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.

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!!

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.

Blaxsploitation cinema of the 70's is littered with the same old tiresome genres: Martials Arts, Gangster movies and Drug Smuggling. So it's refreshing to come across a movie that tries to shake the boundaries and try something new. Granted Arthur Robinson's 'Sister, Sister' aka Black Hooker and Don't Leave Go My Hand, suffers somewhat dramatically from amateur directing, but overall the movie delivers its story well enough for the audience to appreciate the intentions it sets out to achieve.

The story follows the early years of a young white boy, abandoned by his mother; A high class African-American hooker from the city, to be brought up by her grandparents in the poor black regions in the countryside. The denial of her son, is illustrated through her disgust at his white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, a child born a bastard to a drunken white man and a prostitute. The child however, alien to a world of racial bigotry, wants only the love of his estranged mother. After losing his childhood sweetheart and first love to his preacher grandfather at the age of 16, he decides to leave home for the city in search of his mother, only to finally find her and be greeted with stone cold denial, and contempt. A lifetime of rejection and hardship is too much to bare for the son... How will he cope?

A fairly thought provoking story which undeniably sets out to challenge the social and ethnic class structures that were so divided in working class America in the 70's. Which I feel the current IMDb rating does not give it credit for. There's no pretending that this movie is anything particularly special, but it does manage to string together a plausible narrative, which offers somewhat more than the usual pimp/blow/fist fighter we're so used to with blaxploitation.

The strength of this movie comes from the performance of the leading actress Sandra Alexandra who plays the working girl mother. Besides Alexandra's performance, the rest of the cast is nothing out of the ordinary, but the ideals this movie is trying to flagstone, speak louder than the actions actually portrayed on the screen.

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.