Vice Squad (1982, Gary A. Sherman) (Patreon)

38/100

I'm afraid I must once again disappoint those of you with a heartier appetite than mine for trashy exploitation films. Frankly, I assumed throughout Vice Squad that its fans mostly relish Wings Hauser's wild-eyed, borderline camp turn as brutally sadistic pimp Ramrod (Ramrod!), and expected to find sheepish defenses occupying a location somewhere on the so-bad-it's-good spectrum. Turns out a lot of folks—including Martin Scorsese, according to possibly apocryphal reports—consider it genuinely first-rate, so let me explain in detail why that I find that opinion not just untenable but downright bizarre. 

The script: Surely we're all in agreement, at the very least, that there's nothing remotely of interest about this movie on paper? It's not inherently a problem that the narrative consists of little more than "cops try to find bad guy before he kills woman," but there's precious little urgency until the third act; we're mostly just watching Princess do her rounds and Ramrod torture various people as he tracks her down, which would be fine were Sherman not oddly reticent to show sex or violence. Some john tells Princess his kink, and we immediately cut to Ramrod; he menacingly brandishes a weapon, and we immediately cut to Walsh and his crew doing realistic (i.e., mundane) detective work. I was so grateful for the old Asian dude who kicks the shit out of Mendez and Kowalski. (Also for the snooty chauffeur, who I recognized as Ghostbusters' snooty hotel manager.) 

The acting: Sure, Hauser's intense, but so's Jared Leto as Morbius, from what I hear. Gonzo energy per se doesn't necessarily impress me; Nicolas Cage was long my favorite actor because there's unmistakable thought and craft at work when he goes unhinged. You might consider that comparison unfair, but I spent all of Vice Squad thinking about the diner scene in L.A. Takedown, and how consummate pros like De Niro and Pacino retroactively make Alex McArthur and Scott Plank, delivering the same lines, look like they're in a bad high-school play. Here, Gary Swanson isn't bad, exactly, but he comes across as the bargain-bin version of William L. Petersen...and Petersen's pretty limited to begin with! Hubley fares better, for a while, but eventually becomes a shrieking victim. No character here qualifies as compelling, and Ramrod is memorable only in the way that some mentally ill person yelling on the subway lodges in the mind. 

The filmmaking: Hadn't previously been aware that D.P. John Alcott had a "one for Kubrick, one for the grindhouse" sort of career, shooting e.g. The Shining and Terror Train back-to-back (his other '82 film was The Beastmaster!), and I'll concede that Vice Squad captures Hollywood's nocturnal streets in all their neon sliminess. (Hauser rasping "Neon Slime" over the opening and closing credits is another aspect that makes it hard for me to take this film at all seriously, by the way. It's like a Spinal Tap song avant la lettre.) Can't say I found the film formally exciting otherwise, however, and some of the "action" scenes are borderline inept—more in editing than in composition, perhaps, but that's still ultimately the director's fault. I laughed aloud at the shot sequence when Ramrod briefly takes Princess hostage as he's being arrested early on...though, to be fair, that may have been prompted by the truly dorky shuffle that Swanson executes as he pulls his gun and attempts to take a tough-looking stance, as seen about 40 seconds into this clip. (Was the floor slippery?) Actually, the whole thing serves as a good litmus test: If you watch that and think that it looks good (as opposed to enjoyably terrible), then we're just not on the same page when it comes to low-budget schlock. I like mine Faster, Pussycat! precise. 

The "themes": Please do not ask me to consider this a gritty, downbeat societal autopsy on the basis of a final line ("I don't know why you do it. You're never gonna change the streets, Walsh") that comes out of nowhere, plus one of those hero-walks-disconsolately-away-as-the-credits-roll endings. You can't structure your movie around a raging psychopath and then act as if he's symptomatic of anything whatsoever. Marginally more interesting is the film's outlook on sex work, which seems remarkably non-judgmental for the era...or would, had we not spent the opening reel watching Princess with her daughter in scenes that have no function other than engendering our sympathy for a character about whom it was assumed we'd otherwise have trouble caring. In any case, I do not believe that anyone involved in making Vice Squad gave much thought to what it's saying, nor do I believe that it's unwittingly saying anything worthwhile. Apart from maybe "There's a reason why police cars have a heavy partition between the front seat and the back seat; try obtaining one of those." 

Totally ancillary question that I'll delete when I move this to Letterboxd: Toward the end, Walsh and his crew engage in multi-car surveillance, with a bunch of different vehicles picking up Ramrod at various points so as not to tip him that he's being followed. I remember being very impressed by a much more recent film that depicted this, but can't for the life of me remember which one it was, and it's not something that's easy to google. Anyone?