Butler's Cinema Scene

A pre-Oscar Melissa Leo in "Streetwalkin'"

“STREETWALKIN’” (Available Aug. 2)

One of the downsides to winning an Oscar is that the home video industry starts digging through the movies you made early in your career, hoping to peddle some dross as gold.

That’s pretty much the story with “Streetwalkin’,” a 1985 innocent-in-the-big-city melodrama starring the then 25-year-old Melissa Leo.

This was, of course, before Leo registered with TV audiences as a member of the “Homicide: Life on the Streets” cast and, more recently, scored an Academy Award for her supporting performance in “The Fighter.”

In this vaguely lurid effort from writer/director Joan Freeman (her only other feature was the Julia Roberts/Justine Bateman girls-in-rock’n’roll yarn “Satisfaction”) an extremely young-looking Leo plays Cookie, who fleeing an abusive home winds up in NYC, where she’s no sooner stepped off the bus than she’s picked up by a pimp named Duke (Dale Midkiff).

Cookie thinks Duke really, really adores her and is soon doing tricks in the Times Square area on behalf of her loverboy. She soon learns that Duke’s affections are variable, and that he’d just as soon punch her as kiss her.

Even then Leo was a good performer who expertly mined Cookie’s innocence and naivete.

Freeman’s direction, though, is right out of the Lifetime Original Movie playbook, albeit with more nudity than that cable channel would countenance.

The cast is crammed with familiar faces: Antonio Fargas (TV’s”Starsky and Hutch”) as a dapper pimp named Finesse, Leon as yet another procurer of female flesh, Julie Newmar as an over-the-hill hooker named Queen Bee, Greg Germann (“Ally McBeal”) as a revolting young punk, Khandi Alexander (“C.S.I. Miami”) as a hooker with an S&M specialty.

Aside from the cheap thrill of watching young actors pay their dues, “Streetwalkin’” is mostly of value for having been shot on the Big Apple’s mean streets before the Midtown cleanup turned it into a antiseptic urban Disneyland. So the film may have sociological value, though not in the way its makers intended.

MORE CRIME ON DVD…

Not a whole lot to say about “Pros and ExCons,” a Kiwi crime caper whose main claim to fame is a perf by “Avatar” star Sam Worthington.

I say a “perf” because he’s hardly the star of the movie…there really isn’t one. Tim Boyle’s film aspires to the high-energy, multi-character, tongue-in-cheek crook sagas of Guy Ritchie (“Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” “Snatch”)…but lately even Richie is having trouble making the genre work. Boyle simply flounders.

For the record, Worthington plays one of two hit men who accidentally kill the wrong person and have to scramble to set things right. But that’s only one plot thread among a dozen.

Meh.

Faring a bit better is “House of the Rising Sun” in which pro wrestler Dave Bautista gives a surprisingly solid performance as a corrupt cop just out of prison who’s working as a mob enforcer. When the illegal casino/bordello he’s supposed to be protecting is hit by thieves and the big boss’s son is killed in the crossfire, our man becomes entangled in a deadly doublecross. It’s not like Bautista displays oodles of range, but the camera seems to like his hulking, brooding presence. He’s watchable, and he provide the film with a firm anchor.

Among the supporting players are Amy Smart (yeah, she’s kind of a fox, but I’m thinking she can’t act at all) and, briefly, the ever-fun-to-watch Danny Trejo (“Machete”).

A nice touch: director Brian A. Miller filmed “House” in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the dead of winter and many of the scenes are shot on city streets and in alleys while the snow is falling…lends a nice note of authenticity to what is in many regards a cut-and-dried crime flick.

| Robert W. Butler