In collaboration with a selection of the finest film blogs the infranet has to offer
Lost Video Archive is proud to contribute this quality post to Blair Week, a six day extravaganza expounding on the virtues of Linda Blair and her legacy of quality motion pictures. Don't believe me? Just read on...
United States 1984
Director - Danny Steinman
Vestron Video, 1985, VHS
Run Time -1 hour, 33 minutes
Somewhere along the way I became a Linda Blair junkie. I think this is a fairly common weakness, but because it is frequently predicated on a rather shallow but unsurprising appreciation for cheap nudity it’s not something readily admitted. I’m pretty sure it happened when I was about 13 and my friend’s older brother loaned us his
Night Patrol video. It’s a movie loaded with crass low-quality humor that I didn’t quite get at the time, but I did understand tits, and
Night Patrol has a healthy share of those. I was also old enough to understand that a great deal of the films tension rested upon the protagonists desire to get in Linda’s pants, which to everyone’s great delight happens at the end. By that time I was already sold down the river.
Linda didn’t turn out to be such a great actress, but that revelation came at a time when there was plenty of work available that didn’t require much acting per-se. The childlike behavior and almost unnatural innocence she brought to
The Exorcist, turned out to be an asset in her career as an adult. Linda came of age at the exact moment that American exploitation film was at its peak, and
Savage Streets is premium example.
Made the same year as
Night Patrol, Savage Streets claims right there on the back cover to invoke yet another Linda vehicle, the previous year’s epic
Chained Heat. Initially this claim is confusing because plotwise,
Savage Streets actually appears to be an example of that brand of juvenile dystopia films particular to the 1980’s. Typically these featured hyperbolic warring punk-cum-new-wave street gangs who combined Bowiesque face paint and teased hair with studded leather and switchblades. They were the heirs to the delinquent youth scare films of the 50’s but they tried to fuse the modern mosaic of pop cultures into a hyperbolic but plausibly threatening future. Punk, rap, and metal among other subcultural
in-groups were all equally threatening attacks on the status quo and contemporary exploitation films often combined them all into one militaristic drug soaked nightmare in films like my personal favorite,
Death Wish 3.
Savage Streets is rife with the childish arrogance that made parents of the 80’s shudder for thought of a future ruled by their own coke addled offspring. The best part of all this of course, is that scare films usually end up becoming popular with the generation they portray.
In
Savage Streets Linda is the leader of one such group of unruly high-school girls whose smoking-in-class contempt for such elders as school principal
John Vernon sends shivers up the spine. Such virulent threats to the status quo however are couched within the safety of other standard distractions. The rest of the high-school landscape is a choice mix of comedic flirtations and shirt-ripping shower cat-fights, a veritable teen-women-in-prison-comedy that just proves youth rebellion of the future is, if nothing else, still predictable. When her deaf sister (
Linnea Quigley) is brutally raped and her best friend killed by another more violently unhinged gang reminiscent of a watered-down
Warriors, Linda perms her hair and goes full vigilante, invoking Jenifer Hills and
Paul Kersey all in one pouty-lipped self-aware package.
It should be pretty clear at this point that
Savage Streets is much more than just a delinquent youth movie. That may be an overarching theme, but within it are mixed other distinct sub-genres of exploitation. I realize that describing the film in terms of its resemblance to other genre standards makes it sound like an incomplete copy of them all. But the awesome thing about
Savage Streets is that it doesn’t overburden itself with any complicated logic, or try to be clever or original. In fact, it’s honest to the point of self mockery. And that’s exactly what’s great about it, it is a paper thin and imminently predictable string of cheap thrills. There is no reason to feel at all guilty about enjoying every minute because it doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t.
All these sites contributed rad content to Blair Week:
Satan's Hope Chest - Chained Heat and Savage Island
Camp Movie Camp -
Grotesque and
Nightforce
The Horror Section - Hell Night
Full Moon Reviews -
Bailout
Illogical Contraption -
Repossessed
Lines That Makes Things - original Linda inspired artwork
Breakfast In the Ruins -
Exorcist II
B Movies and Beyond - Summer of Fear
The Manchester Morgue - Rollerboogie
Happy Otter -
The Chilling
Ninja Dixon -
The Witchery
Unflinching Eye -
Linda's fall from grace.
Lost Video Archive - Savage Streets and
Born Innocent
It takes a certain panache for a film to claim right on the cover to follow a particular tradition or style. 
Nomad Riders takes its name from a group of three bikers working as heavies for a “Mr. Vacci” by the writer/director. Having exceeded the parameters of their assignment to merely intimidate by actually killing Thrust’s family, the bikers are now the target of both their own employer as well as the aggrieved. But that doesn’t let Steve of Mr. Vacci’s hook yet… As vile as all of these characters are, and there are lots of them to despise, there is something appealing about this protracted and often incongruous cat and mouse game. There is no subtlety, no ‘acting’ in Nomad Riders, only a form of direct address, a sort of yelling-in-the-face line recitation that gives the whole thing a constant sense of physical urgency. To the best of my knowledge (a cursory IMDB search) none of these people, from the writer/director to Thrust to any of the other principals did much more than this single film. It’s a confused and abrasive experience, but its austerity gives it a jarring sense of authenticity lacking in the big budget productions like those it invokes. Thrust and his cohort may be heartless unlikable pieces of shit, but at least they’re honest about it.
