Rating: C-
Dir: Sande N. Johnsen
Star: Diane Conti, Joey Naudic, John Batis, Linda Gale
While pretty dismal as a movie, this does provide a fascinating capture of what New York was like in the fifties. For I don’t believe the 1966 date in the slightest, given that’s the year which musically gave us Revolver and Pet Sounds. The soundtrack here seems more like Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass, and in general, this is only a few finger-snaps and a couple of musical numbers away from West Side Story. The IMDb also states this is inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Um. Not seeing it either. If you squint hard, you could perhaps see some of Lady Macbeth in the ruthlessly upwardly mobile female lead. Yet the differences are far more significant than the similarities.
She is Terry (Conti), who has moved out of Manhattan to the projects in Brooklyn, and is looking for a new gang to hang with. She finds the Rebels, and quickly has her claws into its “prez”, Johnny (Batis), winning a catfight with his current squeeze, Angel (Gale), for the privilege. Though like all the violence here, this is less a fight sequence than a cinematic version of a cut-up poem by William Burroughs. Terri then discovers she is expected to let Johnny carve his initials into her flesh. She’s having none of that, and switches her affection over to his lieutenant, Nino (Naudic). This sets him on a collision course with Johnny, and the gang on the road to escalating violence, until the girls get together to handle Terri.
The problem here isn’t the script, or even particularly the actors: most of the latter are functional, and Conti is actually decent as the scheming bitch. As a bonus, this was the feature debut of Eileen Dietz, playing Ellie. She’d go on, most famously, to play the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist, as well as replacing Linda Blair as Regan in some scenes. For the plot, I was thinking it was all going to end up being revenge for something the Rebels did in the past, but that was too much complexity to expect. Instead, the problem is Johnsen’s apparent desire to extract every possible bit of interest from proceedings, and throw it into the dumpster, to be replaced by teens dancing.
Glorious poster though, despite the product not coming close to living up to the sordid delights it promises. As mentioned, the violence is borderline incoherent, and the sex is tame, if rougher than expected. Particularly nasty is how Terry sends Nino’s ex into a back-room to get gang-raped. But any time it feels like the film is beginning to get some momentum, here’s Johnsen to stop it with some more teens dancing. I did obtain some amusement from the martial arts themed pop song (“Start with a front punch!”), years before everybody was Kung Fu Fighting. However, if I’d paid good money to see this at the time of release, there would have been some severely slashed seats in the cinema.