Streets (1990) + Angel in Red (1991)

It's the first time on DVD for both of these hookers on hard times!
Double feature! Streets, released before Christina Applegate became a TV star, shows a much darker side to her talent. Applegate stars as Dawn, a drug-addicted teenage prostitute living on the streets of Los Angeles. Angel in Red stars Leslie Bega as a teenage prostitute selling her body to support herself and her handicapped brother.




Tough drama looks at the plight of a young L.A. prostitute, who shoots heroin to get through the day, sells sex just to survive, and eats roadkill sometimes when there isn't anything else available. Into this futile existence is thrown a psycho killer, who gets off on raping and slaughtering the girls he catches on the streets. Sy is a straight kid from Sanata Barbara, who gets drawn into this scuzzy underworld and tries to rescue the young prostitute from the killer and her existence.

Christina Applegate stars as, Dawn, a heroine-addicted teen-prostitute fighting for survival on the streets of Venice, whose narrow escape from a psychotic cop (Ed Lottimer) armed with an explosive home-made gun and bent on raping and slaughtering runaways, initiates a bloody pursuit through the hardened world of homeless teens.

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Streets (1990) + Angel in Red (1991)

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After thwarting her attempted rape and murder, Dawn befriends Sy (David Mendenhall), a naive middle-class teen runaway and aspiring musician, who's chosen a temporary life on the streets for seemingly artistic inspiration. Dawn takes Sy under her wing and gives him a guided tour of her world, along the way their friendship of mutual dependence blossoms into youthful love.

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Dawn introduces Sy to an interesting array of characters. Most notably Bob (Patrick Richwood) a heroine dealer and eccentric metaphysical philosopher obsessed with the palindromic nature of his own name and its relation to his existence. Also look for a pre-Nog Aron Eisenberg for those Deep Space 9 fans, and 2nd Unit photography by Janusz Kaminski.

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"Streets" is a compelling look at the lives of the forgotten and abandon children forced into early adulthood combined competently with gripping psycho-killer action. The violence is superb Corman-esquire exploitation with a nice amount of gore, mostly due to the killer's use of a special gun capable of blasting material into oblivion. However one of the more violent executions is entirely off screen accompanied by a descriptively muffled bang.

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The performances are convincing and Katt Shea's direction is outstanding. There are many inventive sequences that utilize techniques that are often misused by others. There is a first-rate use of off screen sound and dialogue, especially Bob's rants, plus a gorgeous temporal ellipsis that brings the audience from one time to the next within the same space. When watching this I was struck how the image of the motorcycle cop hunting down the innocence of a child is something that we've assigned almost icon status to the villain in Terminator 2, however this film demonstrated that same notion of a symbol of protection and justice twisted into the complete opposite -and a couple years before James Cameron's version.

IMDB Reviewer

Miki and her younger brother Robby flee their destructive home and find themselves in the towering metropolis, Los Angeles. There, they meet Sharkey, a pimp. Miki becomes infatuated with Sharkey and starts to work for him. Miki finds herself trapped in Sharkey's dominating world and must find a way to escape the nightmare.

Also Known As: Uncaged (1991)

I remember seeing this movie on cable in the 1990s. I loved it so much that I taped it.

McClelland is correct about the title of the movie. It should have remained Angel In Red. Uncaged is not just generic sounding, but plain old stupid!

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What I really liked about the movie is the characters. While all of them were flawed they were all believable. The writer of the story portrayed the streets as realistically as possible. The actresses portray prostitutes ralistically. The pimps are not stereotypical, either. All of the characters displayed could exist in any big American city.

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But what I really like most was the lack of any police presence in the film. The police are nowhere to be seen and as a result of this the story really takes off; why? Because it is the people who reside on the streets (Pimps & Prostitutes) that deal with the problems surrounding their lives-perhaps in the only way they know how.

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Uncaged/Angel In Red is Four Stars (In My Opinion) for the suspense and action as well as the well-written plot. I only wish it would be released on DVD. That is the real problem with the format of DVD. Only 85% of the motion pictures were ever released on DVD, as a result a plethora of small budget and independent films have been left out of the loop of DVD. This is a travesty. When VHS came out, 99% of all motion pictures were formatted for the VCR. This has not been the case with the DVD player.

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Leslie Bega really shines in this production. I was rooting for her character throughout the movie and felt for her in her wins and losses. She was kind to her friends, yet ruthless to her enemies, as a poor fellow finds out in the movie.

I highly recomend this movie to anyone that enjoys urban suspense and/or dramas. You won't be dissapointed.

A. Nathaniel Wallace, Jr., amazon.com

Special Features: Trailers for both films

Imagine my surprise as I'm scoping out Amazon when I come across two lost movies I was beginning to think would never hit DVD: STREETS, which is among my top 10 favorite movies, and ANGEL IN RED, another good picture. Both feature ingenues who were big on TV: Christina Applegate from Married with Children and Leslie Bega from Head of the Class. These films, made in the early Nineties, have taken 20 years to make it to disk. Frankly, I don't understand what took so long. Granted, neither is well known but there have been opportunities to cash in on these titles before.

Amazon.com

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