Switchblade Sisters

Lace leads a girls' gang. The group holds the neighbourhood; it is tied to a boys' gang and answers to nobody. A new girl called Maggie arrives at the school. Maggie is afraid of no one. Lace accepts her at first and takes her in. Then Maggie stands out too much; the boys look at her and some in the group start trusting her. Lace counts it a threat. A member sets the two against each other. A war begins with another gang in the neighbourhood and Lace no longer knows whose side she is on. Jack Hill writes and directs. Robbie Lee, Joanne Nail, Monica Gayle and Asher Brauner are in the cast. It is an American production. Its structure resembles Shakespeare's Othello; the mechanism built through a character who feeds the jealousy is the same. It was made on a low budget and released within the exploitation distribution of the period. Years later it was reissued by the distribution company Quentin Tarantino set up, which brought it a new audience. The narrative does not build the women as extensions of the men; the group makes its own decisions and in the last section acts entirely on its own. The costume and location design record the street culture of the period. The dialogue is deliberately exaggerated and the acting distanced. Its limit is production; the technical quality is poor, the violence crude and some scenes uncomfortable. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies exploitation and cult films. Who it is not for: it is technically raw, the violence explicit, and the representation contested.