KIDNEYS ON FILM: ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE

I guess we can add Rza to the list of filmmakers that thinks the only prerequisite for making a grindhouse homage is giving your movie a grainy filter aesthetic. I’m a little tired of modern directors thinking their 8 figure budget films with “un-woke” dialogue and tons of blood splatter equates “grindhouse” or an exploitation film. But missing the mark on the grindhouse genre is the least of this movie’s problems. The racial issues and social commentaries found in the Rza’s latest film really need to be addressed. My god…

Much like how I compared The Testament Of Ann Lee to Barbie in my last post, One Spoon Of Chocolate and Rebel Ridge have similar connections. Both are Rambo/Walking Tall/Reacher-coded stories about lone Black veterans trying to take down a small racist police department after the deaths of their cousins (while the immediate villains in One Spoon Of Chocolate aren’t cops, we come to learn later that they work for the police department). Seriously - it’s like the same premise made under vastly different ideologies.
Both movies missed their mark in some aspects but I can say that I mostly enjoyed Rebel Ridge whereas One Spoon Of Chocolate is kind of reprehensible. Somewhere between Rebel Ridge & One Spoon Of Chocolate lies a potentially good movie. One plays out like a centrist’s wet dream where almost no one dies (Rebel Ridge) and the other plays out like a pandering white guy making cartoonish revenge porn on behalf of the type of Black folks that are easy to impress (One Spoon Of Chocolate). You know…the type of Black folks that cheered for Django Unchained. This makes sense because Quentin Tarantino was a producer on this. Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of slave owners and slave catchers getting murdered in the most brutal way. But at the end of the day, Tarantino used slavery to fetishize Blackness and slavery and I'm just not cool with that. But that's just me...

And as a sidenote - I always get frustrated when folks talk about how much they liked Rebel Ridge because no one died when in fact someone did die. Sure it was off camera but there was still a casualty in the movie. Somehow all the evil racist cops got to live while the main character’s cousin (a Black guy) still managed to die in the story.

Anyway...

Because this is another Rza/Tarantino collaboration, you can expect lots of references and homages to older films. This might be the only thing I liked about this movie. Outside of obvious sources like Rambo and Walking Tall, Rza reaches back to everything from John Carpenter to cult horror.

It [CHRISTINE] pops up in [One Spoon of Chocolate] as the black truck.. The idea is that when that truck shows up, it's gonna be trouble - Rza, Conseuence

Christine / One Drop Of Chocolate

When I finished this script, I remember thinking about the scene of the doctor, and I said, ‘I'm going to try to find that movie, because it scared me, and I want to put fear in the audience’ - Rza, Consequence

Zombie Hol0caust / One Drop Of Chocolate

And because this is a Rza film, you can expect plenty of classic Kung-fu movie homages…

5 Fingers Of Death / One Drop Of Chocolate

In One Spoon Of Chocolate we follow “Unique” - a veteran/ex-con who goes to stay with his remaining family in Ohio only to find out he’s living in a sundown town ran by a corrupt police department and a vigilante gangs of racist white nationalists that kill Black people to sell their organs on the Black market. As a two-time kidney transplant recipient and a life-long fan of the Wu-Tang Clan, you’d think this movie was tailormade for me. But it wasn’t. As I said earlier, this movie is like a white guy trying to make a violent blaxploitation film to prove he’s down with Black people. But writer/director is Black. It doesn’t take much to impress certain lanes of Black viewers. All you have to do is murder the racist bad guy and somehow that makes things better (Rza didn’t even have the balls to show the audience if the main racist villain dies in the end or not!).

Besides his well-known love of Kung-fu movies and martial arts in general, the Rza’s personal life and other various Wu-Tang lore is all over One Spoon Of Chocolate. Naming the main character Unique is a nod to his cousin Ol Dirty Bastard’s 5% name; Ason Unique. In Rza’s pre-Wu Tang Clan days he fled to Ohio to stay with family after getting in to trouble. Some of the cast members in One Spoon Of Chocolate appeared in the Wu-Tang Hulu show as well. In my opinion this makes things all the more embarrassing because I would not want anything personal or close to my heart connected to this mess of a movie.
Things are just violent for the sake of being violent and the usage of the N-word would make producer Quentin Tarantino proud. I guess in a sense the Rza did achieve some level of exploitation. He just used Black pain and trauma to do it. It doesn’t make sense because this movie doesn’t really align with the 30+ years of socially conscious Rza lyrics I’ve listened to over the years.

What’s also disappointing is that even Rza fell in to the Get Out trope that a majority of modern Black films do these days. In the opening scene a young naive Black male walking on the side of the road is lured by a car full of flirty attractive white woman only to be set up and murdered by the film’s antagonists. It’s almost exactly like the opening scene of Get Out with Lakeith Stanfield mixed with the very real story of Kendrick Johnson.

similar opening scenes...

Get Out / One Drop Of Chocolate

moments later they’re subdued and abducted…

Get Out / One Drop Of Chocolate

Can modern Black cinema exist without some form of “watch out for the white boogeyman” trope???


Outside of real cases like the death of Kendrick Johnson who, like the victims in One Drop Of Chocolate. was murdered and had his organs stolen, Rza uses the imagery of racist white supremacist rallies as an influence which is so cheap to me...

One Spoon Of Chocolate (below)

Speaking of the film’s antagonists, Rza can’t make up his mind if the bad guys are torch-waving proud boys or wiggers. They’re racist but dress like they actually listen to Rza’s music. Now…I’m fully aware that there are plenty of white hip-hop fans that love the music and adopt the aesthetic of hip-hop fashion all while hating Black people. Just look at underground rap music forums or some of Eminem’s fans. The confused villains could have been some type of commentary on all of this. But this movie is so dumb that I can’t give Rza credit for that type of insightful commentary. I don’t even feel like getting in to the nitpicky stuff like the stupid decisions made by the characters in the movie or casting someone like Shamiek Moore as someone that’s supposed to be an intimidating tough guy. All of that is overshadowed by the cheap exploitative racist bullshit that this movie pulls off. Not only is Rza a coward for not showing the death of the main villain, but all the deaths of the Black men in the film are extra violent and realistic while the white bad guys get murdered quick and fast.


This is all so unfortunate because while Rza has made some dumb statements in the past, he is an intelligent artist with unique perspectives. The problem is none of that is on display here.