1989 was a banner year for producers Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi. After a falling out with Ronald Gilchrist at City Lights Entertainment, the two formed PM Entertainment and began cranking out wonderfully inept direct-to-video movies. They released seven movies that first year, and distributed two more. Three of those movies were ersatz neo-noir Los Angeles thrillers featuring Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, whom older readers will remember as Freddie ‘Boom Boom’ Washington from Welcome Back, Kotter. The relationship with Hilton-Jacobs was so worthwhile, in fact, that PM tapped him to direct. Written alongside Raymond Martino and Merhi, Hilton-Jacobs helmed Angels of the City, the story of a sorority initiation gone wrong.
Kelly Galindo and Cynthia Cheston star as Cathy and Wendy, a pair of college students at an unnamed Los Angeles university that looks suspiciously like the University of Southern California. One of their professors has given the class a sort of urban anthropological assignment. Over the weekend, they are to interview someone familiar with the streets, whether that be a bus driver, a homeless person, a bartender, etc.
The girls’ spoiled boyfriends, Mick and Richie (Brian Ochse and Rusty Gray), decide to go with a street hooker, to mixed results. More on that later. The girls, meanwhile, push their task to the side, because it’s time for their sorority initiation. In order to gain admission, they have to dress up like hookers and get a hundred bucks from a John. They don’t have to seal the deal, but they do have to get the money. It’s a silly idea in a movie full of them. They could have just disappeared from campus for a couple of hours and withdrawn money from an ATM, but then we wouldn’t have a movie.
The streets are a tough place. While Cathy and Wendy are cosplaying as prostitutes, two pimps, Lee and Gold (Renny Stroud and Michael Ferrare), are battling over turf. Lee has been going around killing Gold’s bitches, and Gold decides the best way to force a meet to work things out is to kidnap a couple of Lee’s girls. In a case of mistaken identity, Gold snatches up Cathy and Wendy. Much violence follows, and Cathy and Wendy find themselves lost in the big bad city in the middle of the night.
Meanwhile, Mick and Richie are in trouble with Detective Jon Chance (Hilton-Jacobs, in a short reprise of his role from earlier PM release L.A. Heat). The hooker they interviewed for their assignment, and slept with, was one of the girls Lee murdered. Clues left behind lead Chance to Mick and Richie, and then that’s it. No more Chance, no more murder investigation. The film sets up as if Chance will set off into the city and rescue Cathy and Wendy, but that doesn’t happen. This entire subplot with the douchey boyfriends has no effect whatsoever on the main story, and could be excised, as the main plot resolves on its own.
There is a final chase, a shootout, and a fiery explosion. Denouement. But then, one might notice the movie still has twenty minutes left. Without warning it’s three months after the main events of the plot, and only then are things wrapped up. This epilogue is just one of the many storytelling foibles in this flick. Remember the assignment the girls ignored? Well, they actually didn’t ignore it. In a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ scene, a girl in a stonewashed Canadian tuxedo steps out of the shadows for about thirty seconds in the middle act to help out Cathy and Wendy, then she’s gone. Near the end of the movie, she turns out to be the girls’ interview subject, and we learn of her backstory and eventual salvation. Again, nothing to do with the main story, other than, perhaps, Hilton-Jacobs remembering that he left that minor thread unresolved.
Shitty filmmaking will be apparent to viewers. This flick was shot on videotape. The acting stinks. Sets are underdressed. Sound is muddy. The music, including songs by Hilton-Jacobs and supporting cast member Jastereo Coviare, evoke mirthful humor. But it’s the nonsensical storytelling that dominates this movie. It just doesn’t make sense. That said, we like this kind of stuff here at Missile Test.
Angels of the City is not a movie gone wrong. This is exactly what Hilton-Jacobs, and PM, were capable of. This is the best they could do, and it’s hilarious. The effort was not enough to get it into the top half of the Shitty Movie Sundays Watchability Index, though. Angels of the City settles into the #305 spot, displacing Attack of the Crab Monsters.