Coming straight out of Wakaliwood, Bad Black is the latest Ugandan no-budget action blockbuster where a community got together and made a meta movie about low budget cinema. Like the earlier internet sensaton Who Killed Captain Alex?, Bad Black is a crime movie in search of a plot, made oh so tolerable by the Rifftrax-esque narration that creates its own meta commentary about the movie yet is also integral to the movie itself. It’s a complete party wrapped up in a singular package, and you already know if you’ll love or hate this one because it deals in all the same entertainment factors as Captain Alex? It’s as hilarious, potent and disposable as the earlier film while making all the same types of snarks, including a child kung fu master named Wesley Snipes.
There is one difference, and this comes courtesy of Wakaliwood’s new producer, writer and star. Alan Hofmanis came from Ohio and was a cinema programmer in New York before he was so taken with Who Killed Captain Alex? that he flew down to Uganda to meet with the Ugandan filmmakers, make a documentary, and ultimately help them make and sell their next movies. By the end of his journey, he was integrated enough with the movie that he helped write the script and has a major part in Bad Black as one of the side protagonists.
Director/producer Nabwana IGG and the rest of the gang welcomed him with open arms, enjoying the idea that their movie is being enjoyed outside their country and, hell, being fully embraced in all its strange backyard glory in the United States. After all, their movies use big budget Hollywood movies as their launch point, recycling trope after trope to the point where even the narrator gets bored with the plot rehashing. In a cycle of cultural appropriation, they appropriated our culture and are selling it back to us in their own endearing culturally-appropriated no-budget form.
What made the films of Wakaliwood so special was their approach to cinema, most closely resembling the Sweding from Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. By combining the heart and passion of pure movie making with the self-critical eye of knowing your own limitations and working around it, and adding in a hint of a satirical devil may care attitude, Nabwana IGG crafts an outrageous love letter to genre filmmaking and also the style of film watching that happens in Kampala.
Bad Black is a crash course in making movies with no money. Grab a couple thousand bucks, make a movie, and make it into a self-referential cult hit. Bad Black‘s embrace of its own financial limitations, being a product of the slums of Kampala, just proves you don’t need quarter-of-a-billion-dollar budgets to make a successfully entertaining movie. You just have to have vision.
