Black Klansman, The (1966)
** (out of 4)
Well meaning but wondering exploitation film from director Ted V. Mikels. The KKK are striking terror after the Civil Rights agreement so they decide to bomb a church where a black man is killed as well as a little girl. The father of the little girl, a light skinned man, decides to join the Klan so that he can get revenge. I went into this film expecting exploitation trash but the film actually tries to pass a message and doesn't really exploit the seriousness of the subject matter. The opening scenes of the Civil Rights laws being passed are handled well as one black man wants to go to a white diner for coffee. The Klan scenes are well done and show the horrors of the time and there's some interesting discussion about what violence can actually get done. The only problem is that the story runs out of ideas around the fifty-minute mark and that leaves us with nearly forty-minutes of nothing happening until the final where the father finally gets to see the man responsible for his daughter's death.