Savage Streets (1984)

There's just something about Savage Streets that screams 'peak eighties exploitation' - the fashions, the hairstyles, the whole attitude.  Watching it is like watching a checklist of teen gang/high school movie tropes: the locker room fight between hot chicks - check; gratuitously topless background chicks - check; big hair - check; 'bad girl' heroine with gum chewing attitude - check; scumbag school bully gang bangers - check.  It's all there - and more.  Plus, it stars not just Linda Blair, but also Linnea Quigley - two scream queen icons for the price of one!  Best of all, it is all hugely entertaining.  Clearly made on the cheap, the promised 'gang war of the sexes' is actually pretty small scale as Blair and her besties square off against 'The Scars' (a vicious gang of drug peddlers with only four members) on a mission of revenge.  Their feud escalates from some dangerous driving by 'The Scars' which nearly runs over Blair's deaf mute younger sister (Quigley). through the girls stealing and trashing the gang's car, through gang rape and assault to murder, before Blair goes full-on Charles Bronson.  Interspersed with all this violence are the usual High School rivalries between Blair and friends and the 'cool girls' from the cheer leading team, inspired mainly by jealousies over boys and worries over grades.  On top of all this, one of Blair's friends, Francine (Lisa Freeman), is pregnant and about to marry her boyfriend.

As with all revenge-orientated pictures, those on the receiving end of the street 'justice' have to seem fully deserving of it, in order that the avenging protagonist's actions can seem justified and audience sympathy for them maintained.  Savage Streets goes all out to portray 'The Scars' as just about the scuzziest bunch of bastards ever to roam the back streets of LA.  Just having them being low-life drug dealers who beat up and humiliate pushers who owe them money in front of their girlfriends (whose breasts also get groped), isn't enough.  They also gang-rape, then leave for dead, the deaf mute sister.  Now, the fact that she is deaf mute is clearly meant to make them seem even worse bastards tan if they had gang-raped someone with perfect hearing.  While I understand that her disability makes her seem even more helpless - unable even to cry for help or scream while they assault her in the school toilets - but the reality is that it is surely the act of rape itself, regardless of the victim, that makes them scumbags?  But the fact that their victim is an underage deaf-mute kid is clearly intended to ramp up the audience hatred.  Just as when they, inevitably, go even further and murder one of Blair's friends, you just know that it is going to be pregnant Francine, hurled off of a road bridge on the eve of her wedding, in order to maximize the sense of tragedy and further justify Blair's revenge rampage.

You have to wait a long time for Blair's revenge, it doesn't kick off until nearly the end of the movie, but it is worth waiting for, as she goes into battle dressed in black leather and armed with a crossbow and a bear trap(!).  In the event, she only has to deal the fatal blow to three of the gang members.  The fourth, the weak link who has become disgusted by his involvement in the rape and the murder, is run over by gang leader Jake, after he has - at knife point - confessed all to Blair.  While the remaining two minions are relatively easily dispatched with crossbow bolts and bear trap, their bodies then strung up for Jake to discover, the latter puts up more of a fight.  Finally, having survived a crossbow attack, being dragged behind a car and stabbed, just as it seems that he's got the advantage over Blair, she uses a lighter to set fire to the paint he has been covered in during their warehouse fight.  As his body blazes away, the cops finally arrive.  A post script shows Blair, amazingly not in jail for murder, her miraculously recovered sister and her friends at Francine's grave, where one of them tells her: 'You made things right'.

While director Danny Steinmann moves things along pretty efficiently, despite an obviously limited budget, (Savage Streets was one of only four films that he directed), what really makes the movie stand out are the performances.  I have to admit that I've always had a soft spot for Linda Blair and have never really had the heart to dislike any of her performances as she arced through a bizarre career trajectory that started strongly as a child performer with The Exorcist, before taking in various TV movie-of-the-week melodramas as a teen and finally, in adulthood, settling into a long series of trashy B-movies. So, while she never really convinces as a 'bad girl', (her characterisation seemingly consisting mainly of chewing gum and smoking cigarettes with attitude), she does bring a lot of charisma and screen presence to her role.  (She also, judges her performance well, never appearing to take it entirely serious while simultaneously never seeming contemptuous of appearing in an exploitation film).  Linnea Quigley, appearing here shortly before she hit her stride as a full-fledged scream queen, likewise gives a likeable performance as the deaf mute sister, bringing some real vulnerability to the part, making her ordeal seem all the worse.  Robert Dryer as Jake takes scumbaggery to new levels, relishing every opportunity for sheer loathsomeness, so that by the end of the film, you are just dying to see him go up in flames.  There is also a stand-out performance from John Vernon as the school principle who, in a handful of scenes, alternates between shabbily admirable as he proves himself more foul mouthed than the gang members as he faces them down, and just shabby with his highly inappropriate comments to Blair following the attack on her sister.  Indeed, his retort to Jake's smart ass claim that one of his cronies is sick as he' 'burning up with the clap' - 'Then go fuck an iceberg', is delivered with such relish and vehemence that it is impossible not to laugh out loud at it.

Savage Streets represents another step forward in the evolution of the female exploitation action heroine - unlike her seventies equivalents, Blair doesn't have to endure a personal ordeal of brutality and humiliation, nor does she have to rely upon any male associates to assist.  Indeed, the handful of sympathetic male characters (mainly Francine's boyfriend and his associates) prove pretty ineffective - during a confrontation during which Francine is grabbed and groped by 'The Scars', it is Blair and the girls who take on the gang, with Francine freeing herself by slashing Scar with a knife.  But a female 'ordeal' was clearly felt to be needed, with it being transferred to the kid sister rather than the main protagonist and 'justified' in terms of providing a motivation for revenge.  Interestingly, the film serves up less female nudity than you might expect from an exploitation film.  While the locker room cat fight between Blair and her rival Cindy (Rebecca Perle) might be expected to involve their tops being torn off, this doesn't happen, with the nudity instead being confined to the girls in the background (some of whom are also, inexplicably) fighting.  Just when you think that these two actresses sensibly had non-nudity clauses in their contracts, Cindy loses her top in a classroom tussle with Blair, while the latter herself has a brief topless scene.  Clearly, they had insisted on only one such scene apiece, with no doubling up of boobs.  Interestingly, Blair's topless scene comes while she is in the bath, sitting perfectly still - obviously her contract stipulated no 'jiggling' and a modicum of 'classiness'.

All in all, Savage Streets is a fantastically entertaining piece of exploitation, capturing the full genre scuzziness of the era.  Sufficiently well-made to stand out from the crowd of revenge-orientated direct-to-video actioners, it never quite tips over into unpleasantness, despite some its content and never losing sight of its own fundamental ludicrousness.  Besides, what's not to like about a film featuring Linda Blair as a kick ass female avenger?