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"Bang bang, shoot 'em up / Talkin' 'bout crime / Everybody's swimmin' in the neon slime." The point of departure is Schrader's Hardcore, with Season Hubley back on the streets as a single mother moonlighting as Princess the hooker. Her friend (Nina Blackwood) enters trembling in a fleabag and exits demolished at the hospital, still claiming the love of the maniacal pimp who did her in—Wings Hauser in a masterclass of scum-bucket bravura, Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo in rockabilly jacket and stetson. (He manages to crash the patrol car carrying him and crawl out the shattered windshield while manacled, "I'm the devil, baby.") "Mr. Pussycuffs" the police sergeant (Gary Swanson) navigates the gutter while waxing philosophical. "There's two days out of every week I don't worry about: yesterday and tomorrow." A pungent distillate of grindhouse action, a luxuriant Los Angeles nocturne given seamy effulgence by Kubrick's cinematographer. "Nobody wants straight sex anymore," grouses the heroine shortly before hopping into a limo for a moneyed pervert's emulation of Belle de Jour. Gary Sherman's punchy technique is evident throughout, in the ominous truck that crosses the screen and returns in the background to stalk Hubley, in the raging reflection on the cracked mirror that cuts to the shivering silhouette behind a scarlet canvas. Just another night's work of tattooed leatherheads and kung-fu geezers, the vortex illuminated by Hauser's infernal grin. "The music, the violence / The sex, the sweet smell / I'm a stone-cold believer in the pleasures of Hell!" The sentimental gesture of a teddy bear in the ambulance is refused, it's got blood on it. With Pepe Serna, Joseph Di Giroloma, Beverly Todd, Fred Berry, Lydia Lei, Kelly Piper, Maurice Emanuel, and Michael Ensign.
--- Fernando F. Croce |