Archetypal New World low budget trash, Angel is, despite its dubious theme, rather good fun, if only the most borderline of horror. It’s not by any standards a particularly good film but it is a ruthlessly efficient example of what the American exploitation B-movie was up to in the mid-1980s. Directed by Robert Vincent O’Neill, who co-wrote the script with Joseph M. Cala, it kicked off a short franchise, one that remained resolutely low brow and under-achieving to the bitter end.
In this first film, extremely bright 15-year-old high school student Molly Stewart is forced to fend for herself after her mother dies and her father abandons her and takes to prostituting herself on Hollywood Boulevard using the alias Angel. But a necrophiliac serial killer, Billy Boy (John Diehl) is on the loose targeting hookers and when Angel witnesses one of his killings, her life is put in extreme danger. She’s protected by her marginalised friends – down on his uppers former silent movie cowboy star Kit Carson (Rory Calhoun), her lesbian artist landlady Solly (Susan Tyrell), transvestite Mae (Dick Shawn), street performer Yoyo Charlie (Steven M. Porter) – and a detective (Cliff Gorman) determined to get her back on the straight and narrow.
O’Neill and Cala invest the clapped out scenario with enough wrinkles to keep the attention of all but the most jaded of exploitation watchers. The egg obsessed Billy Boy’s penchant disguising himself as a Hare Krishna and his bare knuckle fight with Mae, decked out in a cocktail dress, lend the proceedings a bizarre sense of humour that saves an otherwise routine thriller. The proceedings are spiced with genuine location footage shot on Hollywood Boulevard, adding a sort of time capsule quality to the film, offering a glimpse of the less salubrious corners of one of Los Angeles’ most famous thoroughfares. It gives the film a patina of sleaze that, despite its rather tacky storyline, it surprisingly lacks elsewhere – nudity is kept to a minimum and the killings are infrequent and bloodless.
Donna Wilkes does what she can with the dual role of Molly and Angel but at the age of 25 is just a bit too mature to carry off a 15 year old with any real conviction and really doesn’t convince as a tough, street-hardened prostitute. The rest of the cast is a hoot though, particularly Gorman, giving something extra to the tired role of tough-cop-with-a-heart-of-gold, Elaine Giftos as an off-the-wall school counsellor and particularly comedian Shawn as the two-fisted, Mae West-obsessed transvestite.
With few pretensions to be anything else, Angel is pure exploitation through and through and is virtually impossible to analyse in any real depth – not that O’Neill and co would wish it any other way one suspects. O’Neill had a track record in the genre, having directed The Psycho Lover (1970), Blood Mania (1970) and Wonder Women (1973) as well as writing The Mighty Gorga (1969) for David L. Hewitt and Vice Squad (1982) for Gary Sherman, a film which shares some DNA with Angel. And Angel is exactly what you’d expect from a man with such a track record – it’s simply a knowing, often fun send-up of the psycho-slasher movies that proliferated in the early 1980s, neatly – and amusingly – reversing traditional stalk ‘n’ slash stereotypes. In the hysterical finale, a terrified Billy Boy flees in panic as Molly – who elsewhere might have been portrayed as a disposable victim, to be killed off at the scriptwriters behest – closes in for the kill. Angel puts an unusual spin on the role of the hooker in the psycho-slasher movie, transforming her from disposable bit-part to avenging force of nature. O’Neill and Cala’s script deftly avoids any moralistic tut-tutting, presenting Molly’s chosen nocturnal lifestyle as not only the only way for her to survive, but also as being the only way she can connect with other people. Having been abandoned by her family – the exact opposite of the looked down upon street people she now mixes with – Molly sought and found solace with the marginals that haunt the grey areas at the edges of modern society.
The formulaic plot was reused for a trio of increasingly worthless sequels (none of which have even the borderline horror elements of the first film) which tended to unnecessarily cheapen the basic premise and which lacked Wilkes in the pivotal role. Betsy Russell took over the role for Avenging Angel (1985), Mitzi Kapture took over in Angel III: The Final Chapter (1988) (directed by Tom DeSimone) with Darlene Vogel and director Richard Schenkman seeing the franchise to its close in Angel 4: Undercover (1993). They were all box office flops but this original, while not destined for anyone’s Hall of Fame, remains a solid, unpretentious thriller.
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