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 They could have just disappeared from campus for a couple of hours and withdrawn money from an ATM, but then we wouldn’t have a movie. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Angels of the City”
This film was up in the air. There was much debate upstairs about where this film should be categorized. It is clearly a b-movie, but it’s also shot very well, by a cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, who would go on to win an Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Writer/director John Landis doesn’t have anything in his filmography that would make potential viewers think he had a movie like this in him, yet this film is gripping from beginning to end, and, while being steeped in noir tropes and cliché of the era, has moments of true shock and unpredictability. But, despite how excellent is this movie, I have to slot it into Shitty Movie Sundays, for one reason, and one reason only: Arch Hall, Jr.