Sheba, Baby [WS]/Monkey Hustle [P&S] [2 Discs]

"Two well-remembered blaxploitation films from the mid-1970's get paired up in this ""Soul Cinema"" double feature set from MGM and Fox Home Entertainment. Disc one contains the Pam Grier vehicle Sheba Baby, which has been given a widescreen transfer to disc, letterboxed at 1.85:1 on conventional televisions and enhanced for anamorphic playback on 16:9 monitors. The look of the film is a bit grainy and the color balance is sometimes muddy, but the image is sharp and this is an accurate reflection of how the movie looked on the big screen. Disc two features The Monkey Hustle, a comedy featuring Yaphet Kotto and Rudy Ray Moore, which unfortunately appears in a pan-and-scanned transfer at the full-screen ratio of 1.33:1. However, the image is crisp and the colors bright and natural, which offers some compensation for the film being unavailable in its original widescreen format. Both films feature English language dialogue, with the audio mastered in Dolby Digital Stereo, retaining the original monophonic sound mixes, which sound clear and acceptably well detailed for the era. Sheba Baby includes optional subtitles in French and Spanish, while The Monkey Hustle has optional subtitles in English, French and Spanish. While each disc features the respective movie's original theatrical trailer, no other bonus items are included. Both of these pictures were originally issued as single disc packages with the presentation identical to what appears here, so if you have the old MGM releases of Sheba Baby or The Monkey Hustle, you won't have any need for this package. But fans of black cinema of the Seventies can pick up two noted films of the era at a reasonable price with this edition, which is good news for exploitation fans."