Angel (United States, 1984)

Watching Angel provides a window into the dregs of a long-dead genre: the low-budget exploitation thriller. Although this sort of film didn’t make it past the mid-1990s, it thrived during the 1980s when it was often used to fill out drive-in double-bills and populate shelves at video stores. Angel isn’t memorable but it follows exploitation tropes to a “T” and, because it was produced for next-to-nothing, it was able to make back its costs during its first couple of weeks in theaters and continue on to accrue a tidy profit. This led to a couple of sequels (neither of which was nearly as financially successful) and briefly gave schlock director Robert Vincent O’Neil a moment of near-respectability.

The movie isn’t quite awful enough to earn it a place in the pantheon of bad movie cult classics. Its “popularity,” to the extent it had any, came early during its life-cycle, while it played in the smallest auditoriums of 8-plexes. O’Neil never amounted to much as a director (he made the first Angel sequel and wrote both of the follow-ups before fading away) and, outside of John Diehl, it’s hard to find a recognizable name (or face) in the cast. Lead actress Donna Wilkes retired a few years later to start a family.

15-year-old Molly Stewart (Wilkes) is a student at a private high school in the L.A. suburbs. Allegedly living on her own with an invalid mother, Molly needs a way to support herself and flipping burgers at a fast-food joint won’t pay her substantial bills. So, by night, she joins the community of hookers plying their wares along Hollywood Boulevard. But the career of the prostitute, never safe even in the best of times, is especially perilous because there’s a killer (John Diehl) on the loose. The police, led by Lt. Andrews (Cliff Gorman), are having trouble catching him and his M.O. isn’t just to kill sex workers but to butcher them, violate their corpses, and leave them in pieces for the cops to find.

Molly, who hangs around with a group of colorful characters when she’s not a school, has become especially friendly with drag performer Mae (Dick Shawn), painter Solly (Susan Tyrrell), former cowboy movie stuntman Kit Carson (Rory Calhoun), and street performer Yoyo Charlie (Steven Porter). When two of her prostitute friends, Crystal (Donna McDaniel) and Lana (Graem McGavin), fall victim to the killer, Molly becomes aware of how unsafe her lifestyle has become…and that’s before her cover at school is blown.

During the 1970s and 1980s, it was commonplace for movie “teenagers” to be played by older actors. While 34-year old Stockard Channing in Grease might be an extreme example, that was more common than what Amy Heckerling did in 1982 with Fast Times at Ridgemont High by casting a 19-year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh and an 18-year-old Phoebe Cates. The industry tendency is evident in Angel. Although Donna Wilkes, thanks to her youthful looks, appears younger than her actual age of 24 (at the time of filming), 15 is a stretch. More laughable, however, are some of the no-name actors playing students at the prep school, a few of which, if asked for I.D., might flash an AARP card.

The storyline is tedious, following an expected trajectory with an obligatory ending. There’s no suspense and little in the way of atmosphere. The acting is generally terrible, often verging on unwatchable. And O’Neil spends far too much time trying to emphasize the killer’s twisted pathology. Two scenes in particular – one in which he sucks out the contents of a raw egg through a small hole (before smashing the empty shell on his face) and another in which he scrubs his naked body in a shower – last far longer than is necessary, making the viewer wonder what fetishes might fascinate the director. Nevertheless, despite the excessive creepiness surrounding Diehl’s character, he never becomes more interesting or terrifying. He’s at best a generic serial killer. He’s a lot closer to Buffalo Bill than Hannibal Lecter, and even invoking the latter name in this review seems blasphemous.

In keeping with the exploitation tradition, Angel checks a lot of boxes. There’s plenty of violence, although a lot of the gore is surprisingly tepid for the era. There’s some gratuitous nudity, although at least one instance of it comes from a corpse. And there’s a long “action” scene at the climax that seems to go on forever without much point (other than the obvious: ending the scenario). There are times when it can be fun to revisit a cheesy, poorly-made movie from another era, but this isn’t one of those instances. Contemporaneous reviews were contemptuous of Angel; it hasn’t aged in such a way that any 40-year-later appraisals should be kinder.

Angel (United States, 1984)