Movie Reviews : There’s No Escaping ‘Crack House’s’ Cliches

Perusing the ad copy for “Crack House” (citywide)--”Getting in is easy, getting out is hell”--it’s possible to hope upon hope that this will be a picture that blows the filmic lid off the rock-cocaine culture and explains why “just say no” slogans cooked up in the White House might not work in Watts.

Yeah, sure. Just like it’s possible to hope that stars Jim Brown or Richard Roundtree will ever make a halfway decent movie again.

“Drugstore Cowboy” this isn’t. (It’s not “Colors,” either, though it does at least have the nerve to look at the world of gangbangers from their perspective, not the cops’.) No, that potentially metaphorical Roach Motel-like ad copy about the impossibility of escape is meant quite literally: There’s a drugged-up damsel in distress being held prisoner in that tightly guarded title fortress, white-slavery style, and it’s up to the LAPD’s battering ram to bust her loose.

It’s not enough for director Michael Fischa and writer Blake Schaefer to offer an exploitative look at Latino and black gangs in Los Angeles warring over commercial turf; they must also give us an endangered white chick. This lass (newcomer Cheryl Kay) starts off as the good girl--a budding fashion designer, even--in her interracial high school, but after her ex-gang member fiance (Gregg Gomez Thomsen) is jailed for avenging a cousin’s death, another boy takes her under his coke-laced wing and gets her hooked.

Even a concerned teacher (Anthony Geary) turns out to be a greedy dealer out for her bod--which she starts giving more and more freely, till she winds up the battered sex slave of transcendently evil Jim Brown in that rock house. More carnage will ensue.

Getting into “Crack House” (rated R for every conceivable reason) is about $6.50; getting out is sheer relief.