Director Katt Shea Ruben's string of B movies--STREETS is her fourth--for producer Roger Corman continue to herald a major talent in the making. Christina Applegate--almost unrecognizable here to those who know her as the curvaceous Kelly on the Fox sitcom "Married with Children"--plays
Dawn, a heroin-addicted LA teenage hooker who meets up with Sy (David Mendenhall), a fresh-scrubbed suburban teen who's ridden down from Santa Barbara (on his bike!) for the weekend with the vague idea of becoming a Hollywood rock star. His dreams begin turning to disillusionment pretty much from
the start, when he begins his LA visit by saving Dawn from a gun-toting trick who takes violent exception when Dawn refuses to deliver as much as he thinks he's paid for. Having been marked by some nasty fingernail scratches, the trick spends the rest of the film pursuing Dawn to get murderous
revenge. While they evade the killer, Dawn gives Sy a hellish tour of LA street life. And it's no place for kids, to say the least. Dawn lives in a drainage pipe with some friends, including a hardened 11-year-old she tries vainly to keep off the streets. News of another girl's murder in a motel
room inspires not mourning, but a fast trip to the motel to recover whatever usable belongings might have been left behind. It's at the motel that Sy learns of Dawn's addiction, "inherited" from her streetwalker mother, who has abandoned Dawn. After taking what she needs, Dawn delivers the
remainder of the cache to the "troglodytes," a group of younger kids living in another drain pipe, who, like Dawn, are sometimes protected by Bob (Patrick Richwood, outstanding here--as he was playing the elevator operator in PRETTY WOMAN), another goofy street kid. As the killer closes in on the
young couple, Sy is mugged, losing his wallet and his bike. In the meantime, Dawn is distracted by a trick who inadvertently puts her in danger from the killer, who has been eliminating her friends one by one in gruesome fashion while hunting for her.
In her first three films--STRIPPED TO KILL 1 and 2 and DANCE OF THE DAMNED--Ruben, along with her writer-producer husband, Andy Ruben, effectively mixed stylish genre storytelling with a realistic, sympathetic look at the world of bar dancers, a world rarely treated with either realism or sympathy
in mainstream American films. Here she turns her distincive attention to runaway and abandoned street kids, with equally effective results. Ruben's approach is an odd, but undeniably original, mixture of hardboiled toughness and streetwise humaneness. Her films have the style and feeling of
moviemaking on the run. Never quite polished or neatly resolved, they are intriguing and memorable precisely because they do not resort to heavyhanded, editorial-page moralizing. Open-ended and ambiguous, they are alive in ways that exploitation films rarely are.
A weakness of STREETS is that its thriller and realistic subplots are a somewhat uneasy mix. The motivation for the killer's pursuit of Dawn and Sy is simply a given based on scenes showing the killer to be some kind of sadomasochistic psycho. Ironically, in a less ambitious film, this might have
been enough. But here, Ruben etches such compelling, multidimensional supporting characters in the street kids that it's hard not to feel a little frustrated by the sketchiness of the killer, especially since the real perils these kids face every moment would have been more than enough to make for
a compelling drama. The kids' street life here resembles nothing so much as a kind of latter-day THE GRAPES OF WRATH, in which these sorry descendants of the Joads are cast adrift in a craven new world of hard drugs, hard sex, and harder violence. Part of nobody's idea of a kinder and gentler
nation, it's a subculture whose very existence should shame us all. Ruben doesn't point a finger, though; what comes across more strongly is the resilience of her characters' hard-edged humanity in a world not fit for animals. The Rubens may never get the call from Spielberg to write and direct ET
2; their vision may even be too tough and uncompromising to suit big-budget urban cartoons like LETHAL WEAPON. But they are genuine cinematic street poets, and, as such, are in a class by themselves. (Violence, profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment
