Switchblade Sisters

This girl gang exploitation flick plays like an episode of TV’s Happy Days hijacked by roller-skating revolutionaries. Maggie (Nail) is inducted into the Jezebels after proving herself in a face-off with Patch (Gayle). She befriends the girls’ leader, Lace (Lee), but has an enemy for life in Patch, a one-eyed Iago who sees that Lace’s boyfriend has the hots for her rival. It ends in a turf war in which the Jezebels side with black Maoist femme guerillas. Maggie’s a reasonable feminist role model, but the movie couples radical rhetoric with exploitation requirements quite shamelessly. The appeal here is to kitsch (anyone who gets off on bad acting, risible contrivance, cheapjack production work) and to academics (anyone sniffing a theory of gender in genre). Either way, there’s only limited value in such cinephiliac slumming.