The Angel Collection (1984-1988)
Anchor Bay DVD (region 1)
Angel (1984)
d. Robert Vincent O'Neill; pr. Donald P. Borchers, Roy Watts; scr. Robert Vincent O'Neill, Joseph Michael Cala; ph. Andrew Davis; m. Craig Safan; ed. Charles Bornstein; cast. Donna Wilkes, Cliff Gorman, Susan Tyrell, Rory Calhoun, Dick Shawn, John Diehl (94 mins)
Avenging Angel(1985)
d. Robert Vincent O'Neill; pr. Keith Rubinstein, Sandy Howard; scr. Robert Vincent O'Neill, Joseph Michael Cala; ph. Peter Lyons Collister; m. Christopher Young; ed. John R. Bowey; cast. Betsy Russell, Susan Tyrell, Rory Calhoun, Robert F. Lyons, Ossie Davis, Steven M. Porter (93 mins)
Angel 3 (1988)
d. Tom DeSimone; pr. Arnold H. Orgolini; scr. Tom DeSimone; ph. Howard Wexler; m. Eric Allaman; ed. Warren Chadwick; cast. Mitzi Kapture, Maud Adams, Richard Roundtree, Mark Blankfield (100 mins)
Exploitation films come in cycles and are, like horror films, addictive experiences for the audiences they attract.
They are also both remarkable and problematic in their inherent moral ambiguity and willingness to embrace offensive conceits and imagery. Exploitation franchises have some of the same appeal as their horror cousins although they often have more claims to a least a rudimentary form of representative social document. Such was the case in the 1970s, the classic period of American exploitation film wherein Roger Corman and American International Pictures spawned a whole generation of American auteurs. In the early 1980s, however, exploitation films turned increasingly urban and even film noir-ish, producing such disturbing and bleak visions as The Exterminator, Ms .45 and Vice Squad. Into this rather despairing trend came the Angel trilogy. With a constructive and oddly feminist slant these films proved surprisingly popular and are amongst the better remembered, using exploitation to chart a misguided young girl’s eventual growth to both maturity and responsibility within an unfair world. The gradual way in which she masters her cruel and debilitating circumstances offered a rare positivism in the cynical field.
Angel was the product of scripter / director Robert Vincent O’Neil who when working on Vice Squad hit upon the idea of a kind of Lolita-esque prostitute.
Whilst sensationalistic, O’Neil treated the material with trepidation and tenderness, turning the film into a curiously restrained vision of child prostitution involving a high school student (Donna Wilkes) who has been long abandoned by her parents. However, at night she works as a whore on Hollywood Boulevard, fitting in to the gallery of assorted quirky characters who now form her makeshift family. When a serial killer begins preying on this community and her friends, she hopes to stop the sick killer even if this means that a kind policeman may discover her secret dual life. The filmmakers were careful in their casting, using the mature age Wilkes because of her childlike, almost pubescent features. With an unusual concern for moral integrity, Wilkes is never shown naked – indeed this trend would continue through the trilogy, despite the nudity of other incidental female characters. The film reacts carefully to the psychological stresses this girl feels as her two separate worlds threaten to implode, implying just how much she has allied maturity and an ironic escapism.
Donna Wilkes in Angel
What distinguishes the film is O’Neil’s sympathetic emphasis on the notion of community shared between these social misfits and outcasts.
In quirky character, the film finds a rare humanism. Thus, unlike in serial killer films with disposable prostitute victims, the filmmakers feel a real sense of loss at the murders. The film refuses to present these characters as trash and instead emphasizes their emotional fragility and their pleasure in each other’s company. It is in this sense of family that they transcend their limited circumstances: ironically, Angel is more at home with this nocturnal group than at school, where she has few friends. Angel’s dual identity is multi-faceted: it is at once the search for substitute parents (finally filled by the benevolent policeman as if to suggest that patriarchy has not yet completely failed this young woman) as well as the search for emotional and sexual maturity. Thus, much is made of the early scene wherein Angel puts on her makeup in preparation, as if this alone transforms her into a woman. The serial killer is the real outsider and pervert (incestuous and necrophilic), a challenge to the affection that O’Neil values about the street community. This sense of family pervades a film about a child whore’s sense of mature independence.
When Angel proved popular, indeed the first big hit for New World Pictures since Roger Corman sold the company, O’Neil returned to make a sequel.
By this time, however, he was apparently more interested in the plight of a former child prostitute. Thus, the child-like Wilkes was replaced by more womanly actress Betsy Russell, even though the actress was ironically younger than Wilkes. This added a sense of progression to the character and allowed for a premise in which the young woman, having put her past effectively behind her, must return to it to settle a score. In the plot of Avenging Angel thus, college student Angel returns to her Hollywood Boulevard community, which is still there despite the changing neighborhood, in order to seek out the killer(s) of the policeman who had helped her escape the trap of the first film. By avenging the wronged father, a former child prostitute is restored to the Patriarchy that at first failed her then rescued her. The central dilemma thus becomes that of a young woman still needing to confront her past before she can truly move on. Although the sequel recaptures the humorous spirit of family, Angel knows that she must eventually move on and the mark of the film is its ability with the bittersweet nature of this necessity.
The threat now is not from an isolated pathological killer but from organized crime, a type of threat to patriarchal order from within.
The realization that criminal capitalism would seek to exploit the street people’s sense of almost “innocent vice” here makes for a peculiar moral ambiguity. The villains feel contempt for the street people who are in a sense just lost, kooky innocents. Running through the joyous reunion plot is the idea that this street level vice is somehow pure, the film insisting on what it considers the innate moral quality of the so-called immoral subculture. It is only when vice is turned into a capitalist commodity that it becomes tainted and immoral: at least that is the idea teasingly put forward here. Vice is best left alone to the good people who will insist on it being a “safe” and valid practice. Angel herself now is capable of moral choice, having reconciled her initially dual nature and able to use the street-whore persona as a cover rather than as a lifestyle, although the film flirts with the notion that this alter-ego is still appealing to her. Avenging Angel lacks the raw conviction of the first film and seems often ridiculous and forced as the decision to treat it as a comedy of ill-assorted characters renders much of the original’s freshness rather trite.
Nevertheless, this sequel was profitable enough to prompt New World to develop a third part to what was now considered a trilogy.
Sadly, however, O’Neil (arguably the guiding spirit behind the originality and success of this concept) did not return. The franchise thus opened itself up to the possibility of creative revision from exploitation director Tom DeSimone, who had emerged from pornographic films into horror and such parodic sleaze as Reform School Girls. Angel 3: the Final Chapter also saw a new leading lady in petite Mitzi Kapture. It was also reset for its beginning scenes to New York City. DeSimone’s film is easily the sleaziest of the lot, with much nudity and an almost contemptuous misogyny. Gone was the sense of community as if this was somehow just an illusion, a surrogate as plot-wise Angel learns of her real mother’s whereabouts and sets out to find her. In this venture, she discovers that she has a younger sister, one who is succumbing to prostitution and even white slavery. For DeSimone, the plot and characters are primarily and excuse for lurid, grotesquely exploitative showmanship despite the analysis of what he considers to be the moral blight of matriarchal responsibility – also a theme in Reform School Girls.
Angel’s plight here is relatively straight-forward, her character now fairly set. Her adoption of the prostitute alter-ego is just that, and the film never captures that niggling ambiguity that on some level she may actually miss it.
Here there is no doubt that vice is evil, the film clearly centering on women’s role in their own sexual exploitation. Maud Adams’ character is hence reprehensible because she profits from the callous “sale” of her own gender as the idea of sexual commodification runs through this glossy, lurid little film – a feminist-paranoid vision of contemporary sexual entrapment in an immoral world. Angel’s desire to save her sister from the fate she had to endure thus reveals her as moving towards the restoration of matriarchal responsibility. Appropriately, this confirms the thematic direction running through the trilogy: a young girl failed by patriarchy is rescued by it, seeks to protect it, and then moves beyond it in order to assume the role of a proper matriarch – finding her real family in the process. In this, she has put her idea of community behind her and the sad thing about Angel 3 is that it never really addresses what this means for her on an emotional level, although it does suggest that by helping her sister she perhaps seeks to redeem herself.
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The three anamorphic widescreen transfers are of surprisingly good quality. The first two films in particular are a standout, true to the glossy neon-lurid values of the period but with an almost verite authenticity befitting a sociological view. Vibrant night scenes especially have a documentary immediacy, often in conjunction with hand-held camerawork. Daylight scenes have more stress on natural light, the comparison emphasizing the other-worldliness of night. Primary colors feature particularly well: also, details of setting and the extravagant costumes add to the film’s uniqueness and textured look. As mentioned earlier, there is some titillating nudity (at its most sensationalistic in the third film) although Angel is never seen fully naked. The refusal to sexualize her, except in the third film by which time she is an adult, is a curious and perhaps admirable choice although in so doing it avoids confronting the reality of her predicament (especially in the first film) and thus the disturbing suggestion that she may actually enjoy it. The second film is the slickest and glossiest of the O’Neil contributions in its concentration on the garish neon look of the city. DeSimone approaches the third film with a more comic book feel for tilted angles and gaudily colored compositions although it too revels in the contrast between sunny day and stylized night. Aliasing is noticeable in this transfer. In look it is the most artificial and unattractive and emotionally it is the least engaging: it shifts the emphasis from street prostitution to high-class call girls and the pornography industry (no doubt of personal relevance to director DeSimone) as a kind of self-conscious examination of cultural codes of so-called sexual sophistication. All in all, these are admirable and respectful transfers of films often dismissed as disposable.
Sound
The Dolby Digital mono sound transfers are equally capable, the first film featuring a score that brings in an aura of melancholia and sentiment, the second emphasizing the comedy and the third being more dramatically functional. Street sounds are always vivid when so needed and contribute a sense of excitement to this milieu that contrasts from Angel’s home and high school environments. Crisp details are kept in a realistic context, particularly in the first film: voices, ambient sounds and the score are the main ingredients in this mix, thankfully given a rather polished transfer although the initial mixes of these films are simple low-budget affairs, filling out their mono potential well enough. The first film makes particularly good use of its silent killer, denying the murderer a voice in a film about communication, sharing and bonding – it emphasizes his strangeness until the irony in his final words. The second film enhances the sound mix choices of the first and develops the background atmosphere, feeling cleaner and more vibrant, even in mono. It also features a far more peculiar score in tune with this sequel’s greater emphasis on humor. The third film is the least engaging of the trilogy on the technical level: although it too is crisp, the ambience seems merely functionally – a token stab at aural atmosphere. What is most noteworthy about the DeSimone film is its emphasis on the distinction between high and low culture and the corresponding (and corrosive?) allure of sophistication: a self-reflexive move from street-level authenticity to glamour. There are no major distracting flaws on any of these transfers as distributor Anchor Bay have once again proven themselves the best source for quality alternative cinema, including that supposedly most disreputable of genres, exploitation.
Special Features
There are only minor special features however. The first film features two trailers as well as three deleted scenes (without audio but shown with subtitles). The second film also comes with two trailers and a poster / still gallery whilst the third disc comes with a single trailer only. The foldout Box Set does feature an illustrated collector’s booklet which gives some valuable background about each film. Missing, however, is any real explanatory reference to a belated fourth Angel film – Angel IV: Undercover – perhaps since this film is not included in the Box Set. Although the three films included in this collection make for rewarding viewing, collectors and completists may lament the exclusion of this fourth entry.
