Isaac Hayes stars in this terrific American International Pictures drive-in flick as the title character, a football player turned bounty hunter.

Truck and his partner Jerry (Alan Weeks) are dispatched to bring an armed and dangerous pimp to jail. The pimp escapes by eventually running into a bar and throwing wads of cash at anyone who can beat up the “punks” getting ready to fly through the door. Truck and Jerry later find him, but when he reaches for his pistol, the skip tracers are forced to shoot the pimp dead.

This provokes a venomous madam played by Nichelle Nichols – Uhura from Star Trek – to offer up her stable of ladies to the sucka who can take Truck out. At the front of the line is Harvard Blue, a pimp played by Yaphet Kotto. Meanwhile, Truck has to handle a girlfriend (Annazette Chase) getting out of jail for petty larceny.

Directed by Jonathan Kaplan – who would go on to helm Heart Like A Wheel, The Accused and several other A-list studio dramas – from a script by Oscar Williams and Michael Allin, and from a story by Jerry Wilkes, Truck Turner is one of the best entries in the Blaxploitation genre.

For starters, AIP actually bought a script. The first half of the movie simply follows Truck around, as his girlfriend’s cat pees on his last “clean” shirt and he goes about his day. Truck and Jerry go to an army barracks to pick up a prisoner and run the barricade, hoping the MP shoots the bad tire Truck needs replacing.

Their prisoner starts yelling racial slurs, so we cut to Truck taking the cuffs off him and whopping his ass in a field (the punching sound effects in the movie are dynamite). Truck promises his girl he’ll pick her up from jail, and goofs around with Jerry in his new Dodge Charger. All of his before any real plot kicks in.

Once it does, the movie slows to a crawl. Kotto is not given much playing time as the bad guy, though it is amusing to hear Lt. Uhura spewing obscenities. Every moment Isaac Hayes is off screen, the movie suffers, which is ironic, because this would be the only film he would ever play a leading role in.

As an actor – even in ’74 – Hayes knew his limitations. He doesn’t attempt any emoting and he doesn’t try to be a handsome leading man, but instead plays a working class dude having fun with his buddies, suffering his woman and putting a foot in the ass of anyone who messes with his day.

Even better, Hayes is funny. Truck Turner is really an action comedy. The scene where Truck picks Annazette Chase up from jail, a whole day late, but offers her a six pack of beer, is hilarious.

Sam Laws co-stars as the grizzled old bail bondsman Truck works for, while Scatman Crothers (when he still had hair), Dick Miller and Charles Cyphers pop up in bit parts that add a lot of flavor to the movie. Kaplan, who got on-the-job training from Roger Corman directing classics like Night Call Nurses and The Student Teachers, makes the film feel real by shooting on location in L.A. and incorporating lots of locals into the over-the-top action.

Hayes also supplied the musical score, which doesn’t measure up to his Academy Award winning work on Shaft, but is still pretty damn funky.