Angelic Trash

WHEN SOCIOLOGISTS LOOK to films in the year 200 to find out what high school life in America was like, chances are they'll be in for a big surprise. Sure, there are kids who still read Shakespeare and get turned on by multivariable calculus, but most of today's youth--or so modern filmmakers would have us believe--would rather sit around smoking pot and drinking beer than applying themselves to their studies.

Then the sociologists will happen upon Angel, New World Pictures' latest unsuccessful attempt at integrating cheap comedy with undressed girls and lots of blood. And they'll think, "Ah hah. Right again." But you see, the sociologists will have a problem. Because unlike The Last American Virgin and Private Lessons, where the protagonists spend their adolescence contemplating how to get laid, Angelis not the degenerate we wish she was. In fact, she is just the opposite: a high school honor student who can only survive by prostituting herself to fat, filthy perverts.

Surprisingly, the central problem with Angel isn't its theme, hackneyed though it is. Though several recent movies have focused on high school prostitution, and even more on crazed sex fiends lurking to kill them, none seems to have failed quite so tragically as Angel. The problem lies, ironically, in the director's attempt to legitimize the film by trying to make a serious social statement in between the trite dialogue.

It's bad enough, for example, that Angel (alias Molly Stuart), looks forlorn when riding the school bus to her prep school because she's excluded from the cheerleader clique. And its also pretty bad when she tells the school geek who asks her out that her parents think she's too young to date. But when her college counselor calls her in and tells her "There's more to high school than getting straight A's,"we've had about all we can endure.

THE ONLY THING more overdone in Angel than the cliches is the film's symbolism. It isn't enough that director O'Neil accentuates Angel's goodness by having her wear saddle shoes and bobby socks to school. But no, she also has to don pretty red ribbons, have a pink and purple bedroom set, and have an appropriately ambiguous nickname. And, should we forget that Molly is a good girl by her occasional use of profanity and her rather unscrupulous coterie of nighttime acquaintances who work the Hollywood strip, she diligently does her homework after each trick and (yes) even comes to hotel lobbies equipped with compass, protractor, and graph paper.

No matter to director O'Neil that Angel has managed to flourish (and rather well, judging from the clothing she wears) from the crazed sex maniacs who roam the boulevard. And no matter what, despite three years of rather profitable business, none of the vice squad seems to have ever seen Angel before. Such issues are peripheral to the more critical plot twist--the mad (what else) necrophiliac who alternately pumps iron and chops up young women after making love to their corpses.

In case we're unable to comprehend all this, the filmmakers are, careful to provide us with subtly suggestive foreshadowing. Should we have doubts, for example, about the inherent goodness of ladies of the evening, one of Angel's friends tells her customers she's studying to be an accountant. "I don't know about you girls, but I'm getting out of this town," she tells Angel before, coincidentally enough, the ominous music begins and she gets bludgeoned to death by the necrophiliac. And, in case we weren't quite receptive enough to realize that the necrophiliac's sexual frustration arose from an overbearing mother, we get the privilege of watching, the crazed pervert suck on a raw egg while staring at a family portrait.

Predictably, as in all poor-street-girl-wasting-her-life-away movies, this film has its heroes: the cop, who nobly dedicates his life to saving girls like Angel with lines like "You're living in a dream world, baby,"; the college counselor, who visits Angel's roach-ridden tenement in an I Magnan's dress to save the bright, ambitious student; and, of course, the strectfelk--including the protective transvestite, the pistol-toting imitator of Kit Carson, and the tobacco-chewing; gun-wielding landlord.

It would be nice to expect more from Angel than the run-of-the-mill locker room scenes and street chases Hollywood producers thrive on. And it would be equally gratifying to see a decent movie made about adolescent troubles. But even if Angel isn't able to do either, sociologists in the year 2000 should at least be grateful that it paints an accurate picture of what movies in 1964 were all about.