When Enter The Wu-Tang first dropped over 30 years ago, part of the reason why it was such an immediately captivating success is because it was a sound no one had heard, created through a synthesis of inspirations unique to nine twenty-somethings from Staten Island. Classic boom-bap beats provided the foundation for production that was lo-fi and grimy in a way that echoed the urban soul of New York City, all framed around samples from exported works of classic martial arts cinema like Enter the Dragon and Five Deadly Venoms. To this day it’s still one of the most celebrated albums of all-time, not because the Wu-Tang Clan was trying to evoke what worked on the charts at the time, but because it was a passionate endeavor that stood against the grain of the mainstream and embraced multiple textures and genres that they found meaningful and exciting.
That same Frankenstein-esque artistic ethos can be found in One Spoon of Chocolate, the new revenge-thriller written and directed by the RZA himself, aka Prince Rakeem, aka Robert Diggs. The second film from the hip-hop icon to be presented by his longtime mentor Quentin Tarantino, the movie’s heady brew of different cinematic influences can be felt from the very opening — the uncomfortable brutality of ‘70s grindhouse cinema and the fight choreography of contemporary martial arts action and a drifting, immensely capable hero that feels ripped straight from a neo-Western. All of it collides in a project that’s as singular and idiosyncratic as a Wu-Tang album, with ideas bursting at the seams — for better and worse.
