Savage Streets (

1984

)

1984 might have been the peak year for cinematic sleaze (at least in the Western world, Japanese and Chinese cinema was moving on their own clock and I'm not even remotely qualified to tell you anything about Indian films). Savage Streets is far from the most gruesome, or the most exploitative, or the cruelest film to come out that year. Hell, it's probably just on the meaner side of average for independent exploitation movies in the mid-80s. Yet watching it in the lily-livered year of 2020, where movie patrons walk out of a film as tame as Joker (2019) in disgust and horror, Savage Streets hits like a megaton blast. You've got cat-fights in the communal shower, graphic rape in the boy's bathroom, a chick getting tossed off a highway overpass, and a principal who tells one of his students to “go fuck an iceberg” with an absurd deadpan. That all this sex and violence involves high school students who are ostensibly underage (though obviously played by actors in their twenties) is just the icing on the cake. If a movie like Savage Streets to come out tomorrow it would find itself at the center of a maelstrom of criticism and public scorn (if it weren't quietly swept under the rug), but in 1984 it was just another day at the grindhouse. I'd be lying if I said this movie didn't make me pine for the good old days when the Cold War was still simmering on the back burner and the average horror film would send most zoomers running from the theater. Yeah in many ways life is better now, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't kill for a half-way indecent movie.

We begin with an act of petty revenge that quickly spirals out of control. Bad girl Brenda and her gang of 1980s tough girl stereotypes are strolling around the mean streets late at night with Brenda's deaf/mute good-girl sister Heather in tow. Since Heather can't hear she nearly gets run-over by Jake and his band of punk hoodlums driving a really sweet mid-century convertible. Jake and his gang are a real bunch of scumbags (because this is a film in the 1980s they are not just hoods either but also running the local drug trade, just say no kids), but it honestly seems to have been an accident. Jake even apologizes to the girls and gets his thugs Fargo, Red, and Vince to do the same. Brenda isn't having any of it, nobody roughs up her beloved sister and gets away with it, so later on Brenda and her gang steal the convertible and go on a joy ride, filling it with garbage once they get to their destination. Jake responds with a primal roar better suited for a Godzilla antagonist than a juvenile delinquent and vows to get his revenge.

At this point we're still on the level of rascally school-yard hi-jinx here, but as Jake's fury in the previous scene implies he intends to make this much more serious. So, he and his goons head to Brenda's school the next day and grab Heather and gang rape her in the bathroom. Since Heather is mute, she can't even call out for help. The whole scene is fittingly horrific, doubly so because of all the girls in Brenda's gang Heather is the only one that one could feasibly describe as innocent (Brenda won't even let the other girls make raunchy comments around her). However, this film has a bit of The Last House on the Left (1972) syndrome and insists on cutting back and forth from the brutal rape scene to a much less disturbing semi-comedic sub-plot. It's nowhere near as jarring a transition as Wes Craven's debut, but not want for trying. As we see Heather get dragged helplessly into the bathroom, we cut to Brenda having a topless catfight with the head cheerleader who hates that her boyfriend keeps hitting on Brenda. After Brenda wins the fight, she gets called to the principal's office to get read the riot act, which the old bastard does when he's not making a pass at Brenda himself (is everyone a pervert in this movie). At least this serves some slim narrative purpose and explains why Brenda doesn't go looking for Heather immediately after class. It also has some thematic cohesion as well, since it's a trashy and exploitative plot-contrivance for a film that is trashy and exploitative in the extreme.

Initially, Brenda doesn't know who assaulted her sister, as there are no witnesses and Heather lapses into a coma after her ordeal. This was the point where I expected Brenda to go all Paul Kersey, and start harassing local thugs until she could get some information on who was behind the attack. Hell, I wouldn't have even been that surprised if she just assumed Jake and his gang were responsible and started to pick them off one by one. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen and instead, Brenda spends most of the second act sitting around moping. Jake even gives her more reason to seek vengeance when he grabs one of the members of her gang and tosses her off an overpass and still Brenda does nothing. Indeed she remains completely passive until Vince, the smallest/youngest member of Jake's gang and the only one with something approaching a conscience, breaks down under the guilt and goes to Heather's hospital bed to beg forgiveness. Only then does Brenda start to seek revenge. The problem with this is that it makes Brenda into a passive character, one that doesn't even try to fulfill the obvious B-movie character arch in front of her until everything she needs for vengeance is literally dropped into her lap. This could be made to work, under different circumstances, but the film has already taken great pains to establish Brenda as one tough chick who didn't take shit from anybody. There's no way that I can buy that this girl, as she's presented here, wouldn't fly off the handle and start a murderous rampage the second something happened to her baby sister.

That said, when Brenda finally decides to go out for blood she does it in style, kitting herself out in a leather dominatrix outfit and arming herself with a crossbow (good choice too, despite what you may have learned from Horizon: Zero Dawn [2017] or King Arthur (2004) or Revenge of the Virgins (1958), the crossbow should be the go-to medieval weapon for the ladies, or anyone lacking in upper body strength really). Jake has already killed off Vince for acting all stuck up and not wanting to engage in any more of the gang's wanton violence and cruelty. This leaves Fargo and Red, who Brenda corners in a fabric warehouse and summarily executes. Then Jake shows up and takes a couple of arrows to the knee, Skyrim [2011] style. Then, despite being slow as hell as a result of his injuries he chases after Brenda and winds up caught in a trap, suspended upside down alongside a chain-link fence. At this point, I figured all that was left in the film was a gratuitous execution scene and the credits but somehow Jake not only escapes but turns the tables on Brenda and looks like he might just come out on top. Normally, I would appreciate such a reversal because it keeps the final battle from getting stale, but here it seems to fit poorly with the rest of the movie. This is a rape/revenge movie, not a wuxia. I've been wanted to watch Jake's brains splatter against the pavement since the end of the first act. It also means that Brenda's agency and IQ take a rather galling nosedive in the process. Seriously, how do you manage to not kill somebody as helpless as Jake is? Sure, eventually the film ends the same way with the bad guy dead and Brenda triumphant, but I have to ask myself why was the last five or ten minutes of this conflict, where it devolved into a glorified slasher knock-off, really necessary?

Right off the bat, I take an issue with the casting. Linda Blair is pouring everything she has into the role of Brenda, but despite her best efforts I just cannot buy her as a tough girl action hero. There is something too fragile and vulnerable in her performance, a trait which is useful at times (like when her sister is in the hospital), but keeps cropping up when it shouldn't (like during the climatic rampage). Blair was much better suited for her role as the new fish in Chained Heat (1983), where this innate vulnerability did not run contrary to her character's personality. Far better suited to her role, oddly enough, is Linnea Quigley, who plays Brenda's deaf/mute sister. Who would have thought that an actress who had been performing in soft-core pornography and exploitation films for half a decade would be so convincing at playing a virgin? A big part of this is just the decision to keep her from wearing any makeup and dress her in clothes that look more like something a high school student would wear in 1954 than in 1984. The result takes a scream queen and turns her into a girl next door. It's astonishingly effective, making Heather's ultimate fate all the more harrowing and disturbing.

This movie is trash, plain and simple. Vile, scuzzy, exploitative filth with no redeeming artistic merits. It's pretty damn fun.