Hookers at the Point

If you're confused about the hookers part of the title, well, we can't help you here.

Brent Owens' HBO documentary is a candid look at the oldest profession in the book, and it ain't Pretty Woman. By and large, today's prostitutes (or at least, hookers from the early 1990s, when Hookers at the Point was made) are exactly as you'd expect. If you happen to live in a city of more than 100,000 people, you can probably ferret them out yourself, and they'll look and act exactly like the women in this flick. (That said, Owens goes out of his way to find a few hot chicks, and he does turn some up in the sequel, which revisits Hookers one year later.)

What makes Hookers at the Point more fascinating than a drive through your own skid row is Owens' dedication to following the ladies on the job. With secret cameras and microphones, we get to see and hear exactly what goes down during a proposition. And it ain't pretty. We also get intimate (so to speak) with the hookers themselves, in candid gab sessions which mostly appear shot in Owens' car or some strange den of sin. The abuse -- physical and mental -- that these women take in order to make a few hundred bucks a night is astonishing.

Owens catches up with a few hookers like Angel (nicknamed "the schoolteacher" due to her large glasses and baby face) and then revisits them years later. After two years have gone by, Angel looks nothing like the schoolteacher from before. Now 30, she looks beaten down and old. And she's got no upper teeth... something to help out with her job.

Unfortunately, the last hour of Hookers gets repetitious -- lots of moaning about pimps, bad tricks, cops, and so on. A second sequel, Hookers at the Point: Five Years Later, adds nothing to the mix.

So what are you going to take away from Hookers at the Point? Well, aside from a new respect for the streetwalker, you're going to learn a lot of amazing fashion tips.

Comes in R-rated and unrated versions. We reviewed (and linked, at right) the unrated version.