Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 4:4	Budget Medium

Linda Blair? Linnea Quigley? Bad 80's music? Check.

After dragging her mute sister around the mean streets and dumping garbage is the local gang's prized car, Brenda goes to school where she is hit on by the head cheerleader's boyfriend. While they are duking it out in the shower, the gang rapes the little sister. Soon after that Brenda gets into another fight with the cheerleader and gets kicked out of school. When one of her friends is killed by the gang, she takes a bath, dresses in black and goes hunting for bad guys. After easily dispatching two of the lesser bad guys, she is nearly done in by the main baddie, but manages to kill him at the end. The final scene at the graveyard seems to indicate that Brenda has not come through the ordeal unscathed.

Wow, they don't make them like this anymore. Seriously. Full frontal nudity in the shower. Enough profanity to make DeNiro blush. More big hair than a Dolly Parton convention. And 80's music and not the good 80's music either. The really tinny synthesizer driven stuff. Lucky us, we not only get to hear the music throughout the film but we are even treated to a scene with the band playing live. Of course this is somewhat offset by the producer bringing in about ten girls to populate the shower scene. After a strenuous PE class the girls head off to the shower. The camera slowly pans across the girls showering, none of whom have speaking lines just tan lines. Eventually the camera reaches the lockers and our clothed main actresses pick up the narrative. The girls also provide background when Brenda and Cindy get into a knock-down drag-out in the shower. Oddly, while most of the girls stand around cheering on the fight a couple girls engage in some hair pulling. As they don't seem to belong to either the cheerleaders or the delinquents, there seems to be no reason for them to be fighting.

Linda Blair got famous pretty early in life by appearing in "The Exorcist" where she had a couple episodes of projectile vomiting and updated one of the priests as to his mother's current activities. She would appear in about 50 more films but she never really became a great actor. Still, she is one of those rare female character actors who work consistently. I vaguely recall hearing her discuss why she acts in B movies once. Her answer was basically it pays for the ranch and horses. Some actors strive to be great artists, Linda didn't go down that road. As I think back to her movies, she always seemed like a celebrity playing at acting. Clearly she put some effort into Brenda, but ends up taking it a little over the top. Of course in this movie only a little over the top seems pretty low key compared to the rest of the cast. Linda was 25 when she made Savage Streets while Linnea who plays her little sister was 26. None of the actors looked school age which is par for the course. We really don't want to see children playing these types of roles.

One of the rules of movie making is that the bad guy has to push the good guy over the edge. The bad guy must be defined as not only evil but unredeemable. In the Nature vs Nurture debate movies come down squarely on the Nature side. Frequently the good guys are good despite their upbringing and bad guys are just plain bad. Little time and effort are spent explaining why they are that way because frankly we don't want to know. If you feel sympathy for the bad guy, how can you cheer when the good guy shoots him down? Imagine how different "Dirty Harry" would be if the bad guy wasn't such a slimeball. When Clint kills the guy in cold blood at the end of the movie, we are okay with it. Why? Because we are absolutely sure that the guy did the killing and that he was going to try to use the legal system to get out of paying for the crimes. Also the retribution by the good guy has to be less than the crimes of the bad guy. That is the bad guy has to deserve what they get. To return to my "Dirty Harry" analogy:

Harry: I know what you're thinking punk, did he fire six rounds or only five.

Punk: Come on, I was just jaywalking.

Harry: In all the confusion, I sort of lost count myself.

Punk: Seriously! I looked both ways! There weren't any cars coming.

In Savage Streets we have street punks that are selling some dope apparently on credit. They beat up three of their clients for nonpayment. Clearly this is part of the film's "Stay in School" message. Had they stayed in school, they would have learned in Economics 101 that of all the groups of people that you don't extend credit to, junkies top the list. We are talking about a strict cash business here. Perhaps this is meant to show the bad guys are not only violent but stupid as well. The bad guys quickly progress from beating up their customers and groping girls to a violent rape and then murder. Shortly before the murder there is a scene where the soon-to-be-dead best friend confides in Brenda that she is pregnant. While the rest of the girls are shocked by the death, Brenda is horrified because of this secret the two shared. After taking a bath, Brenda decides that the only thing to do is to kill the gang members. She starts with the weakest link. Now, we know that this guy is truly bothered by the things the gang did. We are shown that he is new to the gang and that he at least tried to stop the murder, but Brenda doesn't know any of this and yet, she lets him go. Why? Because he wasn't truly evil. In fact, he had already seen the error of his ways and had walked away from the gang. However, because the gangleader thinks that the weak link might turn them in to the cops, he kills the guy. This is the difference between bad guys and good guys. Good guys kill bad guys because it is the right thing to do, bad guys kill basically for fun. When the good guys don't kill someone who did evil things because of a chance at redemption, you can be damn sure that bad guy is going to come along and waste them in the next scene.

While it is not unusual for the police to have a minimal presence in revenge flicks, the highest ranking authority figure for most of the film is the high school principal. John Vernon who plays Principal Underwood is great. He faces down the thugs at the school and then calls Brenda into his office to leer at her. And not in a subtle way either. He looks at her the way starving dogs look at meat. I suppose the idea is that Brenda would distrust the Authorities based on her experience with Underwood. The cops do finally show up shortly after she has killed three members of the gang, but I am not sure if they do anything because the next scene is in the cemetery at the dead friend's grave. There is no chance in hell that someone who hunted down and killed three people would be out on bail, so this implies that she wasn't even charged with any crimes. Premeditated murder and breaking and entering are apparently not that big a deal. I guess Brenda was right about the authorities being a bunch of morons.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the movie is that Brenda is deeply disturbed by what has happened to her friends and what she has done to "make it right". In most revenge movies, the final scene is reserved for walking into the sunset with the feeling of a job well done. The bad guys are dead and if a couple dozen innocent people are dead also, well you know what they say about omeletes and eggs. Savage Streets ends with a scene where the surviving good guys awkwardly gather around the grave of the dead girl. Brenda is clearly shell shocked about whole thing, the little sister now seems to be watching out for her, and the friends seem to have a combination of guilt for not helping out and dismay at the violent result of Brenda's actions. In a film that so clearly followed a formula this downbeat ending was a real surprise.

Got a comment or different opinion? Send a message.