Savage Streets

Twenty-five-year-old Linda Blair stars as a high schooler named Brenda, the vivacious leader of a fun-loving group of senior girls who cruise Hollywood Boulevard and call themselves "The Satins." When a gang of local drug dealers viciously assaults her deaf-mute sister Heather (Linnea Quigley), Brenda sets out to exact deadly vengeance. Fiercely protective of her little sister ever since their father's death and pushed to the brink by the gang's subsequent murder of one of her closest friends, Brenda embarks on a Charles Bronson-like revenge journey armed with bear traps and a crossbow.

Blair is both woefully miscast and the best thing about Danny Steinmann and John Strong's grizzly, teen vigilante, rape/revenge exploitation flick. The slick but amateurish film amounts to little more than a nasty, sloppy bucket of cliches, suffering in comparison to the superior Hollywood-set teen vigilante exploitation picture Angel, released six months earlier. Still, Blair's transformation from tough-talkin' high-school chick to lethally competent avenging angel (even though we get no scenes of her learning the skills she wields in the third act) is far more satisfying and even realistic than one might imagine. When we think of Blair, most of us will forever picture the little girl whose head spun around, puking up pea soup and shouting obscenities with Mercedes McCambridge's whisky-soaked voice. But for a subset of movie fans, especially those who revere exploitation pictures where women kick ass and take out those who've done them wrong, the image of a mid-20s Blair backlit with a perfectly quaffed perm on a dark LA street dressed in black leather wielding a crossbow is one for which she'll always be equally remembered.