Guest review by Brandon Engel, a freelance writer specializing in entertainment and pop culture, as well as an aspiring filmmaker.
What if a real zombie outbreak occurred during a zombie pub crawl? Imagine everyone liquored and latexed up to such a degree that nobody could differentiate the real zombies from the fake zombies. My point, I guess, is that this zombie thing has gotten out of hand.
Hearken back to a time when people were still appropriately freaked out by the living dead. Because of directors like George A. Romero, zombies became a fashionable cinematic device to address a myriad of social issues, starting in the late sixties. The films might have made more of an impression because zombies still elicited a strong reaction from viewers. Romero’s frequently remade and frequently cited Night of the Living Dead (1968), for instance, addressed the increasingly violent and sensational mass media coverage of the Vietnam war, and was notable also for featuring a black actor (Duane L. Jones) as the film’s leading man. Dawn of the Dead (1978), Romero’s follow up, offered a satire of North American consumerism by having a bunch of zombies putter mindlessly around a shopping mall.
Dawn also, incidentally, also featured a black male in it’s lead (Ken Foree), and even delved thematically into race issues with the extended segment that shows how the zombie apocalypse might manifest in the projects. But a few years prior to Dawn, the blaxploitation/horror film Sugar Hill (1974) had also appropriated the zombie motif to comment on race relations and social inequities.
The film was directed by Paul Maslansky, whom some may know as producer of the Police Academy films and Return to Oz (1985). In the film, Diana “Sugar” Hill (Marki Bey) is engaged to marry the owner of a lucrative Haitian-themed bar. At the beginning of the film, members of a predominantly white crime syndicate approach Sugar’s fiance. When he refuses to acquiesce to the gang’s protection racket, Sugar’s fiance is beaten to death.
Sugar seeks the assistance of a voodoo priestess, Mamma Maitresse (Zara Cully), who in turn summons Baron Samedi, the Voodoo Loa who presides over funerals and acts a medium between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Samedi enlists an army of Voodoo zombies to avenge Sugar’s lover’s murder. The white gangsters are picked off, one by one. One guy is fed to a pack of hogs. One guy is thrown into a coffin filled with dangerous snakes. Blaxploitation films usually depicted black characters in positions of power over the “archetypal white oppressor” character. The title character from Superfly accomplishes this by dominating the drug trade. Shaft and Cleopatra Jones were cunning law enforcement agents. Part of what makes Sugar’s story so compelling in the annals of blaxploitation/revenge films, however, is the supernatural element. The film even evokes the transatlantic slave trade directly by suggesting that Sugar’s band of voodoo zombies were all slaves transported to the United States from Guinea. So, it becomes a revenge film in a much broader sense. It’s not merely about Sugar avenging her boyfriend’s death, but she’s also avenging (symbolically, at least) the wide-scale oppression and dehumanization of her ancestors.
The film was produced by American International Pictures, who were eager to follow up on the success of their earlier blaxploitation/horror genre blenders Blacula and Scream, Blacula, Scream. Part of what distinguishes Sugar Hill is that it isn’t based on a piece of 19th century European literature, but is instead a more distinctly black American narrative which synthesizes elements of Voodoo iconography, fairy tales, and classic b-horror film tropes. It’s occasionally clumsy and highly stylized script offers all of the cliches that you’d hope for in a blaxploitation film.
While Sugar Hill is frequently overlooked (even by cult film fanatics), it’s now enjoying a resurgence in popularity thanks to midnight screenings throughout the U.S., and regular showing on Robert Rodriguez‘s El Rey Network. Vintage horror fans (especially anyone with a fondness for either blaxploitation or seventies Italian zombie films) should absolutely check this one out.
Zombie gangsters with voodoo queens sounds like exactly the kind of chaotic energy I need on a Friday night. It is amazing what they could pull off on a budget back then compared to the soulless CGI we get now. Do you think the campy vibe actually helps the horror work better?
Sugar Hill* (1974) — When Revenge Becomes Cruelty
*Sugar Hill* begins as a revenge story. It ends, however, as something much darker: the story of a woman who begins with understandable anger but gradually becomes someone who uses other people as instruments of her own will.
That is why, fifty years later, the film deserves to be reconsidered—not only through the eyes of Sugar, but above all through the eyes of Celeste.
The more closely we look at Celeste, the harder it becomes to accept the simple moral division the film tries to impose on the audience: Sugar as the avenger we are supposed to support, and Celeste as the “bad white woman” whose fate should not concern us.
That division is morally unconvincing.
## Celeste — a woman reduced to a single label
Celeste is one of the most unfairly treated characters in the film—and perhaps one of the most unfairly described afterward.
Reviews can too easily reduce her to racism, jealousy, and hostility toward Sugar. Such a description overlooks almost everything Betty Anne Rees brings to the role.
Celeste is not portrayed as an ideological fanatic.
She is a woman entangled in a relationship with Morgan. She loves him, depends on him, and tries to maintain her place in his world. She is proud, emotional, jealous, and impulsive. But she is also clearly dependent on a man who holds power over her.
Rees plays her as though Celeste is constantly trying to understand what is happening around her.
This is especially visible when Sugar enters her world.
Morgan begins showing an interest in Sugar, and Celeste sees it with her own eyes. In Celeste’s own home, Sugar walks past her without even acknowledging her, Morgan directs his attention toward Sugar, and then orders Celeste to make coffee.
Celeste replies:
> “I’m not a waitress.”
This is not the beginning of some great racial war.
It is a moment in which a woman is humiliated in her own home.
## “That ain’t class, that’s color”
Celeste’s most controversial line—“That ain’t class, that’s color”—should not be torn from its context.
Celeste knows Morgan. She knows what motivates him. She sees his fascination with Sugar and interprets it as an attraction to her race.
One may regard the statement as prejudiced. But saying that Celeste makes a prejudiced remark is very different from turning her into a **one-dimensional racial monster**.
Especially because the film also shows Sugar’s behavior toward Celeste.
Sugar does not treat her as someone to be understood. From the beginning there is contempt and provocation between them. “Says you” is the first clear verbal attack. The conflict then escalates.
And yet many accounts of the film remember Celeste’s words above all else.
That is a very convenient way of telling the story.
It means we never have to ask what **Sugar does to Celeste**.
## Sugar is not the innocent party in this conflict
Sugar has a reason to be angry. Langston has been murdered by Morgan’s men.
But a justified beginning to a revenge story does not mean that everything Sugar subsequently does automatically becomes moral.
That is precisely the film’s problem.
Sugar increasingly crosses the line between delivering justice and inflicting suffering.
At Club Haiti, she confronts Celeste physically. Celeste strikes first, but Sugar responds with repeated brutality: she beats her, throws her against the wall, takes the bottle away from her, knocks her down, and dumps ice over her.
This is no longer simply a confrontation between two women having an equal verbal dispute.
It is **a brutal humiliation of Celeste**.
And at that point it becomes particularly difficult to accept an interpretation in which Celeste is treated as the main moral problem in the scene.
## The darkest thing Sugar does, however, is not about Celeste
The most disturbing element of the film is the zombies.
Not because they are frightening.
Because of **who they are**.
They are dead slaves.
People who, while alive, were deprived of freedom, dignity, and their lives. The film invokes them as victims of slavery—and then shows them after death once again in chains.
And here *Sugar Hill* does something morally horrifying.
Sugar has power over these dead people.
And **not for a moment does she try to free them**.
She does not say: you are free.
She does not say: rest now.
She does not say: your enslavement ended with your death.
Instead, she uses them.
She orders them to kill.
She orders them to carry out her commands.
She uses them as an army.
This is the exact opposite of what could have been the moral meaning of their story.
If these people were victims of slavery, their deaths should have meant the end of their enslavement.
Instead, Sugar brings them back into existence **precisely in order to enslave them again**.
The chains do not disappear.
Only the master changes.
## Sugar begins as a victim, but ends as someone who takes freedom from others
This is where the ending of the film becomes so significant.
Sugar makes a pact with Baron Samedi to avenge Langston.
But by the end, we are no longer looking merely at a woman delivering justice to those who wronged her.
We are looking at a woman who has acquired enough power to determine the fate of other people.
And she uses that power.
The clearest example is Celeste.
Baron wants Sugar.
Sugar does not want to face the consequences of her pact.
And Celeste becomes the solution.
This is one of the most repulsive moments in the film precisely because Celeste is not the person who made the pact.
Sugar knows that Baron wants her.
She knows what he demands.
And yet she allows the burden to be transferred to another woman.
At this point Sugar is no longer simply an avenger.
**She becomes someone who uses a weaker person to save herself.**
That fundamentally changes the meaning of her character.
## Celeste is punished for someone else’s history
That is why her fate is so unjust.
Morgan created a world of violence.
Morgan and his men killed Langston.
Sugar made the pact with Baron.
Sugar used an army of the dead.
And yet Celeste is presented as someone who can simply be handed over in exchange.
This is not justice.
It is **scapegoating**.
Celeste is not taken because she committed an act corresponding to the punishment imposed upon her.
She is taken because she is available.
Because she is close to Morgan.
Because she is a woman who can be sacrificed.
And that is precisely why the ending is much crueler than its surface horror conventions suggest.
## Betty Anne Rees makes it impossible simply not to feel sorry for her
This is where Rees’s performance becomes so important.
The point is not to set her against Marki Bey or turn the film into an acting competition.
The point is that Rees **refuses to play Celeste as a cardboard villain**.
Her face often reveals more than her words.
When Celeste looks at Morgan, we see a woman who knows him better than the screenplay might suggest.
When she looks at Sugar, we see jealousy, wounded pride, and a sense of threat.
When she is humiliated, we see genuine humiliation.
And as the ending approaches, her fear does not look like “punishment for a bad person.”
It looks like the fear of someone who suddenly realizes that her life has been placed in the hands of other people.
**Betty Anne Rees saved Celeste from the script.**
That may be the most important fact about the character.
## *Sugar Hill* also has a problem with its own vision of slavery
The film wants to use the memory of slavery as a source of supernatural revenge.
But it does so in a deeply troubling way.
The dead slaves are given no individuality.
They are given no names.
They are given no graves as places of rest.
They are given no freedom.
They are given chains.
And orders.
Their suffering is transformed into a visual effect and a weapon of violence.
This is particularly ironic because *Sugar Hill* could have created an entirely different vision: the dead could have returned not to carry out further orders, but to **finally break their chains**.
The film does not do that.
Sugar needs an army.
And the army is provided for her.
That is what makes her actions so difficult to defend.
## From revenge to the reproduction of violence
At a certain point, the film therefore creates a very dark symmetry.
Morgan uses people.
Sugar uses the dead.
Baron uses Sugar.
Sugar uses Celeste.
And Celeste, who has very little power herself, becomes the final link in this chain of violence.
This makes *Sugar Hill* a far more interesting film than its simple plot might suggest.
Because its real subject may not be revenge at all, but **the way violence passes from one person to another, and how a victim can begin to use other people herself**.
Sugar does not begin as a monster.
But the ending allows us to ask a deeply uncomfortable question:
**How much of a person remains when their own suffering becomes a justification for inflicting suffering on others?**
And that is why Sugar should not be viewed solely through the lens of what Morgan did.
We must also look at **what she herself does**.
## Celeste deserves to be read again
The greatest injustice in *Sugar Hill* is not
It cannot replace an analysis of the woman as a whole.
Celeste is, above all, a tragic character: in love, jealous, proud, wounded, and largely powerless in the world in which she lives.
And Betty Anne Rees makes that tragedy visible.
*Sugar Hill* wanted to tell the story of an avenger delivering justice.
Yet fifty years later, the more interesting question may be:
**Can revenge remain justice when freedom is denied even to those who have already lost it once—and when an innocent woman, as far as that revenge is concerned, is ultimately sacrificed?**
The dead slaves are still in chains.
Celeste is handed over to Baron.
And Sugar walks away believing that she has achieved her goal.
That is the moral nightmare at the heart of *Sugar Hill*.
The film wanted to portray liberation through revenge.
It failed to notice that its own avenger had begun to **enslave others all over again**.