SWITCHBLADE SISTERS is from 1975, but I’m considering it Slam Evil Summer, because it was re-released June 15, 1996, thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s fandom and his label Rolling Thunder Pictures. It’s directed by Jack Hill (SPIDER BABY, COFFY, FOXY BROWN), and it’s his penultimate movie as a director (the last being SORCERESS in 1982).

I did not see this in a theater, I had to wait to rent the VHS, but it must’ve been a great time with the right audience. It starts off so strong with the wah-wah infused theme song “Black Hearted Woman” playing over a documentary-style black and white photo montage of tough ladies in a world of boarded up houses covered in graffiti. Establishing the landscape.

And then it says “Music by MEDUSA”? What kind of badass group is that!? (Apparently it’s frequent Roger Corman composer and lounge music pioneer Les Baxter.) I’m not sure who took the photos, but the credited title designer is Bill Levey, director of BLACKENSTEIN and MONACO FEVER. His IMDb bio says he was childhood friends with James Dean, hung out with Elvis and discovered Patrick Swayze (who he directed in SKATETOWN U.S.A.).

The titular sisters are an L.A. gang called the Dagger Debs, who are the girlfriends or female counterparts of the Silver Daggers (who all look around 35 but are meant to be high school students). The first Deb we meet is Lace (Robbie Lee, voice of Twink on Rainbow Brite), who’s introduced sharpening her knife at her makeup mirror before putting on perfume, then following a sleazy repo man down the elevator and leading her friends in cutting off his tie, stealing his gun and beating him up. Then there’s this cool starburst transition to a shot of garbage:

I mention that because 1) it’s a cool stylistic touch that signals we’re in for a treat and 2) it pans over to a newspaper headline about an ongoing garbage strike, a detail to show that life is miserable at this moment in time. Paul Schrader did the same thing in LIGHT SLEEPER.

Lace is adorable, turns out to be a meanie (cruelly fat-shaming Donut [Kitty Bruce, daughter of Lenny Bruce] for starters), but I still find her a compelling, tragic character, and the heart of the movie. She seems like she’s gonna be the hero until the Debs try to scare apparent normie Maggie (Joanne Nail, THE VISITOR) away from their favorite table at the burger joint Jobo’s. Patch (Monica Gayle, “Gepetta” in THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO) clearly expects her to slink away in fear like the other couple at the table, but Maggie defiantly spits soda in her face, throws salt in her eye, pulls out a whip like Catwoman, yanks her leg out from under her and takes on a pose like she’s about to fence the entire gang at once. We have a new champion.

Then the cops show up and they all get locked up together at a detention center where lesbian stereotype warden or whatever Mom Smackley (Kate Murtagh, WAXWORK II: LOST IN TIME) sexually harasses Maggie and waterboards her in a toilet. I noticed one of the guards was stunt legend Jeannie Epper (DOUBLE DARE), so I knew there was gonna be a scrap. It’s like on Scooby-Doo when there’s, like, a cabinet painted into the background but one drawer is painted on the cel, so you know somebody’s gonna open it. Sure enough, Maggie bites her ear.

Patch is the coolest looking one (she wears an eyepatch with a butterfly on it), but also the worst one, so she’s delighted by Maggie being tortured. Lace feels bad, though, and leads an uprising, so when Maggie gets out first she repays the favor by delivering a letter to Lace’s boyfriend, Silver Dagger leader Dominic (Asher Brauner, “Mob Thug #1,” STEELE JUSTICE).

I love that the letter isn’t more important than foreshadowing a later plot development, so it mainly serves to show that hellcat Lace writes corny, heartfelt love poems. A little girl at heart. But Dominic reads it out loud to his friends and they all make fun of it. Maggie is pissed, slaps him and calls him a bastard, so he follows her to her apartment and rapes her. Thankfully it’s not one of those old movies where she starts to love him anyway, but unfortunately she does just forget about it and keep it a secret even after Patch accuses her of trying to steal Lace’s piece of shit predator boyfriend.

First Maggie and Lace become good friends and do fun things together like beat up a classmate who makes fart noises and threatens the teacher. Lace declares Maggie a Dagger Deb, but Patch insists on an initiation: she has to steal the medallion that Dominic’s enemy Crabs (Chase Newhart, first assistant director of DEATH WARRANT) wears.

I don’t really get it but Crabs runs an organization called “Teen Post 12” and seems to be a hippie left wing type, but a real slimeball who agrees to talk to Maggie when he’s told she’s good looking. And his medallion has a swastika on it? Anyway she bites his dick, breaks through a wall with a chair, flips over a table, good stuff. But Crabs retaliates by shooting and raping associates of the Silver Daggers. On school campus!

It gets pretty operatic or Shakespearean or something. Lace tells Dominic that she’s pregnant, and he doesn’t respond well. Then a rumble at the roller rink turns into a mass shooting, leaving him dead and her miscarried. While telling everyone that Dominic was planning to settle down with her, she and Patch scheme against Maggie, who takes over as leader of the gang, kicks out the men, renames them the Jezebels, and embraces intersectionality by going across town to propose a partnership with the all female Black militia led by her old friend Muff (Marlene Clark, SLAUGHTER, GANJA & HESS). They took over a police precinct where they teach the Jezebels to shoot and they all attack Crabs and his crew with a car they armored up like it’s the post-apocalypse.

It’s fun that things escalate that much, but this is the story of Lace and Maggie, so it has to end with a one-on-one knife fight and an argument about who got Crabs to ambush them at the roller rink. Maggie is in the right, but it’s sad to watch her stab Lace in the throat. And then kind of awesome to see her make an unhinged super villain speech as the cops drag her away.

During Slam Evil Summer, Quentin Tarantino was red hot. PULP FICTION had been out for less than two years, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN had come out in January, JACKIE BROWN would be at the end of the following year. There was still great interest in the things that inspired him, he really was a tastemaker, and I think it’s really cool that he used his clout to exhibit catalog titles he loved. Unfortunately this was the last of the Rolling Thunder re-releases, after THE BEYOND, CHUNGKING EXPRESS, DETROIT 9000, MIGHTY PEKING MAN and SONATINE. But his mission continues today as owner of the New Beverly and The Vista theaters in Los Angeles, where I imagine he’s cultivated a more appreciative audience than the random multiplexes where these popped up.

I don’t see SWITCHBLADE SISTERS as the type of old movie somebody would laugh at mockingly, but some asshole always seems to find a way. I guess the most understandable part would be the action shots where women are clearly doubled by men. It was half a century ago, things were different.

The stunt coordinator was Bob Minor, who by ’96 we might’ve known from his characters in COMMANDO and ACTION JACKSON.

I know I enjoyed SWITCHBLADE SISTERS renting it with friends back in the day, but I think I appreciated it more now, with this beautifully transferred blu-ray from Arrow. I just like the whole feel and attitude, and the fantasy of cool, beautiful tough girls going through all this melodrama. It would be silly to say that the characters from this pulpy 51 year old drive-in movie are more complex than what we tend to get in modern movies, but it kinda feels that way simply because they’re allowed to be so messy. They’re sweet and they’re honorable and also they’re crazy scheming assholes. They’re bad people by any standard definition but also I feel for them. The formulas for creating sympathetic characters have become rigid enough that it’s exciting to see a movie like this that doesn’t even know those are rules it’s breaking. It feels very freeing to be able to accept Lace and Maggie and their terrible choices and love them anyway. Do you think I should get a Daggers tattoo?

P.S. Grafitti notes

I like what it says on the front of the former police precinct Muff’s crew use as headquarters:

Also what Jobo (Roy Engel, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS) apparently wrote on his burger restaurant after shutting down:

But the graffiti in the opening credits is the best because it appears to be real. There’s even some Dogtown graffiti! I wonder if the Zephyr skate team ever met the Jezebels?

P.P.S. The distinctive triangular building that was Jobo’s still exists as The Oinkster and was apparently in THE DEBT COLLECTOR.