"Vice Squad"(1982)d/Gary Sherman

"Bang! Bang! Shoot 'em up, talkin' about crime! Somebody just bought it in a neon sliiiiiime!!!" From the instant your ears wrap themselves around lead antagonist Wings Hauser's uneven voice, cracking, as it dramatically belts out the obvious lyrics of the title tune from tonight's review, you should already know you've got a minor eighties exploitation classic on your hands, and one that features one of the great deranged cinematic performances of the era.Nevermind that it was helmed by director Gary Sherman, of Raw Meat(1972) fame, or '70s supporting actress extraordinaire, Season Hubley, in the female lead, or even the appearances within by pioneer MTV vee-jay, Nina Blackwood, Fred "Rerun" Berry of "What's Happening", and a nondescript cameo by a nearly unrecognizable Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith.It's Wings Hauser you're gonna wanna get a load of in this one, trust me.After toiling on television crime dramas like Baretta and Magnum, P.I. for several years, his breakthrough role came in tonight's entry, in the form of a scumbag named Ramrod, who looks like he might be the illegitimate father of record breaking Detroit Lions' franchise quarterback, Matthew Stafford, if he was a coked-out psycho pimp that wore a turquoise cowboy shirt, drove a personalized monster truck, and terrorized his stable of money bitches with an unpredictable steak of debilitating sexual violence, that is.Hauser's Sunset Strip sociopathic slut-slinger effectively takes the cartoon stereotypical movie pimp with his ostentatious polyester evening wear and catty pimp slaps and sends him scurrying for the nearest street lamp to hide behind.Because of him, Squad is sleazy, tension-packed exploitative gold that'll leave you on the edge of your seat.Onwards...

Sorry, Nina, but the pimpstick didn't wanna see "I Ran", by A Flock of Seagulls twice last hour...
After seeing a lengthy title montage of the colorful pond life that made Sunset Boulevard after hours the sideshow it was famous for being at the outset of the eighties(no big deal these days, as any 3 am trip into WalMart will illustrate, really), we're introduced to "Princess"(Season Hubley), a single mother forced to send her tearful, young daughter off to stay with a relative while she overapplies her makeup and wears a lotta purple, pissing on strangers and getting her toes shrimped for cash as a Sunset Strip outlaw(def: sans pimp) streetwalker.She receives a distressing phone call from fellow hooker, Ginger(Nina Blackwood), who's bolted on her sugar daddy, a sociopathic hillbilly named Ramrod(Wings Hauser), who gleefully takes it upon himself to mutilate her money-making mound with a folded up wire hanger for jacking his ends (and not being as adorable as Martha Quinn), resulting in her premature death at the local hospital.Walsh(Gary Swanson), a vice cop, coerces Princess to partake in a sting operation to snare her friend's killer(by repeatedly shoving her face into Ginger's lifeless cadaver on a gurney), but Ramrod is no easy collar, headbutting the arresting officers with the whore's forehead, and generally making a nuisance of himself before being hauled off in an unmarked cruiser, where he cowboy boots one officer in the face and slaps a submission choke on the driver from the back seat with his legs(!), escaping into the night from the accident scene, unbeknownst to Princess, the target of his suicidal vengeance.Meanwhile, it's sex trade business as usual on the streets, and after wolfing down a friendly hot dog with Walsh, Princess is back at it, herself, turning tricks for amputees, attending mock funerals for rich old pervs, getting her piggies tooted on by wallflower foot fetishists, and robbed by finicky overweight convention attendee/johns, oblivious to the fact that Ramrod is on the loose, getting his handcuffs sawed off, and scoring the weapons that he plans to use in paying her back a thousand fold, from tattooed fetishistic perverts.

"Does Wings Hauser have to foot rest a bitch's head in, in front of the King, to get his point across?!! Well, DOES HE?!!!?"
From here on in, it's a race to Princess, with Walsh, laden with guilt over allowing the psycho-pimp to escape, filling the strip with a rainbow platoon vice unit to find her as she makes her nightly rounds, while Ramrod beats the snot out of one of her Asian colleagues, Coco(Lydia Lei), dumping her in the street like a bag full of discarded Burger King wrappers, and even removing her former sugar pimp's(Fred Berry) jewels with a switchblade in zeroing in on her whereabouts(I always wanted to see somebody do that to Rerun, unimpressed by his jiggly poppin' n' lockin' for laughs and silly beret on What's Happening, for the record.).There's a crowded precinct sequence, for those who expect that sort of thing in movies like this, complete with brazen white prostitutes(Cheryl Smith), sassmouthed teen smack-veins(Stacy Everly) handcuffed to benches, and giant negroid cops inquiring about the whereabouts of their missing paper clips.Then Ramrod snatches Princess up into his stolen vehicle and the film races towards it's commodious climax where Ramrod blindly fixates on laying the pimpstick treatment to the cash-for-gash thorn in his side, nonchalant to the vice cops that have him hemmed in on all sides.Will Walsh save his flat-chested new gal-pal before the monster mack can add her to the growing list of uppity bitches he's brutally iced just for kicks?How much abuse can Ramrod's turquoise cowboy shirt endure during his mad dash to final judgment before he decides to put something else on?Most importantly, once it's all been said and done, will we be graced with a reprise of Hauser belting out "Neon Slime" over the end credits?I'll leave the experience to you, the readers, this time around.Give it a look yourselves, would you, ferchrissakes...

Pimpin' Hint #117: Neuter Rerun with a stiletto to show bitches you mean business.
The gritty script was co-written by Robert Vincent O'Neill, the writer-director of the first two "Angel" movies(Angel(1984), and Avenging Angel(1985), respectively), interestingly enough.Most of you will remember Season Hubley as the Chock Full'O Nuts girl who gets pulled through the floor by the cannibalistic 'Crazies' in front of then-husband Kurt Russell's eyes in Escape From New York(1981), though she's also appeared in Hardcore(1979), the Humanoids From the Deep remake(1996), and various cash-in horror franchise sequels like Children of the Corn V:Fields of Terror(1996), and Stepfather III(1992).Wings, who supplies one of my favorite on-screen villains of all-time here, a long-time television staple, also showed up post-neon slime in John Bud Cardos' Mutant(1984), direct-to-video sleaze Bedroom Eyes II(1990) with Linda Blair, and recent horror-comedy, Rubber(2010).Sherman also directed 1981's Dead and Buried, Poltergeist III(1988), and even an episode of the Poltergeist:The Legacy tv series.For me, this one goes back to the cable box days, where I must have watched it twenty times if I saw it once.On the scale, Vice plays the lamp post three Wops worth, a ballsy effort, full of the realistic grit that fans of exploitation flicks crave.Recommended.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboy/psycho pimps that swim in the neon slime, like Ramrod(Wings Hauser).

"Raw Meat"(1972)d/Gary Sherman

You'll have to wait for my "Mind the doors!" pun 'til later on in the post(with Doors fans acknowledging and respecting my personal opinion,thanks), since most of you already know it's coming before we start.For years this title remained a rarely seen, admittedly dated little number indeed, until that marvelous new vista in home entertainment(digital versatile disc,natch) made it readily available for the horror-starved masses looking to finally screen c.h.u.d.'s British predecessor for themselves, myself included.What followed is a twisted little dittie with surprising levels of early gore as the U.S. title promises(released as "Death Line" in d.o. Blighty), that occasionally plods along just like its minimalist synth-heavy score as provided by Wil Malone, and examined in-depth by the L.I. Ripper on one of his glorious blogsites.Despite its pacing troubles, the movie offers interesting character studies by long-time cult fave Donald Pleasance as a skeptical-yet-street smart Cockney cozzer with no hatred for the drink, and genre maestro Christopher Lee in an enjoyably smarmy cameo, all directed by American Gary Sherman, whose other work we'll also come back to later in the entry, if that's alright with you lot.Tube filming(for you Underground historians and factual hairsplitters) took place at Aldwych station, which was in a state of disuse at the time, and Holborn, which was still up n' running, despite a disused Museum tube in the movie, mentioned by name.All-in-all, not a bad way to burn an hour and a half for horror fans hoping to catch something relatively unique in both story and tone.The story goes like this...

Cannibalistic British Underground Chappies: One man's cadavers are another man's(Hugh Armstrong) vittles.
After a political suit's attempts at procuring a bit of weathered-looking krumpet in a mostly deserted area of the tube go sour when they haggle over prices(she knees him where lemonade is made), he is suddenly attacked by an unknown assailant, who is interrupted by an incoming train that lets off Alex and Patricia(David Ladd, Sharon Gurney), an American collegiate and his British squeeze, who come to the man's aid, but when they return with a nearby bobby, the bloke's pulled a bloody Houdini, hasn't he?Enter Detective Sargeant Rogers(Norman Rossington) and Inspector Calhoun(Donald Pleasance), the salt-of-the-earth duo responsible for the investigatory procedures that follow the ensuing report, only to be visited by a mean-spirited MI5 agent named Stratton-Villiers(Christopher Lee) who matter-of-factly tells the policemen that their services are no longer needed for this particular case(in more sarcastically brilliant terms).Calhoun tells Stratton-Villiers that he and his partner will continue the investigation despite the agent's words(well, he tells him to fuck off, actually).Though the lawmen seem content to merely harrass the American student and his girlfriend to no end, even though they're the pair who brought the disappearance to light in the first place(what is it with cinematic cops and young people anyway?), the real reason behind the vanishing is much more convoluted and sinister...

Inspector Calhoun(Donald Pleasance)tells Stratton-Villiers(Christopher Lee) to "fuck off".Not very nice at all, is it, now?
The last surviving cannibalistic descendants of a small group of miners subsisting in a sealed off section of the Underground(trapped when a turn of the century mine collapsed upon them and the mining company simply gave up in retrieving any survivors and/or corpses as they went bankrupt) previously content to only eat each other as they grew old and sick, has taken to venturing out into the surrounding subway tunnels in search of the titular life-sustaining meat.One sickly pregnant woman, and one scabrous hulk of a man(Hugh Armstrong), neither of which would classify as "healthy-looking" under the medical scrutiny of many practitioners of such.The man resembles a Led Zeppelin roadie after one seventies acid trip too many, forever shambling after a tour bus that's long since been retired to blocks.Their subterranean digs are peppered with both the decaying remains of family members the man honours by showering gifts pilfered from recent victims upon, and the victims themselves, hung on hooks as morbid future food supplies, surrounded by scavenging rodents, and dimly lit by Victorian era gaslights.Bleech.When the man's vile mate finally expires due to disease(unidentified, but really, just pick one and you'll probably nail it), he takes it upon himself to blag Stephanie to replace her(when he isn't biting the heads off of rats, that is), leaving it up to Alex(who proves to be just as violent-prone as our sore-laden antagonist...who's the real savage,I say!) to pull off an exciting rescue at the finale.Mind the doors, indeed.

A different brand of 'terrifying':Lee playing a squirrelly MI5 agent with an unnerving smile.
Director Sherman would go on to helm the cult classic Dead and Buried in 1981, as well as Vice Squad, Wanted:Dead or Alive with Rutger Hauer, and Poltergeist III.Pleasance moved on to Tales That Witness Madness, The Mutations, and From Beyond the Grave after finishing this one.Christopher Lee?He only followed his cameo up with roles in The Satanic Rites of Dracula and The Wicker Man, while Norm Rossington appeared in the telefilm Frankenstein:The True Story, and later in my favorite tv series of all-time, I, Claudius.David Ladd was a seventies tv staple, while co-star Sharon Gurney disappeared off the radar after this film, despite her volcanically hot chelsea-esque hairdo within.Hugh Armstrong went on to a long career in British television, and an appearance in Don Coscarelli's 1982 sword and sorcery nod, The Beastmaster.Seek it out, give it a chance, and you'll most likely find yourself entertained by the final credits, if not feeling a bit peckish yourselves.Two wops.

"Mind the doors!"(I don't mind them, actually.They're okay, if not slightly overrated and very overplayed.)