I’m not going to stand here and tell you to your face that Scorchy is good, at least not in the classic sense of the word “good” (or the word “scorchy”). But the 1976 white-people-in-a-blaxploitation-movie potboiler has two major assets that make it well worth a film lover’s time: (1) The catalog of American International Pictures—the leading distributor of independent American cinema before “independent American cinema” meant cheap genre exercises with gratuitous sex and violence—only becomes more fascinating with age; the shoddy production values, poor acting, un-writing, and inert action sequences are astonishing artifacts of a time before audiences were sophisticated enough to care. (2) It was filmed in Seattle in 1975–76. Talk about astonishing artifacts. Unlike many of the films made here during the ’70s (The Parallax View, Cinderella Liberty, 99 & 44/100% Dead), Scorchy actually takes in quite a bit of the city as it was then, and the newly restored print (thanks, Shout Factory!) is a vivid time capsule of the time before progress made it so hard to live here. Top marks for the curators of Ark Lodge Cinemas’ Dark Lodge series for having the nerve to program such an essentially local relic. by Sean Nelson