ALABAMA’S GHOST (1973)
Article 2280 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-20-2007
Posting Date: 11-9-2007
Directed by Fredric Hobbs
Featuring Christopher Brooks, Lani Freeman, Karen Ingenthron

An employee named Alabama at a music club dreams of becoming a magician. When he accidentally runs a forklift through the wall in the basement of the club, he comes by the remnants of the equipment of dead magician known as “The Great Carter”. He uses what he finds to blackmail the sister of “The Great Carter” into introducing him the Carter’s assistant, who teaches him Carter’s magic secrets. When Alabama becomes a magician, he soon finds himself tussling with vampires and ghosts.

This is one of those movies that left my jaw hanging open. Imagine, if you will, a cross between a hokey melodrama, a blaxploitation flick, and an underground art movie. Then weave into the plot the following elements; magic, psychedelic rock music, female Nazi scientists, vampires (who feed from their victims on an assembly line), black magic, robots, frogs, ghosts with beating hearts outside of their bodies, dixieland jazz, and an elephant. The end result, in this case, is pretty awful, but at least it’s awful in an interesting way, though it does get more than a little shrill on occasion. Whatever you can say about the movie, it does appear that director Fredric Hobbs had a vision of sorts, and I find myself all that much more curious now about what is perhaps his best known movie, GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS. Believe me, low-budget horror doesn’t come much stranger than this one.