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Youngblood Priest, also known as Purdie, has returned to New York City for the first time in many years after living in Paris. Time has not been kind to the streets; in 1990, crack and violence rule the tough streets of New York City. Just like how there was no honor amongst thieves, there seems to be no honor here either. Purdie has supposedly been running a legitimate business, which is why he hasn’t been active in “the game” for so long.
Turning to Nate Jackson, a friend of his, for help was his first mistake. Not only is he tied to drug gangs, but he also manufactures crack. After some time, Priest starts losing the people who were ‘not so mysteriously’ dying to his surprise. Desperate to save what was left, Purdie teams up with Willy Green. The two set out to take revenge for the death of Priest’s friends. However, groups as opposed to individuals seem to have taken revenge to the next level where they’ll stop at nothing to kill a local pimp.
The Return of Superfly has the right idea. The film takes a deep dive into the lower-class areas of New York City during the time. The pre-freedom strike Tone Loc speaks volumes and with his style accent, we see characters lashed with thick golden chains and performing their version of ‘best hustle.’
It is rather straightforward, that Ron O’Neal is not Superfly once again. He’s Tico Wells and Willy, however, is quite charismatic and fun to watch. We had fun with Nathan Purdie in the main role, but like some of you, we couldn’t shake the feeling that Billy Dee Williams or Ivan Rogers had the potential to play Priest. A youthful Samuel L. Jackson also shows up, but we wouldn’t be seeing him here on Comeuppance until Arena (2011). This guy’s laugh is so hilarious, it is inescapable Leonard Thomas who plays Joey, one of the villains stands apart from the rest.
We should barely be surprised at what was done in Super fly’s return because, blasting wide open, all is greatly absurd and misleading. Still, the movie suffers from an almost common set of challenges within low budget projects such as poor lighting and stemming too far from the plot while in the middle of the film. In short, there simply weren’t enough jumping elements, which one would think someone like Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs would have brought to the table to fix this issue. All in all, the film had afflicted the director Sig Shore’s other movie, Sudden Death (1985), a novel approach which this reviewer would have preferred.
The Return of Superfly is perhaps the first, or one of the very first, films that began the genre of ‘Homie Movies’. It pioneered something of great importance this film and the original carry the most weight in the rise of Homie Movies in the 1990s few and far between.
Additionally, we’d like to add a scene in the club where we think Rampage and Pole Position arcade games are being played in standup cabinets (we always tend to do that), and several others are shot within and beyond Stamford in our favorite Connecticut: we always tend to do that whenever Connecticut is featured in a movie.
In case you miss it, Stamford is a suburb of New York City and that is where cinematic gems such as Seagal’s Pistol Whipped (2008) were also filmed. It is also the city where the famous director Sig Shore died at the age of 87. He deserves to be remembered, if only for his contribution to the Super Fly series and Sudden Death, for these films alone.
To finish, we appreciated the urban level realism of The Return of Superfly and the fact that a Purdie as Priest returns from the first movie to a completely new world of violence and crack that he does not understand was a solid story line. While it could have been a more interesting we say check it out if the start of the ‘Homie Movie’ genre interested you.
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