Bloody Streetz

Rating

Director

Gerald Barclay

Screenplay

Gerald Barclay

Length

1h 23m

Starring

Gano Grills, Kalimi Baxter, 3rd Rail, Olatunde Olusei, Adunni Oshupa Tabasi, Godfrey Sowah

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
In Bloody Streetz, a New York City street thug attempts to avenge his son’s death but shows us that his rage will only bring him to a tragic conclusion.

Bloody Streetz stars Gano Grills as a gangster named Black who wants only to find the man who killed his son, and then exact a revenge of death. The one complication to this plan is that Black’s girlfriend Semaji (Kalimi Baxter) has announced that she wants him to move in with her and get away from life on the streets. She fears that he’s involved in nefarious activities she would be ashamed of but doesn’t realize the truth in her trepidations. Through his ghetto contacts, Black eventually discovers the whereabouts of his son’s assassin.

Later, after his retribution has been dealt, Black is questioned by a mentally-deficient Dollar Van Driver (Olatunde Olusei) about his real intentions. Desperate to get away, Black shoots the driver and escapes only to be persecuted by his own soul for slaying an innocent. Parallel to this story, Semaji’s co-worker introduces a college student to a Wise Old Lady (Adunni Tabasi) for an interview on life on the streets of crime. This un-related dialogue scratches an unnecessary philosophical surface that touches the plot only tangentially and disappears as quickly and mysteriously as it began.

Bloody Streetz is a film about retribution and the tragedy of love and the demise of sanity. Through various gruesome scenes, Black must cope with his rage-induced murder as he slowly comes to the realization that his psyche won’t let him forget. It is this moralistic idea that brings the film, in its sluggish last half, to a disappointing conclusion. While director and screenwriter Gerald Barclay attempts to grace his audience with a worldly lesson on the cause of African-American self-destructiveness, he ends up delivering a didactic tale that stretches the audience’s patience.

None of the performances are inspiring. All of them are pale, ungifted turns that give the viewer cause to make comparisons with a kindergarten production of a Shakespeare’s Hamlet or an after-midnight infomercial on the latest in street-specialized homicide techniques. Grills is decent but never good; Baxter is thoughtful but not wise; Olusei is nothing but redundant; and Tabasi is offensively vocal.

The Wise Old Lady drags the film bitterly forward with a should-have-been easily avoidable diatribe. Her thoughts on the pressures put on black children and the cause of their outbursts against society are antiquated. She states that white Americans, through slavery, have caused all of the strife that African-Americans face. She believes firmly that the American culture as a whole causes the violence rampant in minority environments, but resists the idea that violence breeds violence and that while there are still Americans out there who persecute black America, there is an even larger body that supports their attempts to grow and develop as part of the larger society. Barclay seems to support these ideas and uses them as justification for conditions that shouldn’t need justification and can be supplanted with the right, constructive approach.

Some audiences will feel empowered by the anti-oppression sentiment displayed within the film; however many other audiences will undoubtedly cringe at the thought of such moralizing fare. Bloody Streetz fails to credibly portray a haunted character by imposing its own high-minded opinions without presenting a much-needed counter-point.

Review Written

June 2, 2003