Blu-ray Review – Welcome Home, Brother Charles

Best known as the creator of the "Penitentiary" saga, writer/director Jamaa Fanaka began his career with student features, crafting dissections of black life in America while receiving his education from UCLA. Keeping up with the cinematic movements of the day, Fanaka hoped to twist the Blaxploitation trend by focusing more on the human element of the black community while still delivering all the violence and sleaze this type of entertainment normally requires to attract audience attention. "Welcome Home, Brother Charles" is a 1975 effort from Fanaka, and it showcases a raw desire to be provocative with unreal plot developments and empathetic to the financially and spiritually unstable locations the production utilizes. "Welcome Home, Brother Charles" takes a considerable amount of time before it reveals its reason to be, and along the way, Fanaka delivers a passionate study of poverty and desperation, doing his best to fit in his perspective on life while tending to levels of outrageousness the picture eventually indulges in. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com