DVD Review: 'Black Dynamite' sends up '70s 'blaxploitation' flicks

Step aside Shaft and slide over Super Fly. Make room for “Black Dynamite,” starring Michael Jai White in the title role.

That’s right. That’s the main character’s given name — Black Dynamite. It’s the name he answered to when he was a scrawny little kid taking beatings from playground bullies. Maybe his name was what made him a bully magnet. Can you dig it?

Anyway, he grows up to be a babe magnet — bearing a strong resemblance to Richard Roundtree — and the baddest cat on the street, proficient with big guns, nunchucks and blinding kung fu moves in this hilarious send-up of all the low-budget blaxploitation movies of the ’70s.

Directed by Scott Sanders (“Thick as Thieves”), who co-wrote the screenplay with White (“Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?”) and actor Byron Minns, (who plays a character called “Bullhorn” in this film), “Black Dynamite” even has the look of a ’70s vintage film shot on cheap color film stock that hasn’t aged very well. Sanders also captures in side-splitting fashion the inept and amateurish filmmaking that was common in the worst of these films, particularly in one scene where an angry Black Dynamite leaps up out of his chair and the camera is a second too slow in panning up, but just in time to catch Dynamite bumping his head on the overhead mike that can be seen at the top of the frame.