Savage Streets
The 1984 film Savage
Streets is about youth culture and the troubles faced by high school
students such as being menaced by street gangs, being told to “Go fuck an
iceberg!” by their hard core high school principal, and planning their
weddings. I wasn’t in high school back
in 1984, so it seems to me that a lot of the issues depicted in this film had
been resolved by the time I got to high school in 1990s, or perhaps these
problems are more specific to Los Angeles where this film is set.
Linda Blair is
the lead actress in this film and she plays a tough high school student who
struts around with several other sexually aggressive trash-talking chicks in a
posse, frequently dressing in matching outfits, fighting, and stealing cars
although they are not the street gang in this film, these girls are actually
opposed to street gangs. There’s some
pretty clever clashing of regular people with street gangs and how we’re all kinda in gangs in our own way.
The street gang
in this movie is called The Scars, and they’re not really much of a street
gang. Like a lot of thugs in similar Death
Wish type movies, these guys rove around in a little pack laughing all the
time and committing random unprofitable sadistic acts while seemingly priding
themselves on their group organization and code. There are several things that cost this gang
credibility in my opinion. I really
don’t think in a movie like The Warriors, Cyrus would want The Scars in
his league of gangs that would shut down New York City. For one, they’re really shy on numbers, they’re even smaller than The Orphans in The
Warriors, although they have a more gang-looking uniform. There’s only four of
these guys, and this one member, Vince, really shouldn’t have made it past the
application phase and definitely not the background check. Vince goes to high school, works a degrading
part-time job, and even has to hide his gang status from his pappy by leaving
the house dressed as a nerd and changing into his gang uniform in the bushes
outside. And what kind of gang member
has a curfew? I get that The Scars
cruise around in a convertible and so they probably needed somebody to fill up
that fourth seat, but I’m sure there’s somebody better than Vince out there.
There’s also
way too many scenes where The Scars get served for me to take them seriously as
badasses.
There’s this dude who owes them money, and you keep expecting them to
kill him or at least fuck his shit up, but they keep giving this guy extensions
on his deadline until he ultimately pays up and they do everything but print
him up a fucking receipt. They also get
out-trashtalked by the high school principal. Granted, the principal is the toughest
character in this movie and possibly even some sort of prequel to those The
Substitute movies, but still, I think standard gang procedure is if
somebody shows they have a quicker wit than you, you at least physically attack
them and say “You ain’t so smart now!”. But these guys just take it. I guess they don’t want to jeopardize Vince’s
academic future, but to me that means they’re not fully committed to this whole
street gang venture.
Like I said,
the principal is one tough motherfucker who don’t take no
shit, but there’s something really wrong with his school in general. There are a lot of violent incidents and the
violence is really contagious. In one
scene two chicks get into a fight in the locker room and end up wrestling
around in the showers, but in the background you can see two other naked chicks
who just start fighting each other for no reason. The fight choreography of this wet t-shirt
fight is definitely not on the same level as DOA: Dead or Alive, they
went with a more Bourne style realism, only with girls, so the resulting
fights are a lot of manic slapping of each other’s shoulders and the odd
hair-pull.
These fights
also have Mortal Kombat style finishing moves where
the sign of victory seems to be ripping the shirt off the chick you just beat,
leaving her breasts exposed. And you’d
think these kids would be more chill since in this
school all they ever teach and talk about is sex. I mean, that’s something youths have a pretty
easy time hearing about, beats fuckin’
geography. They also have gym class that
seems to just be the girls posing in spandex outfits while dudes oogle them. And maybe
I’m reading this the wrong way, but the cheerleading squad’s cheers don’t
exactly sound like they’re cheering about sports.
I couldn’t
believe that in poetry class the teacher was making such a sincere attempt to
help a student write a poem about how he hates disco music and likes getting
blowjobs (it did rhyme, mind you). Of
course, poetry class gets interrupted by two girls ripping each other’s shirts
off and fighting. Poetry’s emotional
shit, yo. Gets
girls all riled up.
So then we move
onto the next class and this dorky Rick Moranis type
teacher comes in, so I figure it’s finally math class, but then he busts out
this easel with a big drawing of a boner and slides the chalkboards around to
reveal a big drawing of a pussy and we discover this class is Sex Ed, as if the
other classes weren’t. All I keep
hearing about is in America that there’s this big movement for something called
‘Abstinence Education’, but if the schools are anything like this I don’t know
what kids would do all day if you took sex classes out of the equation.
Anyway, Linda
Blair’s posse and The Scars ultimately clash resulting in several assaults on
Linda’s crew. Linda and her crew and her
mother all get dressed up in matching slutty outfits with elaborate hair styles
and go to a loud discothèque to cry and mourn where their sobbing can be drown
out by upbeat 80s rock music.
Shortly after,
Linda undergoes a quick transformation into some sort of superhero vigilante
and goes after the gang. The whole
vigilante portion of the movie seems like what it’s all building towards, but
it’s pretty short-lived with a relatively low body count. Early in the film the girls are having a
philosophical discussion about how “anything longer than ten inches is a
waste” and this is later contrasted when Linda Blair dispenses more than
ten inches of justice and it isn’t nearly enough.
Maybe this was
a setup for sequels, but that never happened.
This movie is definitely more entertaining and trashier than Thriller:
A Grim Picture in terms of those types of movies
where some gal gets abused for an hour and a half and then fights back for
twenty minutes. The dialogue is pretty
hilarious and this movie has some other entertaining things such as boobs. Overall, Linda Blair is not as brave as Jodie
Foster in The Brave One, but she gets points for style, one-liners, and
creative choice of vigilante costume and weapon.
If you liked me takin’
it to the streets here, check out this other shit:
Here’s my take on a Straw Dogs type of movie.
The title was inspired by Bad News Bears.
DEBS:
They’re Crime-Fighting Hotties with Killer Bodies
May the Jordanafication and Brewsterization
of Hollywood continue.
This is a film based on video game based on a wet dream.