Black Hooker

With the title of this movie at times being "Street Sisters" and other times "Black Hooker", one might be lead to believe this is a sleazy blaxploitation movie. Actually, while the movie does have a couple of sex scenes with nudity, the majority of the movie aims to be a serious drama. Nothing wrong with that aim, but the end results are disappointing. I will say that the acting by the no-name cast is competent, and while the movie is based on a stage play, it manages to hide its stage origins fairly well. But the storytelling is a mess. It's confusing with its abrupt jumps in time, though most of the time the movie is really slow, padded out with scenes that serve little to no purpose. And we never really get into the head of the Caucasian central character. I suspect that this worked a lot better on the stage than this cinematic translation.

Not depressed enough? Why don't you try this film that involves the life and times of some poor kid who has to be brought up by his grandparents because his mum is out there getting her kicks from Johns while getting them to bite her real heard or something because she thrives on their hate.

Add to that the grandfather who is a priest who thinks his grandson is some sort of abomination but ain't afraid to play stinky finger with his grandson's childhood sweetheart. To be honest if you can even make it to this part in the movie without removing your eyeballs with a spoon then you may actually have the same kind of OCD as me.

Easily the weakest film in the mill Creek Drive in Classics box set, this film is like standing in line to get a hot dog, pishing yourself, then weeping uncontrollably.

A very white, blond, blue-eyed, hippie-haired boy who looks kinda like 70s Joseph Bottoms is improbably born a trick baby to a hateful African-American prostitute/flapper (the initial period seems to be the 1920s) who leaves him to be raised by his loving grandma and hostile preacher grandpa on the farm while she carries on her evil ways in the Big City. As an adult, the Boy (none of these characters get names, emphasizing their archetypal melodrama nature) falls in love with a local black girl, whom out of the blue his pious grandpa decides to seduce. So our hero runs away. Further tragedies lead to a violent finale.

Based on the director's stage play--which must have seen even cornier onstage--this isn't at all the 70s blaxploitation piece it was rather desperately marketed as, but a crude inspirational drama like those of Oscar Micheaux (as a prior poster noted). If not for the infrequent, rather gratuitous, very badly shot sexploitative scene, it would be something you'd expect to see in a church basement of the era.

The low-budget film-making is really erratic, ditto the acting, both running a gamut from the nearly professional to the completely hapless. Unsurprisingly, this was the first/last film endeavor for its writer-director and much of the cast. It's got that very 70s thing of soundtracked soul songs that clumsily comment on the action. By no stretch of the imagination is this a good movie, nor is it a camp classic despite some dialogue howlers. Still, it's worth a look for people (like me) who find any one-off oddity from the era interesting.

Well what can I say, this is a true Blaxpoitation film. To be honest I totally adore this genre and this movie hasn't changed it at all. Basically it follows a little white boy who is the son of a black hooker. (Go figure!) Anyway, he lives with his grandma and grandpa. The characters don not have any names at all, which only adds to the special ambience of the film. Everybody Should really check out the awesome psychedelic special effects of the burial scene! This movie is a real eye-opener! Blaxpoitation will never be the same!!

Just when I think I've seen every unnoticed example of the 'blaxploitation' genre...along comes this quirky, sincere little film from 1972. It more rightly fits, perhaps, into the sub-genre of African-American themed films set in the Great Depression, like "Book of Numbers" and "Thomasine and Bushrod". The actress who plays the main character's mother bears a rather striking resemblance to Josephine Baker. The film's stage origins often stick out and the fact that all the dialogue was post-synched doesn't help to alleviate a general sense of technical stiffness. Still, it's an interesting story about the son of a light-skinned prostitute (improbably played by an actor who's far too fair-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed) caught between the clash of white and black cultures. The video version I watched (on Edde) was actually a pretty good looking print (apart from a few bad stretches on the soundtrack), moderately letterboxed even. If you can find this and are a fan of the genre, check it out.