Savage Streets

I Like Linda Blair. Now, I’m not talking about sweet, innocent, help me shake this demon from my system, Linda Blair of the early 1970s. I’m talkin’ the bare-breasted and bad-ass Linda Blair of mid-’80s action movies and bad girl beat-’em-ups. That’s the Linda Blair that’s on my mind. And that’s why I found myself glued to the screen for a healthy double ‘D’ dose of Linda Blair in Savage Streets. 1984’s Savage Streets was written and directed by Danny Steinmann, the man responsible for single-handedly breathing life back into the now beaten, burned, shot-up, and worm infested corpse of Jason Vorhees. Danny Steinmann, Sean Cunningham and I salute you.

Linda Blair isn’t the only Femme Fatale wandering those Savage Streets of 1984. It just so happens that, within the brutal boundaries of this gritty, rebellious action flick, gates scream goddess Linnea Quigley, who is perhaps most famous for her graveyard tramp, tombstone striptease in The Return of the Living Dead. But this is not the Quigley most familiar to fans. This is a young, innocent Linnea Quigley, in a film that predates her ROTLD fame, as well as her blood red dye job and her necrofantastic lifestyle.

But back to Linda Blair. If you want to know how much starring in an intense, early 70s horror film as a demonic, head spinning, pea soup vomiting, possessed child with a Lifebuoy deserving mouth can change a girl, one need look no further than down one of the many dark alley ways in Savage Streets.

Let’s begin our trek...

The film starts off with an honor student type exiting his house to the tune of his berating father. Though he reassures his father that he’ll be back before curfew, faster you can say “stereotypical 1983 teen punk uprising preface”, he is doing his best Clark Kent behind the bushes. Leaving his discarded cardigan laying on the grass, his shiny black leather jacket magnetizes him to the back seat of a classic car carrying an 80s punk version of the T-Birds from Rydell High.

There are two main groupings of characters in this film. The tough-as-nails female posse, fresh off their raid on the “Love is a Battlefield” wardrobe, is led by Brenda, played by none other than Ms. Blair. This is a group of 25 going on 32 high school girls that would rather kick your ass than pass notes in class. Heather, Brenda’s younger sister, is portrayed by Linnea Quigley. Heather is the odd member of the group. Not only is she the innocent one (if her smile doesn’t give her away, her reserved clothing surely will), but she is also deaf. Brenda may be tough, but she loves her sister, and she’ll do anything to see that Heather’s virgin innocence remains intact.

The cool, cruisin’ dudes mentioned above are led by Jake. At first, Jake appears to be just another 35 year old playing a punk kid in high school, but it doesn’t take long for Savage Streets to tell us otherwise. It appears that this group of strongmen are the leading dope dealers in town, and they don’t take too kindly to payment plans. They also don’t take too many classes, for they do not appear to be enrolled at any sort of school.

After Heather’s near miss with the front bumper of Jake’s car due to a prank gone awry, Brenda and the girls discuss getting even. They decide to take the fella’s convertible for a joy ride, park it in a deserted alley, and abandon it, but not before filling it with garbage.
When Jake and the gang discover their trash filled automobile, Jake let’s out a primal scream and one knows that from this point on, things are not going to be pretty.

While perusing the locker room, collecting on overdue payments, the brutes encounter Principal Underwood. Enter: John “Put your back into it” Vernon. Now, this is a few years after his tenure at Faber College and a few shy of his space klown ventriloquist act, but he is in classic linguistic form as the familiar hard ass authority figure in a world full of irresponsible, trouble making minors. After their memorable confrontation with Vernon, they spot Heather walking across the school grounds and plot a little revenge of their own. What follows is one of the most brutal rape scenes in ‘R’ rated cinema.

Meanwhile, Brenda is busy scuffling with a rival in the girls’ locker room, so she is delayed in meeting up with Heather to walk her home from school, thus allowing time for the brutality to take place. When the locker room brawl is broken up by the stereotypically butch, way too happy to be amongst naked teenage girls, loud mouthed gym teacher, Brenda realizes that time flies when you’re playing pin the cheerleader on the shower spigot and it’s time to go find sister Heather. But Heather is nowhere to be found.

When the girls finally do find Heather, who was beaten and brutalized to within an inch of her life, they decide that actions must be taken against the offenders. Due process just isn’t good enough for this bunch and they decide that the law must be taken into their own hands if they are to receive the kind of justice they are seeking. It’s a deadly game of tit-for-tat, and this time they’re playing for keeps.

Savage Streets is not your typical "I Spit on Your Grave" (rape & revenge) meets "Grease" (over the top school-time period piece) type of movie. The entire thing is packaged in an over-sexed 80s-centric atmosphere that oozes underground nostalgia at every grimy crevice in your outdated VCR.

Now, “put that goddamn skeleton back where it belongs” and pick up a copy of Savage Streets instead.

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Remote Control

“Remote Control” has got to be one of the best camp send-ups of paranoid 50’s sci-fi ever made. It was written and directed by Jeff Lieberman, who served the same duties on earlier horror classics “Blue Sunshine” and “Squirm”. This film uses the convention of movie in a movie to advance the plot and give us some wonderful recreations of bad 50’s sci-fi sets, costumes and dialogue.

One of the best things about this film is how it captures that stereotypical futuristic 1980’s style of fashion and design, which are themselves a throwback to 1950’s sensibilities. When you watch this movie you find yourself believing that maybe the 80’s really were all about neon colors and plastic hair, almost as if Patrick Nagel had lived beyond 1984 and went into cinematography and set design. It’s the same way as when we watch those cheesy 50’s films and almost believe that was how the world really was.

As a follow-up to his acclaimed performance in the Oliver Stone classic “Platoon”, Kevin Dillon went to the complete polar opposite with “Remote Control”. It doesn’t seem to have hurt his career any. And it’s a good thing too, because he’s gone on to be arguably one of the more entertaining character driven actors of my generation. Here he plays Cosmo, a rough around the edges, wise-cracking video clerk extraordinaire and erstwhile world savior.

One day a salesman comes in and leaves free copies of his videocassette, “Remote Control”. All he wants in return is for the store to set up his display. The display is this big Interociter-looking thing with a spinning antenna, a mirror and all the trimmings. People seem to be strangely attracted to it, and the video becomes an unusually popular rental. This is probably because both the display and the video exert a form of killer mind control.

This is where things get weird. In the video, set in a 1950’s version of the 80’s, a couple are settling in to watch their own videocassette called, as luck would have it “Remote Control”. Suddenly, the people in the video see themselves on TV, hear voices and then kill each other. As fate would have it, this is exactly what happens to the people who rent “Remote Control” from Cosmo. He and his buddy Georgie from the video store stumble upon the truth while delivering a video to their customer Allegra, played by the sickeningly bubbly and always hot-to-trot Jennifer Tilly. They get away. She doesn’t.

Cosmo and Georgie take the blame and go on the run to find the truth and clear their names. Along the way they join up with Belinda, another customer that Cosmo has the hots for. She starts out as a hostage but has also had a run in with the killer video. Belinda is also being pursued by Victor, her sometimes boyfriend who is yet another video store customer already under the videocassette’s influence. They trace the tapes back to their origin, Polaris Video. There they find alien controlled workers making thousands of copies. It seems that everyone at Polaris Video serves the Master Controller. Cosmo and friends wreak havoc at Polaris and then escape on a mission to destroy all of the tapes before the whole world is taken over. It’s not going to be easy.

Are they successful? Get yourself a copy of “Remote Control” and find out. You’ll be glad you did. And remember, "You can't control yourself".

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