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"This is not a pretty picture... It could not be pretty and still be true." It begins where Cronenberg's Rabid ends, a lifeless babe face down in the alley with rubbish, the fruit of a rooftop scuffle. The mixed-up girl (June Kenney) runs through the streets and bumps into a blind man, "what is it I smell? Blood?" Dad (Damian O'Flynn) is a square's square and Mom (Dorothy Neumann) looks like Baby Jane pigtailed, suburban "normalcy" in an odd anticipation of Lynch. (Other parental glimpses include a frowzy paterfamilias smooching poodle-skirted slags and a slumbering flatfoot getting his gun filched.) Female gang members huddle under power lines, the leader (Fay Spain) kicks off a night-long vendetta. Youth and its tribalism, juvenile delinquents "made, not born," Tarantulas and Black Widows and Vandals and Vandalettes at play in a full blast of Roger Corman's glistening grunge. Altman is concurrent with The Delinquents, though the closer affinity is with Hill in Switchblade Sisters. The greaser beau (John Brinkley) lording over the underground lair, the big sister (Barboura Morris) negotiating her way out of the hole by dating the boss, the little sister begging for crackers in the squalid flat. The junkyard in an elevated angle right before a rumble, "so quiet and empty. It's like it's deserted. It's like the face of the moon." Not much of a choice for the heroine in the end, hope is a faint glimmer in a cosmos of grubby sets. "We are not doctors... We can offer no cure..." With Colette Jackson, Barbara Wilson, Sandra Smith, Ziva Rodann, Richard Devon, Jay Sayer, Richard Cutting, Ed Nelson, and Bruno VeSota. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |