If it’s been hard out there for a pimp in recent decades, that wasn’t always the case. In the beginning, there was Ramrod, the scarfaced, rockabilly psycho whose reign of terror on Ho(llywood) Boulevard anchors Gary A. Sherman’s Vice Squad, a definitive second-feature sleazterpiece (executive produced by, among others, Frank Capra Jr. and former AMPAS president Robert Rehme).
The film’s post-Urban Cowboy tagline reads “On the street, the real trick is staying alive.” And, as played by Wings Hauser as though he gargled octane between takes, Ramrod struts into the film with Tony Manero’s rapacious mojo, coolly hunting down a trifling hooker named Ginger (MTV charter VJ Nina Blackwood) who made off with his cut, nuzzling up to the locked door of her motel hideaway and oozing charm until she unlocks the door. “I cannot believe how stupid you are,” he leers, clearly not having any time for sweets, before tying Ginger down to the vibrating mattress, stuffing her mouth with single-ply toilet tissue, removing his suede Stetson jacket, retrofitting a wire clothing hangar, and scrambling the moneymaker between her legs into eggs benedict.
Vice Squad was initially conceived as an anthology-style series of episodes culled from the real-life experiences of an L.A. beat cop (the pseudonymous Kenneth Peters): a hard, direct look at a diffuse, scattered underground world. Somewhere along the way, the filmmakers honed it down to one linear narrative, effectively ramping up the intensity and using all other separate-but-equal subplots as indecently entertaining window dressing: tricks, tatted leathermen, transgender junkies, sugar pimps, chickenhawks, and septuagenarians who also know kung fu.
Season Hubley plays Princess, a mom-by-day-madam-by-night browbeaten into putting the finger on Ramrod (in every sense) for the murder of her fellow prostitutes, while wearing Detective Tom Walsh’s (Gary Swanson) wiretap. Entrapped and enraged, Ramrod busts out of the squad car, setting up the rest of the film’s one-night timeline as a two-pronged manhunt: find either Princess or Ramrod before they find each other.
An unapologetically violent and seamy flick, Vice Squad’s vices are its virtue. After all, cinematographer John Alcott—who lensed Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 magnum opus Barry Lyndon, quite possibly the most sumptuously opulent film ever made—maintains a surprising street cred by shooting every raunchy setup from a sewer’s-eye view.
Okay, so the mix of intense, bloody retribution and scuzzy, freakshow locations runs the risk of both encouraging a Travis Bickle-style street-cleansing “real rain” solution and commodifying street life—as does the film’s rich old pervert who hires Princess to pretend she’s mourning him at his private, Penthouse Forum wake. But Princess handily shoots down any such airs—and reaffirms the film’s lowbrow veracity—when she bluntly informs Walsh, her chivalrous would-be suitor from the right side of the tracks, that he’s “never gonna change the streets.” Especially since he can’t even afford her on his salary. It’s hard out there for a po po.
Image/Sound
Even grindhouse aficionados keep their pinkies in the air when referring to Vice Squad, and that’s due in large part to John Alcott’s truly dynamic, neon-lit cinematography. Sourced from a new 4K scan of the original camera negative, Kino Lorber’s UHD presentation is certainly the best the film has looked since its original theatrical release, delivering the finely wrought grime in a transfer that strongly emphasizes the fine grain of the 35mm source material. The color palette is steely, and the nighttime streets consistently glisten with fresh, photogenic precipitation. It’s a teeming, tactile transfer overall. The sound mix is available in either 2.0 lossless stereo or 5.1 surround, and both tracks are eminently capable of rising to the high bar set by Wings Hauser’s sound and fury as the vengeful, idiotic Ramrod.
Extras
Many of the extras here are ported over from, predominantly, the previous Shout! Factory release. The headlining new addition is a commentary track by filmmaker Steve Mitchell, who, despite having been brought aboard primarily due to his work on the documentary Wings Hauser: Working Class Actor, delivers a confident, wide-ranging performance that analyzes the film from every available angle. So informative is Mitchell, frankly, that his track is borderline preferable to the recycled track featuring director Gary Sherman and producer Brian Frankish.
Mitchell usually falls on the side of respecting Vice Squad’s professionalism above and beyond its huckster’s hustle. In Mitchell’s eyes, the film is ahead of its time in its basically humane depiction of sex workers, and he argues that its creators clearly had empathy for the characters. Contrast that with Sherman and Frankish, who offer up a lot of insight but also, conspicuously, also revert to jocular, cynical laughter over the film’s seedy locations and interludes. This isn’t to say that either side is “right,” merely that this release sets up a fascinating dialectic.
Beyond the commentary tracks, a bonus Blu-ray includes Shout! Factory’s roster of featurettes with cast and crew members, none of which involve Season Hubley or Wings Hauser (or, for that matter, Nina Blackwood). In one, Gary Swanson goes into great detail on the path that brought him to this role (including time spent learning method acting under the tutelage of none other than Lee Strasberg). In fact, almost everyone included in the featurettes gets more time than you’d expect, some offering monologues that run beyond an hour.
Of the sextet, probably the most memorable participants are actors Beverly Todd and Michael Ensign. Todd says she was given the choice of playing either an undercover cop or one of the supporting hookers, and her choice of the former gave her a meaty enough line that none other than Eddie Murphy parroted it back to her during a chance encounter. And Ensign, who’s best known for playing the snooty hotel manager in Ghostbusters, says that he assumed from reading his scenes in the script that Vice Squad was meant to be a Monty Python-style comedy. Aside from the standard trailers and TV spots, there’s also a hastily edited-together montage of then-and-now location comparisons from around Hollywood.
Overall
Sam Fuller said it’s impossible to make a truly anti-war movie, given how easy it is to glamorize the topic. Arguably, it’s nearly as impossible to make an anti-prostitution one. But Gary A. Sherman’s Vice Squad makes a scary, mean-tempered run for it.
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