Angel

1984's first major release has one of the most notorious posters and tag lines of the decade. Gracing many a multiplex wall in January of 1984, right next to the box office where little kids and families waited in line, was this split-screen one sheet featuring back-to-back images of the movie's star, twenty-five-year-old Donna Wilkes. On the left side, Wilkes looks about 13 years old, dressed as a pigtailed high school girl with books wearing a sweater, skirt, kneesocks, and patten-leather shoes. On the right side, she’s a dolled-up streetwalker wearing a low-cut blouse, a leather mini-skirt, and high-healed red pumps. The caption reads, "HIGH SCHOOL HONOR STUDENT BY DAY. HOLLYWOOD HOOKER BY NIGHT. Her two worlds are about to collide. It's her choice, her chance, her life."

That poster sold a lot of tickets, but Angel is not the exploitation sleaze fest its poster was promoting. Far more akin to the 1976 Jodie Foster picture The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane than to grizzly thrillers about street life like 1982's Vice Squad, Angel is about as sweet as a film about a necrophiliac serial killer targeting hookers on Hollywood Boulevard can be. Wilkes stars as Molly Stewart, a fifteen-year-old honor student who attends an LA prep school and has lived alone since she was around eight years old in the home of an eccentric painter (Susan Tyrrell). To support herself, Molly transforms into a prostitute known as Angel and turns tricks most nights.

Angel is part of a "street family" who look after her and each other. They include aging movie cowboy Kit Carson (Rory Calhoun), street performer Yoyo Charlie (Steven M. Porter), drag performer Mae (Dick Shawn), and fellow hookers Crystal and Lana (Donna McDaniel and Graem McGavin). Angel's life is fairly manageable, but danger always lurks with every potential encounter, especially when this serial killer (John Diehl) begins to strike. That's when an LAPD Lieutenant (Cliff Gorman) enters Angel's life. Lt. Andrews is assigned to the case but finds no leads until one of Angel's group of friends becomes a victim. Angel does her best to conceal the facts of her living and working situations from Lt. Andrews, which only makes him all the more curious.

While this film is not some hidden gem, a rough diamond of a movie hidden under the dirt and muck of how it was promoted, Angel is not a bad movie. Part of what's surprising about it is the rather authentic way the misfits, runaways, outcasts, and washed-up former stars find each other on the streets of LA and become a surrogate family. The biggest shocker is the serious way May, the drag queen, is portrayed by the usually over-the-top comic Dick Shawn (this is the guy who played "L.S.D." in The Producers, a crazy Russian cosmonaut in the Jerry Lewis space comedy Way Way Out, and the hedonistic hippy son of Ethel Merman in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World! Shawn does his level best to create a fully realized depiction of his transvestite character that never breaks down into caricature. Shawn's May and Tyrrell's wacky landlady prove to be far better quasi-parental figures for Molly than anyone in law enforcement.

The film is notable for being shot by Haskell Wexler protege Andrew Davis, who would go on to direct a slew of successful ‘90s action pictures like The Package, Under Siege, and The Fugitive. Composer Craig Safan (The Last Starfighter, The Legend of Billie Jean, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins) apparently wrote the score to this film in less than a week. Angel spawned two sequels—Avenging Angel in 1985 and Angel III: The Final Chapter in 1988.