THE BLACK GESTAPO (1975)

In the 1970s, blaxploitation cinema produced a bumper crop of instantly disposable films. Despite its intriguing title, THE BLACK GESTAPO was one of them.

To protect the people of Watts from an encroaching Mob presence, General Ahmed (Rod Perry) forms an inner-city People's Army. After a nurse friend of Ahmed's is brutalized by mob enforcers, the general authorizes his second-in-command, Colonel Kojah (Charles Robinson), to form and train a protection squad out of the normally non-violent army. Their first order of business is to attack the head mob enforcer in his bathtub and cut his balls off with a straight razor. Kojah tells the newly-created eunuch, "Consider this a warning." The protection squad soon runs the Mob out of Watts, after which Kojah gets too big for his britches. He turns his reactive squad into proactive vigilantes who terrorize the very citizens the People's Army was formed to protect. Under Kojah's command, drug use and prostitution in Watts rises to an all-time high. To protect his people, General Ahmed now must go to war against the very army he himself created.THE BLACK GESTAPO fails on two levels:

1 - As a statement against organized crime. For the first half of the film, it's the People's Army vs. the Mob, so we know who to root for. But once the People's Army drives the Mob out of Watts, it takes over their businesses. Now instead of white gangsters threatening the prostitutes, drug addicts and small-business owners of Watts, the black soldiers are doing it—in their brand new jet black, oh-so-Nazi-like uniforms. So it's "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" time.
2 – As a criticism of black-on-black violence. Not only does the People's Army under Kojah engage in violence against their own people, so does General Ahmed when he launches a one-man attack on the People's Army compound. He shoots and kills a good three dozen young black men, including Colonel Kojah. The screenplay had already abandoned its storyline of white-on-black violence, leaving it unresolved, and now does exactly the same thing for black-on-black violence. Once Ahmed kills Kojah, the film quickly ends, allowing no epilogue on how Watts might deal with the problems the movie so effectively raised. 

Granted, the film's creators were under no obligation to play peacemaker, but because they went for the quick buck, THE BLACK GESTAPO fell considerably short of its potential.