by pretending that she’s going to have sex with him, then rubbing some honey on his ass so he’ll get attacked by a swarm of bees. Another woman has enough knowledge of chemistry to make some gunpowder, allowing the resistance to arm themselves with grenades. And Carmen finds some poisonous plants they can use to make lethal blowgun darts (when questioned about how she knows about the plants, she says that her grandmother was really into voodoo, which is a trope I’ve complained about before).

Anyway, it all leads up to a big action scene in which the “good” guys manage to triumph, after which the survivors seem to have found a way to live together peacefully. In the final scene, the authorities try to get Dr. Milford to come back to the mainland with them because he’s been granted a new trial, but he refuses, apparently believing that he’s helped to build a better, more just society in this land of lawlessness. But that’s also implied rather than stated outright, because this movie can’t be bothered to even consider what its message might be.

I may be trying to place too much on the back of filmmakers who weren’t trying to make any big statements about anything. Director Stephanie Rothman, one of the few women filmmakers in the exploitation scene of the era, supposedly focused on female characters who took a radical feminist point of view, but somehow I doubt that movies like The Student Nurses and It’s a Bikini World had much more to say than this one did. Regardless of intentions, this is a lost opportunity, especially with several Black characters who could have provided a look at the racism they surely faced when dealing with the justice system. This movie so thoroughly fails on that account that I, based on the level of authority afforded to me as a white guy on the internet, am refusing to allow it to be recognized as a Blaxploitation movie. Take that, 50-year-old movie that few people even remember!

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Non-Blaxploitation: Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones