CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

DEPARTMENTS

PLASTIC MAN

REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS (New World Pictures)

by Jeffrey Morgan

In case you hadn’t noticed, there's a Plasmatics revival of sorts going on. Part of it can be attributed to the MOR (!) success of former Plasma Jean Beauvoir's Drums Along The Mohawk album, whose "feel the heat" was used as the hate theme in Cobra—but most of the movement has been spearheaded by no less a personage than that dumbsel of distress. Wendy Orlean Williams.

Just consider the astute career moves she’s made since the demise of the 'Matics* a single with Lemmy Kilmeister; two solo albums; ensuing Grammy nomination; photo ‘■spread" in Playboy (banned in Canada), and the starring role in the latest Tom DeSimone flick, Reform School Girls

The third part of the trilogy that also includes Concrete Jungle and Prison Girls, RSG is the story of the Pridemore Juvenile Reform School, where good girls learn to be bad and bad girls learn to be even worse. And none of 'em are worse at what they do than Miz Wendy, who plays a teenage lesbian under the auspices of bible-thumping warden Sybil Danmng That's right, this is a science fiction movie.

When the girls aren’t taking showers together, they’re catfightmg When they're not cat-fighting, they're wrecking their dorm And when they're not wrecking their dorm, they're lounging around in Fredrick’s of Hollywood lingerie and DOdies that would put Appollonia to shame.

How'd they get the fancy undies in a reform school, you ask? Hey, Pridemore is the place where Vince Neil served a six-month drunk driving sentence—and when he checked out, he left all his ctbfrm behind.

And speaking of bodies, Wendy’s is strictly a five-star performance all the way but, unfortunately, she looks as bad as she acts, she acts as bad as she talks, and she talks even worse than she sings—so it's no wonder that this flick flops from frame one. But then again, what do you expect from a film that locks Sybil Danning in a high collar dress—and keeps her in it until the final fade?

Anybody looking for a Grade Z camp parody is in for a shock because half of RSG is as numbingly serious as the films it purports to parody

And. although it's exactly this psychotronic sense of schizo which is fast making Tom DeSimone this generation's Ed Wood. Jr., it doesn't alter the fact that Reform School Girls is, in the worse sense of the word, trash (don't pick it up).

LOVE IS A ROSE

SID AMD; NANCY (Samuel Goldwyn Co)

by Kris Needs

No one hanging around the punk clubs in 1976 and *77 could help but notice the sad decline of Sid Vicious from menacingly-charismatic, fun-loving Sex Pistol to shambling junkie, lumbering from needle to needle with "Nauseating" Nancy Spungen clinging to his belt loops.

When the Clash played the Royal College of Art in late '76. Sid saved me from a certain beating at the hands of misguided rugby-playing rednecks who thought (seeing my then-unusual spikey haircut) that I was Mick Jones. The following night's frolics were a Sid-steered Pistols delight. Six months later, I couldn't extract even a glimmer of recognition from Sid, as he slumped against the wall of the Vortex club. It later came as little surprise when I heard he had died of a heroin overdose in New

It was this fall from punk figurehead infamy to squalid smackhead besotted with love/lust (itself an early punk "no-no") for a girl loathed by his associates that fascinated director Alex Cox. Originally, Cox had planned to make a film chronicling the short-butturbulent career of the Sex Pistols, a band whose name stilt sends shock waves through the music jungle nearly 10 years on. But Cox wasn't there and never met the Pistols, so it could’ve hardly been a Great Rock W Roll Swindle-s\y\e filth andfury documentary.

Instead, Cox decided to center the film around Sid and Nancy, using their relationship as a jumping-off point for a part-fiction/partfantasy real world love story. Cox. who made his name overnight with Repo Man, told one U.K. music paper: "It’s a film about being in love—even though they were junkies." And one thing can’t be denied: Sid and Nancy were in love, against all odds. They couldn’t live without each other—and, in the end, they didn’t.

Gary Oldman plays a reasonable Sid, going from an exagerrated parody/caricature of the hedonistic, ultimate punk slob—spitting, cursing and swiping his way across the screen—to the wasted, stumbling wreck at the film's end (and he's at his best during the final scenes) Still, it's occasionally difficult to take seriously someone staggering through life's wreckage when he opens his mouth to emit a voice the spitting image of the gormless hippie Neil from The Young Ones U.K. comedy show.

Chloe Webb apparently got so involved with the part of Nancy, the New York junkie-groupie who clamped herself to the Virgin Vicious heart, that it got a little too close for comfort at times. She certainly is convincing... and nauseating with her grating whine, gale-force tantrums and name-dropping antics. Of course, something had to make her that way. but the movie only hints at this in scenes like the one where she takes Sici home to meet her family.

So love obnquers all, even death. Toward the end of the film, the Sex Pistols have dissolved in acrimony, Sid's lost his friends (most notably Johnny Rotten, who refuses to have anything to do with Nancy), and his solo career is on the rocks due to his inability to remain upright onstage. All he has left is Nancy and the needle.

Nancy wants a suicide pact. Sid's not so sure, but during a blazing row, he snaps and gives in to hefV demands by stabbing her. Nancy dies, and by the time he’s arrested, Sid’s died inside as well. Conveying this feeling of pure love in a dirty world is one of the film's strongest points: Sid and Nancy kissing in an alley as garbage rains down around them, dr the torching final scene in which Sid goes for a last pizza and then joins a white-clad Nancy in the back of a heaven-bound Checker cab.

The film’s not a total success. though. Scenes jump about so much that anyone unfamiliar with the Pistols’ history wilt be left rather befuddled. And if you were "there,” It’s easy to get indignant about factual inaccuracies. although that's not really the point. I've also had a chance to read the original script, and it seems that they cut out some good bits for the final production, such as Johnny Rotten's bitter sadness about losing his old mate to the clutches of Nancy and drugs. And sometimes the film seems to be about nothing more than two people who were totally out •

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