A juvenile court judge goes out of her way to try to aid a young man whom she believes has innocently gotten involved with a gang.
Writer/Director: William Sachs
Stars: Elliott Gould, Emilia Crow, Karen Black, Francesco Quinn, Cuba Gooding Jr.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097631/
Watched online, mediocre print.
Tagged as Music because the first character shown, supposedly an 8th grader (looking 25), is playing piano in a schoolroom where he shouldn't be. The only other music scene is with the same guy when he comes back with his gang to destroy the room, fulfilling exactly the teacher's prejudices. The title HITZ refers to killings, not successful songs.
This is far more interesting than the 4.6 rating from 88 IMDb users; I'm tempted to give it a 7, but I don't think I'd want to watch it again.
I'm guessing the poster was created after Cuba Gooding become a hot property because he's actually billed alphabetically, which starts after 18 others are credited. He plays a cop testifying in court, so he was not onscreen standing with the 2 other guys on the poster. This is his 5th film credit, between Boyz in the Hood ('91) and A Few Good Men ('92).
Karen Black has a slightly larger role than CG, but rather pivotal to the story; she's a court stenographer who gets hypnotized by a judge, and for some reason goes insane. Then she gets released, comes back to court and shoots up the place with an AK-47-type gun, which ironically causes the death of the defendant (our piano guy). He wrestles the gun away from her with no casualties, but then some cop shoots him dead while he's still holding the gun. I'm guessing the cop just entered the room.
EG is the judge who hypnotized her, and inappropriately groped her while she was under. He gets arrested for that, but when bailed out goes back to work. I didn't catch whether charges were dropped. The judge who's our central character, EC, discovers he's actually very wealthy, and has several juveniles "sentenced" to living in his home, supposedly a nurturing place.
EC is also a juvenile judge, and seeing this setup, brings him a kid who killed his abusive father. We don't see any indication the kid is getting intensive therapy, which seems important given his horrendous background. Then he witnesses what can be interpreted as abuse by the judge (I didn't pay attention to EG's words, but he was clothed, seemingly in the bed of a teen girl in his home.) Big surprise, he kills EG.
We have other traumatic events in the film, but none gory or gratuitous. Perhaps too many and too severe for a juvenile judge, but it wouldn't be interesting to delve into shoplifters.
The ending has EC returning to work after the violence comes to her home and hospitalizes her. I couldn't tell if she got shot (didn't see any blood) or just collapsed from her ulcer. Her improbably return to work was setup by her attorney-boyfriend's (FQ) continuing his career in criminal law despite being paralyzed from a shooting (perhaps in a courtroom). However, it's supposed to be a surprise because a moment before, in a different scene, she swore she wouldn't go back. To compound the improbability factor, the case we see her about to adjudicate is the kid who killed EG, and she has a big warm smile for him, as she had during his prior trial.
So this is not a great film, but it does have something to say. I can imagine that people on both sides of the gun control debate could feel this film supports their case.
For judge EC, whose acting was ok, this is her last film actor credit of 6, last film producer credit of 4, and she has only 1 more tv acting credit after this, a Star Trek DS9 episode in '93, capping 6 rv credits. Here's a Feb'90 article about her divorce that mentions this film being tied up.
indie direct to video, dir. Sachs; 6
