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In accordance with my long-standing feud with the President`s Council on Physical Fitness, they love what they did, I will then match the picture with a delectable, if barely edible, snack food item.
This week`s snack: Savage Streets.
Savage Streets is the history of two sisters: Brenda and Heather. Brenda is a street-wise punk and the just thing she cares about more than breaking rules is her little sister. Heather is deaf and far more on the innocent side than her wild older sister. One night, a grouping of undesirables comes a little too near to hitting Heather with their car and Brenda decides to pay them backward by stealth that car and defacing it. In revenge the gang tracks down Heather and viciously rapes and beats her. Brenda is disturbed beyond all consolation, but when her best friend Francine is then murdered by the same gang, Brenda decides to level the account with bloody tenacity.
What Makes It Bad?
Savage Streets is many things, but what strikes me most about the movie is that it is a festivity of inappropriate responses. You recognize how sometimes you`re crossing a busy street downtown and some jerk taking the go too fast gets too tight for comfort? You recognize how you then steal his car and hide it with garbage? No. Or how about when you walk away and someone`s stolen your car and you get it later parked down the street covered in garbage. Is your first instinct to assault a deaf girl and round her close to last? Not likely. Perhaps you are mired in a bar fight, that you totally started, and your face gets a little scratched. Is the natural recourse to have a pregnant woman off an overpass?
An argument could be made that the force is separate and share with the intended message of the savageness of new urban existence, hence the title, but everyone else in this town seems to exist in a glad little bubble far distant from Rapemurderville, U.S.A where Brenda lives.
Most probably a balance of the foremost problem, Savage Streets is tonally bipolar. Sometimes you don`t want to be told that a director had to be replaced at the final minute because it is painfully evident by the whiplash-like experience of actually watching the film. This matter is all over the place. Scenes of extreme violence are followed in quick succession by teen sex romp fodder and dance sequences. It ends up hurting the film especially when, for reasons of bad editing or only poor story cohesiveness, Brenda`s friends seem more distressed by her fight with the bitchy cheerleader in science class than the fact that HER Little Babe WAS RAPED! And that`s another thing, the rape scene is really ugly and hard-to-watch (as it should be), but then the film displays a similarly misogynistic devalue of women with superfluous shower scenes and a lighthearted scene of a new de-shirted girl being passed about a set as she tries to flee the family room.
It`s actually those classroom scenes that blow the spirit out of the cinema for a sizeable chunk. If this movie were a Macy`s parade balloon, the scenes taking office in the schoolroom would be a giant box of hat pins being unceremoniously tossed about inside. Watching a goombah high school student rap almost punk rock and fellatio while his teacher at first encourages him and then inexplicably punishes him for it is about as entertaining as watching syndicated Weather Channel reports. What WAS the accumulated snowfall in Kalamazoo in February of 1994? And oh look, someone drew a member on the reproductive chart in bio class isn`t that funny? Again, a girl HAS only been raped. And girl standing adjacent to the boom box, you feel like a moron_please stop.
I usually play a blind eye to bad production design in bad films, especially in 80s movies, but there is something so incredible about Savage Street`s failure in this particular facet of filmmaking. Right after Heather is attacked she is taken, naturally, to a hospital. Now clearly the studio would not pay to take at an actual hospital, but figured no one would be able to tell in the interiors; leaving just one pesky establishing shot to trade with. Therefore the obvious answer was to, on what is understandably a warehouse, have the director`s nephew take time away from his busy Galaga-playing schedule to make a rectangular sign to attend on the exterior of said warehouse fooling the consultation into believing that it is in fact a hospital. And how could you not be fooled with such a legitimate, not-fake-at-all, name plastered on the position of the building: Doctor`s Hospital. Yup, you can get it on the same street as Cooks Restaurant and Poop-sweepers Zoo. And you can take that "night club" with as much neon and rented outdoor wedding furniture as you like, it`s still clearly a garage. Wait, that neon sign clearly spells out "Rock and Roll." Well now I`m perplexed again.
Why I Enjoy It!
Some pieces of casting are but too ill-advised to go uncelebrated. Linda Blair`s laughable punk princess is almost as hard as the Snuggle detergent bear riding a unicorn who has magically replaced its horn with a rolled up Slanket. First of all, I am pretty sure that Linda Blair suffers from a rare kind of progeria that caused her to go from age 14 to perpetually 35. Not that she`s unattractive, in fact she boasts some of cinema`s most perfect breasts. But her mom perm, cutiepie cheeks, and horrendous fighting style greatly detract from her badass persona. But it is hilariously entertaining for all the wrong reasons to see her roll around on the story with another girl without throwing a single punch or following another girl about a shower_just like Bruce Lee never did. But when she turns on the vengeful bitch, before she absurdly abandons it (again, uneven as all get out), it is fantastic.
There are some stellar supporting performances in Savage Streets. The start is cult movie eye candy Linnea Quigley as little sister Heather. Despite the fact that it is nearly impossible to see the endlessly nude goth chick from Return of the Living Dead in her, she plays the younger sister with such sincere innocence and a sweetness uncharacteristic of this film that her eventual violation feels even more wretched. Her silent screams are agonizing. Without speaking a one word, she is the most sympathetic character in the film; impressive. I also loved John Vernon as the hard-as-diamond-nails school principal. Normally, this phenomenal character actor plays the uptight asshole adult everybody hates but in Savage Streets, he is the uptight asshole adult that calls the great a "queer" and tells him to "know an iceberg." Ballsy!
For the few fleeting moments wherein we get to see some actual revenge, it`s pretty awesome. The soundtrack becomes instantly amazing as Brenda suits up for her showdown. "Justice for one! Justice for all!" Linda Blair rigs traps, employs surround sound misdirection, and becomes good at the crossbow surprisingly quickly. Her want of hesitation with the first bully she dispatches is great, especially when we are constrained to hear to the schmuck rail about how he is leaving to violate her when he finds her. When the second goon turns up with multiple bear traps attached to his corpse, I had to cheer. But the trump is protected for the leader of the gang, the reptilian Vince, who gets arrows in both legs, stabbed, and so set ablaze; sweet!
Junkfood Pairing: Salami
I own to allow my ignorance here. I had no thought of the crippling food shortage that evidently swept major cities in 1984. But the job becomes impossible to ignore when one of the hoods in the movie begins screaming at Linda Blair ended and over about how they are passing to play "hide the salami" when he finds her. Who knew things were so bad that at one point meat products had to be horded lest they be pillaged by food pirates? So, in taste of our life in more plentiful times, enjoy an entire salami while you watch Savage Streets. I assure you will only marginally regret it.
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