“It’s after the end of the world / Don’t you know that yet?”
Sun Ra finds a new planet, decides to bring over some Black people. He appears in the 1940’s as stage pianist “Sunny Ray,” playing futuristic jazz piano to the annoyance of the patrons (the Back to the Future of its time). Some sort of interdimensional devil finds him, and challenges him to card games in the middle of the desert.
Somehow I thought this movie was a concert/rock doc, but it’s not a doc of any sort. Ra ends up in present-day California and observes all kinds of dickish behavior. He is kidnapped by NASA agents, who tie him up and torture him by playing him “Dixie” in headphones, until he’s rescued by young men who were earlier arguing about whether Sun Ra was selling out by releasing his music on LPs. There’s a sidetrack where the (white/racist) NASA guys beat up some prostitutes, a running joke where the devil-man has two naked women and his crony gets excited only to be kicked out so the devil can have both women for himself, and at the end, one of the young men sacrifices himself to save Sun Ra from an assassin, then all the decent(ish) Black people are raptured away to Ra’s planet before Earth explodes.
The youth of today:
The wikis say Ra made his own edit, 20 minutes shorter, cutting out the blaxploition stuff, which would probably be for the best. No info on the director… cowriter Josh Smith’s other credit is a G-rated family movie about a kid’s baby seal. Devil-man (Ashley Clark called him a “megapimp”) is Ray Johnson, who showed up 15 years later in a previously unheard-of TV version of The Bourne Identity, and his hanger-on is Chris Brooks, who played both Hieronymus Bosch and Jesus Christ in his short career. But that’s all if you believe IMDB credits, which are often bunk. I see a John and a Chris, a Johnson and a Smith – these are all generic pseudonyms, since this movie was clearly made by aliens from the future.