In the '70s, groups like the NAACP and Operation PUSH accused movies like "Shaft" and "Superfly" of what they called "black exploitation." In pandering to a black audience and promoting racial stereotypes, the films were blamed for doing more harm than good. Eventually, they were shamed out of business.

A quarter century later, however, many of those films look like landmarks. They were the first movies to make blacks the lead characters, and many of the works addressed important social issues - albeit under the guise of genre entertainment.

In the process, the derogatory label "black exploitation" has been shortened to the more prideful term "blaxploitation," and the genre gets its props in a new documentary debuting at 9 p.m. Wednesday on the Independent Film Channel. "BaadAsssss Cinema" - a reference to "Sweet Sweetback's BaadAsssss Song," the original 1971 blaxploitation movie - makes sense of a messy topic and navigates some thorny subjects. It's the thoughtful, and thought-provoking, defense the films badly needed 25 years ago.

Directed by British filmmaker Isaac Julien, the documentary draws on actors and directors, critics and academics to retell the story of the blaxploitation craze. The most important thing it does is put the films in context.

In the '60s and beyond, remember, blacks were relegated to supporting roles. If it was an action movie, the black was almost certain to die. (See Jim Brown in "The Dirty Dozen.") So one witness talks about how powerful it was just for the lead character simply to make it to the end of the movie in "Sweetback."

"We needed something to make us feel better about ourselves," says Samuel L. Jackson, and the blaxploitation movies supplied that.

Yet the popular arts don't work on an orderly continuum, the way organized social protest sometimes does. They work on a more visceral level, where it's sometimes difficult to see progress until time passes and the audience gains perspective.

In fact, the popularity of the films, and their reliance on anarchic violence and sex, reflects a disillusionment with social protest after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

"Sweetback" director Melvin Van Peebles defends the film, saying, "The cause I had was giving black folks a sense of self that we had taken from us."

But bell hooks, a cultural critic, maintains Van Peebles didn't make his muddled, turbulent movie out of some sense of altruism.

"He made it for the money," hooks said. That commercial impulse drives the whole genre - sometimes with good results, sometimes with bad.

After "Sweetback" proved there was a massive black audience to be tapped - at a time when Hollywood movie studios faced dwindling revenues - films flowed in to fill the vacuum.

"Shaft," the documentary says, was originally a film project about a tough white cop, but it was handed to Gordon Parks and recast with Richard Roundtree in the lead role.

Parks himself is a great story. A pioneer in photographic social realism during the Depression, he went on to shoot fashion photos for Vogue and then direct the film that ignited the blaxploitation explosion.

But the hourlong documentary doesn't have the time to go into his career in detail. Instead, it shows him working on the "Shaft" soundtrack with Isaac Hayes and hurries on to other subjects.

New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell points out how "Superfly" seemingly glorified drug dealers, while Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack undercut that message with social commentary that almost served as a Greek chorus, as in the song "Freddy's Dead."

Larry Cohen, a white director, is credited with making one of the most socially aware of the blaxploitation movies, the "Little Caesar" remake "Black Caesar," with Fred "The Hammer" Williamson.

Yet Cohen is the first to admit, "They made a lot of bad movies under the guise of blaxploitation," like the horrific "Blacula."

Along the way, the genre outstripped "white" action films in making room for female characters, most notably Pam Grier's "Coffy" and "Foxy Brown," and Gloria Hendry in "Black Caesar" and "Hell up in Harlem." (Keep your eyes peeled for actor Allan Arbus, best known as sensitive "M@*A@*S@*H" psychiatrist Sidney Freedman. He plays a mobster saying, "I got to have dat girl" in a clip from "Coffy.")

The heyday of blaxploitation films was relatively short. Attacked by critics like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, they mutated into kung-fu movies, and by the Reagan '80s they were gone altogether. The same social impulses that caused the blaxploitation movies to bubble up would instead invigorate a more confrontational artistic movement in rap music, but that's another subject entirely.

This documentary is in many ways as messy and unfocused as the blaxploitation genre itself. It hurries to get its points across, and sometimes overheats (not just when Quentin Tarantino is pontificating).

Be careful - it also doesn't edit much out from its film clips. But it's undeniably interesting, and its main point has been a long time coming: that movies once considered a source of shame in the black community were actually as groundbreaking and influential as more "idealistic" efforts at social change.

As '80s slang would later phrase it, they were so bad they were good.

- Ted Cox's column runs Tuesday and Thursday in Suburban Living, Friday in sports and Friday in Time out!