Angel (1984)

  This is pure 80s cheese.  It's somehow both sleazy and prudish, poorly scripted, nonsensical, and feels like it manages to rip off every serial killer movie while predating most of them.  It also manages to spawn THREE SEQUELS.  "Angel" got more sequels than Iron Man.  You think about that.

Molly (Donna Wilkes) is an honors student at a prestigious Hollywood prep school by day.  By night, she walks the streets as "Angel," a tough but tender teen prostitute, with her best friends Mae (Dick Shawn), an aging drag queen, and Kit Carson (Rory Calhoun), former stunt double to Golden Age Western stars.  A killer (John Diehl) is on the loose, murdering prostitutes left and right and Molly/Angel catches a glimpse of him, making her his next target.  Can she balance being on a killer's radar as well as acing the big math test?!

This is bar-none one of the worst movies I have ever watched without the benefit of MST3K or Rifftrax commentary.  Surprise, surprise, it was written by two dudes.  Jury is out on whether either of them had ever talked to a woman before conceiving the idea for the script but one of them also directed, so he would have at least had to interact with the actors, right?  And I'm not even talking about tamping down on the jailbait hooker fantasy elements but just getting even one aspect of being a girl correct.  During the second of three unnecessary naked locker room scenes, a group of "high school" girls put cheerleading uniforms over their surgically enhanced "teenage" breasts and bounce boobily off to practice with not a bra between them.  I literally had to pause the movie and just wheeze over how painful that would be.  I get that sports bras would ruin your naked cheerleading fantasy, but Jesus Christ.  Any kind of support?

Molly/Angel is a hooker but due to the logic of 80s movie heroines, she can't actually have sex or show T&A or she won't be the "good girl" so she remains the most virginal hooker you've ever seen.  I'm sure this was billed as some sort of "she's so tough!  She has a gun!" but she spends more time crying about her lack of a father figure than she does anything else and SPOILER gets rescued at the end by not one, but two daddy stand-ins, while the gay supporting character dies because this is the 80s and we hate women and The Gays.  Seriously, there's another plot thread (again, completely unnecessary to the storyline of girl vs serial killer) where Molly's secret identity is discovered by high school jocks and her spotless reputation is shredded based on a rumor.  There is absolutely no reason to add this except to shame the character --and by extension all sex workers-- for earning their livelihoods.

This is streaming on Amazon Prime because we continue to live in the Worst Timeline but I got it through Netflix DVD because I didn't know that.