Joe Bullet

Joe Bullet (1973)

In the criminal underworld of soccer, one man will have to save the championship!

When local soccer team The Eagles fall prey to a series of onslaughts from a mysterious gangster only a week before the championship final, the team turns to the one man that can help save their chances at victory – Joe Bullet (Ken Gampu). Joe will have to battle against villainous henchmen, escape booby-trap bombs and bring his martial arts expertise to the fore in order to survive an attack from a deadly assassin. In the end he will have to infiltrate the mysterious gangster’s hide-out in a dangerous cat-and-mouse rescue mission to save not only The Eagles’ two kidnapped star players, but that of his beautiful love interest, Beauty (Abigail Kubeka). The odds will be stacked against him, but he’s the man that fights crime, the man that no one can tie down! Joe Bullet!

Date of release
1973-01-01
TMDB
5.1 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 19m
Genres
Action, Crime
Director
Louis de Witt

Casting

Interesting facts

Joe Bullet is a South African action film. It was the first South African film to have an all-black cast, to appeal to black audiences. The film was followed by a 1982 sequel Bullet on the Run.

Background

Independently released in 1973, Joe Bullet played at the Eyethu cinema in Soweto. The film was premiered without approval from apartheid censors and after two screenings the film was banned, although the ban was eventually overturned. For about 40 years the original film reels were stored by the writer and producer Tonie van der Merwe's, who kept the reels every time he moved home.

The film was restored by Gravel Road Distribution under the supervision of its original producer, Tonie van der Merwe.

Joe Bullet was scheduled to appear at the MoMA annual film preservation festival in 2014. According to Variety on 18 October 2014, the film was to be screened at the New York fest on 8 and 13 November.

It was announced on 24 January 2017 on Channel24.co.za that after 44 years the film was to be screened at the Bioscope Independent Cinema in Johannesburg on 24 January and at the Company Gardens in Cape Town on 25 January.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended