The Angel Collection (DVD) 2003
Angel (1984)
Starring: Donna Wilkes, Dick Shawn, Susan Tyrell, Rory Calhoun
Directed by: Robert Vincent O'Neil
Avenging Angel (1985)
Starring: Betsy Palmer, Susan Tyrell, Rory Calhoun
Angel III: The Final Chapter (1988)
Starring: Mitzi Kapture, Mark Blankfeld, Kin Shriner
Anchor Bay Entertainment
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"You can just take a piss on one of those Hollywood stars! I wouldn't diddle you with your daddy's dick!"

"High School Student By Day--Hollywood Hooker By Night"--how could any self-respecting (or loathing) sleaze beast resist such an inherently base come-on like that? Hence the astounding success of Angel, New World Pictures' first big hit following the early '80s departure of founder Roger Corman for less greener pastures at New Concorde. Angel had a lot of winning factors on its side--the director was Robert Vincent O'Neill, who had established himself as a man with an ear for the gutter two years earlier with the legendary killer-pimp thriller Vice Squad, and had a lengthy pedigree in softcore filth starting with 1969's Wanda the Sadistic Hypnotist (he also wrote and directed The Psycho Lover). As with Vice Squad, O'Neill took his cameras to L.A.'s ground zero for sin--Hollywood Boulevard, which in the early '80s was boiling over with prostitute action of all varieties and ages amidst the flora and fauna of street freaks, junkies, religious nuts and petty criminals. And smack dab in the middle of this, he dropped his coup de grace--twenty-five-year-old Donna Wilkes as his fourteen-year-old protagonist, Molly Stewart, a.k.a. You Know Who. Wilkes (who'd previously endeared herself to trash creatures as Klaus Kinski's headcase daughter in Crawlspace) was petite and Keane Kid-eyed enough to pass as a freshman, but her pack-a-day voice and stripper build said something else altogether. Her compact package presents the dream girl of every nail-biting chicken hawk and lunch-hour grindhouse visitor--sugar-sweet enough to giggle over butterfly kisses yet also with that cold-around-the-heart demeanor that said she'd given more rimjobs in a month than Debbie Diamond and Lois Ayers in their entire sordid careers. Wilkes' casting was exploitation paydirt, people, and Angel delivered the goods.

"Come on, Molly, show us your whiskey biscuit!"

Like all great exploitation, Angel's tagline pretty much sums up the plot as well: sweet teen Molly is abandoned by her deadbeat mom and dad and is forced into hooking to make rent. Thankfully, she's got a "lovable" crew of street people to watch over her: monster drag queen Dick Shawn, bull dyke Susan Tyrell (as always, on the verge of exploding off the screen), and senile ex-cowboy star Rory Calhoun (himself just one year away from trash greatness as Farmer Vincent in Motel Hell). Life isn't too bad for Molly-she's getting straight A's in school, and most of her tricks get scared off once they realize she's underage (with such a low batting average, why she just didn't give up hooking and get a job at, say, White Castle, is never quite explained). Unfortunately, there's a lunatic (John Diehl) on the loose with a taste for cutting up prostitutes, and gritty cop Cliff Gorman wants Angel off the streets. But after Diehl carves up a few of her friends, it's up to Angel to settle the score, and we're treated to the sight of a tiny underage hooker toting a loaded .44 in full pursuit of a Hare Krishna down Hollywood Boulevard (which, to be honest, is not as startling or unique a sight as it sounds in this town).

Behind the spatterings of gore and infrequent visits to the girls' gym showers, Angel is really nothing more than a souped-up, crinoline- and neon-draped revamp of a mid-Fifties juvenile delinquent movie. Angel is essentially a good girl who's going through a bad patch, and she's sensible enough to keep up her schoolwork and pay her rent in between $5 blowjobs. Her street pals are less freaks than well-meaning eccentrics with free-floating living situations-they look out for one another and would never, say, cut a friend's throat over a dimebag. Their existences seem fairly pleasant, to be honest-if it weren't for the psychopath and sourpuss Cliff Gorman, one might get the impression that working Hollywood Boulevard might be a more pleasant way to earn a buck than working 9-5 at Pic-N-Save. Of course, Angel has to learn that good girls don't pull trains for drunken Shriners in a station wagon behind the Holiday Inn-they go to school, get jobs and settle down. So it takes a few murders to push her in that direction-at least she gets with the program eventually.

The clash of old-fashioned movie morals and end-of-the-century sleaze is what makes Angel so watchable and likable, despite the howler dialogue by Joseph M. Cala ("Why don't you go home now and spank your monkey, numb nuts?") and O'Neill's by-the-books direction. It pretends to be outraged by the terrible conditions that Angel is forced to immerse herself, yet paints them as fun, sexy danger (O'Neill is quoted in the liner notes as saying that he was inspired to create the film after seeing so many underage prostitutes during the making of Vice Squad-God bless you, Bob). You get your cake and a glass of cod liver oil to wash it down, but the two cancel it out, and what you're left with is a full stomach. Not a bad way to end an evening, no?

Extra points for: exploitation vet Ross Hagen as a harmonica-playing yokel who utters the "daddy's dick" line referenced above; Tyrell, for being her own bad self and yelling "Eat my puff!" at Shawn; John Carpenter vet Peter Jason  as a loud-mouthed john ("You better be fourteen, baby, or I'm gonna throw you back in for being too old!"); the scene where Diehl, sucking a raw egg near a picture of his mom, gets so worked up that he smashes the whole thing in his mouth; the lengthy brawl between Diehl in Hare Krishna get-up and Shawn in full gown; and for the rare glimpses of such Hollywood low spots as the Cave (still there), a pre-renovation Roosevelt Hotel, Graumann's Chinese (before becoming Mann's and then part of the Hollywood and Highland monstrosity) and the Pantages Theater (now gone). Points subtracted for the sappy-ass romance between street performer Yo-Yo and Angel's buddy Crystal-thankfully, she runs into Diehl before it gets any stickier. Anchor Bay's DVD includes the original trailer and a couple of pointless deleted scenes (which are missing dialogue).

The success of Angel demanded a sequel, so a year later, audiences got Avenging Angel, which actually takes place five years after the previous film. Donna Wilkes was out as Angel, and in was Betsy Russell, who ingratiated herself to a generation of horny teens with her naked horseback ride in Private School. Sadly, Betsy offers no such repeat skin show in this film, which on the whole is lacking in the coating of grime that dusted its predecessor. Avenging Angel has our girl Molly hitting the books in law school, only to be forced to return to the Dirty Blvd. when her old cop pal (Robert F. Lyons replacing Cliff Gorman) is gunned down by mobsters in Chinatown. Molly dons her short skirt and tight top once again to track down the killer, with nominal help from a skeletal-looking Calhoun, Tyrell and a goofy twink named Johnny Glitter. O'Neill delivers more action in this entry, with a promoted Ross Hagen chewing the scenery as a hotwired hitman and a fairly tense showdown in the Bradbury Building (Blade Runner was also shot there), but Betsy, we love ya, babe, but you're no Donna Wilkes, and the special friendship between she and her street pals gets even more cloying than in the first movie (the situation isn't helped by some slapstick comedy bits). On the whole, it feels like a juiced-up TV-movie, designed to drag in straight-edge viewers curious about the first film.

Extra points for: the presence of biker movie great Bob Tessier as a tattoo artist, Playmate Lynda Weismeier and Frank Doubleday (the white chief of Street Thunder in Assault on Precinct 13); the reprise of the tranny-vs-killer brawl from Angel, this time with double the goons and chicks with dicks; Tyrell's Buzzcocks T-shirt; some nice shots of Chinatown, especially Hop Louie's restaurant; and Betsy in a nurse's outfit in order to smuggle Calhoun out of the looney bin (hello, nurse!). Points subtracted for a truly limp soundtrack (Bronski Beat, Split Enz, Blancmange-what the fuck?), and for the fact that the greatest line of dialogue from the trailer (which is included on the disc)-"When you get to Hell, tell 'em Angel sent you"-is NOT present in the film (again, what the fuck?).

The last disc in The Angel Collection is Angel III: The Final Chapter (which it actually isn't- Angel 4: Undercover was released in 1993), which should have moved the franchise back to its exploitation roots given the presence of former gay porn director Tom DeSimone (who also gave us The Concrete Jungle and Reform School Girls) in the driver's seat. But instead, Angel III is even more sanitized than its predecessor, with Angel (now handled by Mitzi Kapture, later in the cable tease series "Silk Stalkings") deep into her third career as a New York police photographer. Her coverage of a whorehouse bust leads her to a woman in LA who turns out to be her long-lost mother. Mom reveals that Angel has a sister who's hooking for a creepy pair of Eurotrash (the attractive half is played by Maud Adams from Tattoo and Octopussy), but gets blown up for her troubles before she can offer more. So it's back into short skirts and onto the streets for Angel, who works her way into the Eurotrash duo's stable via a porn producer, who casts her as background on a prehistoric-themed porn flick (the scenes on the set, with DeSimone himself as the harried director, are the film's best moments). Angel soon discovers Maud and Co's scheme-they're white slavers who sell off their girls to slimy foreigners. You'd think with a plot that read like the above that Angel III would've been a winner, but unfortunately, it's largely lifeless-Kapture is a good actress but completely unconvincing as someone whose teen years were spent as a hooker, and her sidekicks this time are similiarly DOA (comic Mark Blankfield as a former gay prostitute turned ice cream man, and Kin Shriner from "General Hospital" as a documentary director-boring!). There's a smattering of action, and a nice send-off for the mustachioed, Sasha Gabor-lookalike half of the white slavers (grappling hook in the back), but too much time is devoted to Angel's investigation and a sticky romance subplot. And the damn thing doesn't even take place on Hollywood Blvd. (most of it was shot in Venice). Donna Wilkes would've solved this case in half the running time and still been able to work in a couple of early morning dates.

Extra points for: the short-fused Latin pimp that Angel rolls ("I never mind picking up some new gash, but nobody gets a taste until I know it's sweet enough"); the savvy name-drop of the Mitchell Brothers by a porn starlet; the white slavery auction, which achieve a level of scary depravity that Joe D'Amato surely would have appreciated.

For sleaze beasts with a lot of travel miles who get inspired by The Angel Collection and hope to score their own jailbait pross in L.A., take heed: the sleaze landscape of Hollywood has changed considerably since the days when Angel prowled the Blvd. Most of the hooker action moved down to Sunset (just east of the Strip) before that scene was cleaned up in the late '90s (though around 5 a.m., Sunset still looks like Night of the Living Crack Whores). Nowadays, you can find plenty of ladies for sale in my neighborhood-West Hollywood-though they're more Dick Shawn than Donna Wilkes, if you catch my drift. You still won't find benevolent street people like Johnny Glitter anywhere in Hollywood-in fact, you won't find any street people at all now that the street is undergoing massive birth contractions that have so far yielded the Kodak Theater (a music hall so far noted for its complete lack of acceptable acoustics-watch the Oscars next year for a glimpse) and a hellacious shopping complex that despite looking like it was built by Egyptian slaves, still houses the same junk T-shirt stores and shit fast food joints you find in your own local mall. More than likely, the only glassy-eyed, shambling creeps you'll find on Hollywood these days are bewildered tourists who register visible disappointment at the fact that there aren't any movie stars on Hollywood Boulevard (guess what-there never were!). I wonder, though: does Donna Wilkes (who pulled a disappearing act from the movies a few years after this) come down to Hollywood around midnight, flush with nostalgia and maybe just a nip of Chivas Regal, slip on a pair of fuck-me pumps, and troll the sidewalks between Vine and Western for old times' sake? One can always dream.

-Paul "Still in Hollywood" Gaita