It’s difficult to tell if the extremely 80’s exploitation movie Savage Streets (1984) is intended to be a parody of juvenile delinquent flicks and grindhouse rape-revenge sagas. Throughout it seems just a step away from becoming a tasteless Troma comedy. While a teacher is working through a poetry lesson, she decides to use a student’s improvised ditty as a learning opportunity about poetic language:
Disco sucks
Punk is dead
Give me rock
Or give me head
A villainous gang of punks at one point tosses a girl over a highway overpass, killing her in broad daylight, heedless of the many potential witnesses (the people driving past are probably not part of the film crew; you’d think they’d get concerned). The school is covered with graffiti, and the school principal (John Vernon) is so tough-talking that he calls one of the gang members a f*ggot just to get him riled up. That hasn’t aged well, of course, along with other elements we’ll get to. Everything is cranked up. Most of the parents are absent, except for a mother who urges her daughter not to go on a crossbow-armed mission to avenge her comatose friend, but, you know, if she must…
Linda Blair and her gang.
That teen, Brenda, is played by Linda Blair, whose best known role was and remains Regan from The Exorcist, released 11 years prior. In that decade, apart from a handful of TV movies (including 1975’s Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic), she’d made Airport 1975 (1974), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), disco cash-in Roller Boogie (1979), and the clever slasher Hell Night (1981), in which she played a sorority girl. Consider that three years after Hell Night, at age 25, she was now portraying a high schooler. (That could be another element of the satire: juvenile delinquent movies have a rich history of casting actors too old for their parts.) Just before Savage Streets Blair starred in the women-in-prison entry Chained Heat (1983), a turning point in her career of sorts – a shift into a more lowbrow brand of exploitation film in exchange for meatier parts (nudity required). Savage Streets is a continuation of that anything-goes approach. Though it looks backward to grindhouse movies of the 70’s, this might as well have been a contemporary Cannon movie for all its sleazy absurdity. Blair gets to play an empowered woman, the tough-talking leader of her own female gang who gets to take out her rage on the men who wronged her friend – but she also has a topless bathtub scene, because there were tickets to be sold.
Jake (Robert Dryer)
Throughout the film, Blair switches – sometimes jarringly – between Brenda’s different facets: tough-as-nails, sweet and tender; doe-eyed one moment, then all punk rock attitude the next. She is protective of her deaf and mute sister Heather (scream queen and cult favorite Linnea Quigley), who is so innocent as to stretch credibility past its breaking point, given who she hangs out with on a regular basis. (When a thug tries to teach Heather the universal hand gesture for sexual intercourse, she’s perplexed.) At the start of the film, Blair and her gals steal the convertible belonging to Jake (Robert Dryer), a psychotic gang leader, and cover it in trash before ditching it (you know, for kicks). This triggers a chain reaction leading to the gang rape of Heather in a locker room, presented to provoke maximum outrage – either against Jake and his hoodlums or against the makers of this film, you decide. The always-brave Quigley submits herself to a violent rape scene that, although unbelievably over-the-top like everything else in the movie, is also prolonged, graphic, and unsettling. This is the linchpin of the revenge plot; it also furthers the story of one of Jake’s gang members, who’s been having qualms about his involvement with their crimes, and now begins a slow, guilt-ridden meltdown before meeting a vicious end late in the film. The sequence is leering, a depressing moment in all the wrong ways – though of course pretty typical of the subgenre.
Blair goes vigilante.
With that unpleasant moment aside, Savage Streets shifts more comfortably back into the realm of quasi-camp. There’s the aforementioned murder on a busy street. There’s Blair, back in TV-movie mode, weeping beside her comatose sister’s hospital bed. There’s a funeral and an oath of vengeance. There’s Blair gearing up in a leather catsuit, running the zipper up over her cleavage and taking up that crossbow which she’d been admiring in a shop window at the story’s outset. The final confrontation with Jake and his buddies is Savage Streets at its best, and it really ought to take up more of the film’s running time, proportionally speaking. As Blair stalks and kills her prey by night in a warehouse, the film finds its groove, Blair purring out one-liners that aren’t very good before launching her arrows at body parts. More of this, please.
Savage Streets is newly available as a special edition Blu-Ray from Code Red.
