F or some unknown reason back in the seventies and eighties rape revenge thrillers were all the rage. They were also, every last one of them, trash.
Even the well reviewed ones like Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 involved gun toting models dressed up as nuns blowing away bad guys. They were not classy cinema. Even when the big studios got involved the best they could come up with was a Dirty Harry sequel squeezing in the same old plot. Eventually rape revenge moved away from just picking up your weapon of choice and executing your attacker and actually dealt with the subject with intelligence and respect with films like The Accused. It was a merciful end to this most exploitative of sub genres.
Before that though we had stuff like Savage Streets: a film that not only hits all the marks you’d expect of the rape revenge thriller but also was a high water mark for terrible eighties fashion, music and exercise trends.
In Savage Streets there are two main groups of characters: there is the bad-ass school girls who, presumably due to poor patenting, are allowed to spend their week nights strolling down Hollywood Boulevard shouting at bums and pimps. To show they are in a gang they all wear the same shiny bright red satin jackets and their leader is none other than the mighty Linda Blair, shooting her mouth off and showing she’s cool by smoking like a chimney. This is back in the good old days when killing yourself slowly with cancer whilst making your clothes stink really was the epitome of stone cold coolness. And boy is Blair cool. Obviously she smokes down the Boulevard (who wouldn´t?) but she’s also sparking up in the classroom, burning baccy during gym and even lights up in the head teacher’s classroom when she gets reprimand… weirdly not for smoking at school.
Meanwhile the boy gang, known as The Scars, drive a classic T-bird, wear black leather jackets and grease their hair back. If you’re thinking I’m actually describing the cast of Grease here then you wouldn’t be far off. The makers have clearly (lazily?) modelled their characters on the seventies musical classic, but instead of singing and dancing, the boys here rape and kill.
So as the leader of the girl gang Linda Blair if the Rizzo of Savage Streets then Linnea Quigley, as her sweet, innocent, deaf sister, is the Sandy of the piece. However instead of moving to Los Angeles and falling in love at a diner, Quigley is sexually assaulted and beaten into a coma. No one in the cast sings about this. There are lots of songs throughout however. For example, when Blair sets off, with handy crossbow, to exact her deadly revenge, a dreadful eighties rock song plays, going for that Rocky III mood. This is what the singer warbles:
“There’s a time for revenge and your time has come,
Justice for all, you get what you give when you’ve broken the law”
Etc. Etc.
Talk about on the nose. I guess it’s important to know exactly what is going on at any given moment in a movie. And what better way of knowing than having a big haired crooner singing it to you over the action.
Of course this could have been a serious look at rape and vigilantism but this was the eighties. Plus it was directed by one Danny Steinmann, the man who brought us Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning, the least interesting Friday the 13th movie, and that´s saying something. So instead this is more about the tits and the gore. And, if you include the actors playing The Scars, by heck are there a lot of tits.
Multiple scenes have teenage girls (well, thirty year old women pretending to be teenage girls) acting with no tops on. Blair gets into a fight with the school cheerleader bully person over a boy (one Blair repeatedly tells the girl, Cindy, she is not interested in so I’m not sure what Cindy’s beef really is) which is fine. But the fight starts in the locker room, where many tops are already off, and ends in the showers where there are numerous naked women jumping up and down and occasionally fighting each other – seemingly for no other reason other than to rub their bodies against one another. The fight ends when Blair tears off the soaking wet Cindy’s bra like some kind of pervy finishing move.
Even Linda Blair herself gets in on the nudity action… there’s a scene late on where Blair finally works out who her sister’s rapists are and her eyes go all steely as she decides to exact her bloody revenge. It should be a powerful moment of self determination, however the whole scenes is shot with Blair lying in a bath, soaping her naked self down. And there’s no soap.
Linda Blair is an odd choice for the leader of an all female street gang, she’s not entirely convincing at talking tough or shooting bad guys with her crossbow. However in her quiet moments, especially with Linnea Quigley, you remember why she was so good in The Exorcist. Weirdly, it’s Quigley who is the best player here. Even she would admit she’s not the greatest actor in the world but Quigley´s performance here, all done without a voice, is genuinely affecting . It makes what happens to her almost heart breaking.
Anyway, apart from that the whole of Savage Streets was absolutely ridiculous. And fortunately in the version I saw the rape scene was heavily cut so I was just left with Linda Blair blowing away street scum with more hair spray than the entire cast of a John Waters film. All to a terrible eighties rock soundtrack. I bloody loved it.
My Own Personal Hell 