Cracking The Case

A couple of nights ago, I had my latest VHS movie night. Yesterday I wrote about the first film we watched, "Hurricane Smith". It was enjoyable enough, once people quieted down. It's rather frustrating that people should chatter over the opening scenes and then get upset about not knowing what's going on, but let's not dwell on that. The point is that Carl Weathers went to Australia in search of his sister, found out she was dead and returned home with an Australian hooker with a heart of gold.

The second film- "Crack House" played out slightly differently. You have a teen boy who has quit gang life to pursue his education and work at a burger restaurant. He's drawn back in when his brother (I think) is killed by a rival gang, but this only winds up making a victim of his girlfriend, who is taken captive by the selfsame rival gang. She becomes addicted to crack and is made to debase herself in a myriad of ways by ganglord Jim Brown. Cop Richard Roundtree teams up with the teen boy to free her and bust the gang.

I was, of course, won over by Roundtree's appearance in a PSA before the film. In it, he speaks against the evils of crack, which then was still a growing epidemic. I don't know if his message helped any, dependent as it was on the impression that the movie which followed was any good. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy myself watching it, but it was not an effective anti-drug movie in the way that "Requiem For A Dream" was. THAT would put me off drugs.

In any case, the film promised a crack house and it delivered. Roundtree was no worse than he has been in other films, Brown was at least mildly interesting, and the young members of the cast acquitted themselves tolerably well. The film probably does not have much to say about the reality of gangs and crack cocaine addiction, but I think America managed to weather the worst of that problem without any major contributions from Cannon, under whose auspices the film was made.