Film Insults Faith, Say Rastafarian Protesters

Smoky incense sticks burned over the door. Reggae gospel boomed over speakers Monday into the gritty Los Angeles street. The bloody shoot-’em-up film “Marked for Death,” in which a white hero does battle with a criminal gang of black men in dreadlocks, had inspired a protest in Hyde Park, Jamaican-style.

“This film must be stopped,” reggae star Ras Michael, an elder in the Rastafarian religion, said outside his tiny Hyde Park “assembly house,” a sort of storefront record shop and church on busy Florence Avenue. “This film is not showing the truth of the dread-man and the Jamaican people.”

Michael, wearing a red silk African robe, turban and chest-length dreadlocks, lashed out at the R-rated 20th Century Fox movie starring Steven Seagal for what Michael called an inaccurate portrayal of Rastafarians and Jamaicans as killers and drug dealers. The protesters--about a dozen men and women in brightly colored African gowns and dreadlocks--bore such names as I-Locks, Strangejah Cole and Queen Rejoice. They spoke of themselves as Bible followers and lovers of peace.

Their long hair, the bearded Michael said, symbolizes holiness.

“And I’m telling you . . . when the dreadlock man is killed by the star (during the film), they all cheered in the audience,” the religious elder said. “That ain’t right. Rasta is love.”

Fox, which released the film Oct. 5 to nearly 1,968 Southern California theaters, declined to comment Monday on the protest. However, the studio apparently expected some objection to the film, written by Michael Grais and Mark Victor and directed by Dwight H. Little.

The credits end with a disclaimer saying that the criminal element portrayed “is estimated to be a fraction of 1% of the Jamaican population and should not detract from their country or the contributions Jamaicans have made to this country.”

The film does not refer to the gang members as Rastafarians. Neither that nor the disclaimer was enough to satisfy protesters who said the depiction of gang members in dreadlocks selling cocaine to Chicago high school students was implication enough.

Outside the storefront, where a candlelight altar is used for chanting and prayer, reggae performer Queen Rejoice, 44, read part of a protest poem she co-wrote. The film, she intoned, “Tarnishes the reputation / And needs confrontation / To stop the exploitation. . . . These are the people of greed / Who will do anything to succeed.”

I-Locks, a 25-year-old keyboard player in Michael’s reggae gospel band, saw the film Sunday and likened it to “a 1940s Superman movie.” In “Marked for Death,” the hero uses guns, knives and fists to overcome the dreadlock-wearing gang members. The gang, controlled by an unsmiling character named Screwface, was involved in cocaine, murder and voodoo, he said.

“To me it looked like a direct propaganda film against the Rastafarian community,” I-Locks said, in reference to the several thousand members in Los Angeles. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”