Here we pick up from where we found out who killed Captain Alex - it was Swaaz, the Ugandan Arnold Schwarzenegger, who went on a rampage across Kampala, wielding a machine gun and dragging a little kid along with him on his excursion as the Army did their best to stop him. It started with him robbing a bank, recruiting the boy to gather his ill-gotten gains, and a chase commenced that saw him overturn cars and gun down and blow up his pursuers. They finally cornered him when his own vehicle overturned, and as the hail of bullets rained down, he fired his machine gun into the fuel tank of the car, blowing it up and him with it. But why was he so enraged? What could have sent this man flying off the handle?
Wakaliwood may not be threatening Hollywood any time soon, but with this shot on video movie, lasting just over an hour long, costing a reported sixty-five dollars, they certainly had the big boys beaten for economy, even if it had taken around five years to complete. It was technically the second feature from director and writer Nabwana I.G.G. who filmed around the Wakaliga slums of his hometown, a place with no running water or plumbing, just a river running through it. If you believed that would be an impediment to crafting an extravagant action flick, you would be dead wrong, indeed after the previous Who Killed Captain Alex?, it was if anything more advanced, if remaining impoverished as far as its resources went.
Yet the director at least knew his way around a computer, and if you laughed at the toy cars standing in for the vehicles in the high speed chases, you might begrudgingly agree green screen effects on this tiny budget were impressive, if not foolhardy. Nevertheless, he kind of got away with it because the can-do, DIY attitude on display in every frame was infectiously energetic, helped along by the mysterious V.J. Emmie. Who he? Good question, but he was a remnant of what happened in Uganda when films were shown and had to be translated for the local audience, so a V.J. ("video joker") would be employed to give a running commentary and explain the action. This would be par for the course even if they did not know what was actually happening in the movie, which may have been the case for the commentary we got here, but he littered the talk with amusing quips.
In fact, being aware of what was happening in Bad Black was a challenge in itself, and you might be better off going with the flow rather than trying to unpick the finer details, though to be fair the plot was explained after a fashion in the final few minutes, suggesting the filmmakers had a grasp on what it was about. With sequences ranging from tearjerking orphan singalongs to a white, American doctor shooting up the place when he loses patience with his charitable works, it was as if Nabwana was changing his mind about the direction of where he wanted to go with every successive scene, the amount of time this took to complete affecting the creative decisions as he put his ideas on the screen as they occurred to him. Despite being over in a flash, it was fairly exhausting, especially if you were used to more conventional motion pictures, but you could see he was trying to hold and sustain an audience with a short attention span. It was quite an achievement considering it began life as a highly local enterprise and never expected to go global; it remained a cult effort, but was testament to the reach of entertainment in the third millennium.
