Sentenced to jail for a crime he did not commit - though let's be honest, he wasn't exactly on the straight and narrow - the man named Dolemite is offered a chance for freedom: if he helps the federal authorities find down evidence to bring down the city's corrupt mayor and the dirty cops who work for him, he'll be pardoned and released.
Dolemite's not keen on working with the man, but he is eager to settle up accounts with the rival who set him up, one Willie Green, and with the dirty cops - those same cops who work for the mayor - that carried out the actual arrest. So it's not too long before he's back in his best pimp suit and reunited with the young women who are his primary source of income.
I'm not kidding about the pimp suit
Dolemite's time inside has hurt his business financially, and he's lost his beloved club "The Total Experience", but his friends haven't been entirely idle while he was in the big house. Every one of Dolemite's buxom employees is now a bona fide kung fu killer. With this army of lethal ladies at his back, Dolemite's determined to get back his club and wreak revenge on those who set out to destroy him.
Right off the bat, I want to be clear about one thing: I have not given this film a qualified recommendation because it is in any way good. It's not. The acting is wooden and the sound sometimes iffy. The fight scenes are even less convincing than the spoken performances and the boom mic doesn't so much 'occasionally drift into shot' as 'deserve separate billing for how much it is on screen'. The whole thing is transparently a vanity project for comedian Rudy Ray Moore, who wrote and produced the film, played the lead, and several times brings the whole movie to a halt to deliver a 'funny' monologue.
No, the film is not good. But in this case, that's part of the attraction. Dolemite is camp, brash and completely without self-awareness. It shamelessly throws itself into its extravagances of costuming, cussing, and clumsy fisticuffs. There's something charmingly naive about it, for all its sex and violence.
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