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Vice Squad (1982)

Dir: Gary Sherman

Sgt. Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) works in the Los Angeles Vice Squad and spends his time on the pointless task of arresting (and of course re-arresting) working girls.
But he’s also sporting a major hard-on for a psychotic pimp named Ramrod (Wings Hauser, in a career making performance) and is obsessed with taking down him down once and for all. A righteous cause that reaches new heights of obsession and anger when one of Ramrod’s girls, Ginger (early MTV Video Jockey Nina Blackwood!), ends up beaten and tortured to death.

In desperation Walsh pressures a hooker named ‘Princess’ (Season Hubley) into helping him trap Ramrod by threatening to bring her up on false drugs charges.
You see ‘Princess’ is actually a suburban single-mother who bulks up the finances with a spot of street walking while the maid looks after her little daughter (!) and Walsh knows she has too much to lose if arrested.

So with an obsessed Policeman behind her and an evil pimp in front of her ‘Princess’ has to avoid being crushed between them both as Cop and killer go head to head….

 

Opening with staged ,as well as ‘fly on the wall’, footage of pimps, perps and hookers on L.A.’s mean streets, while a stupendously overwrought slice of 80‘s cheese rock blasts out (sung by Wings Hauser, and with some fun ‘concrete jungle‘ lyrical descriptions like; “That big city monster just opened it’s eyes”….“Bang! Bang! Shoot ‘em up, talkin’about crime! Somebody just bought it in a neon slime! Everybody’s drowning in the neon slime”!), you just know that “Vice Squad” is not going to take the subtle route in it’s depiction of big city crime and sleaze.

The movie is a veritable banquet in fact of sleazy, low-life, criminals and societies helpless victims.
All the essential clichés to this type of movie are present and correct;
Super fly pimps in crazy hats and suits say things like “Get outta my face momma” (as well as announcing their social status with pride, “Hey man! I ain’t no junkie…I’m a pimp”!), high camp transvestite queens with badly dyed pink hair, tramps, smackheads, all ages and colours of hooker, runaways, dealers, muggers, psychiatric cases and basically every single example of inner city rot you could hope for.

We also have some great dialogue. Not just from Ramrod (who is full of quotable but nasty lines) but also from other sources.
A Black female Cop pulls a gun on a Black pimp henchman and announces “Blink your eyes, motherfucker, and you die in the dark”.
You have to also love lines like “Well , well if it isn’t Mr Pussy Posse” (when the Vice Cops appear, a phrase still used today even in London) and the conversations involving the sexual dealings (many of which were genuine experiences/descriptions by real prostitutes) are also memorable;
Client: “Have you ever golden showered? I mean it doesn’t hurt or anything”.
Princess: “Sorry lover I just went to the rest room”.
Client: “I have a six pack and a $100”.
Princess: “You also got yourself a date with Princess Running Water”.
And she promptly hops into the car! A scene that also shows that it’s money that makes the rules.

But what helps to keep “Vice Squad” from shooting off into laughable (though in bad taste) high camp is that despite it’s (now) dated aspects and it’s melodramatically beefed up clichés Sherman and the screenplay (by Sandy Howard, Robert Vincent O'Neill, Kenneth Peters and Gary Sherman) ensure that the movie fiction is always grounded in some kind of gritty realism.
A classic example is the ‘Pimp Stick’, a wire coat hanger folded around on itself to make a tube like shape, that Ramrod like to use on his girls. It’s a nasty idea and a ripe ingredient for any Exploitation film. But it’s also true, wire coat hanger ‘Pimp Sticks’ were frighteningly real to those working in the prostitution rackets.

The “but he loves me really” delusion that Ginger has about Ramrod (something also used in Scorsese’s masterful “Taxi Driver”) is also a sad truth as far as prostitution goes and many ex-prostitutes tell of their tragic belief that their pimps felt something for them and some were actually pimped out in the first place by lovers and boyfriends who, they self-deluded themselves into believing, were only doing it for the best.

It’s details like these when combined with the excellent performances, the tight direction (yet another good job by Sherman after "Death Line" and "Dead and Buried"), astute set and costume design, and the wonderful L.A. location shooting (superb cinematography at every turn by John Alcott) that ensure “Vice Squad” works as full-on, entertaining, sleazy Exploitation and as a genuinely serious and tough movie at the same time.

There is one rare diversion (badly placed narrative wise) into plain and simple humour though when a protective old Chinese guy proceeds to bitch slap and dish out ‘the chop socky caress’ to two very stupid Cops whom he thinks are picking on his lady friend! Thus proving that in the 70’s and 80’s any excuse will do to slip some Kung Fu into the proceedings!
A later ‘Wedding/Corpse’ fetish sequence is also blackly comic and shows just how varied sexual kinks can be.

The aforementioned performances are the film’s major strength.
Ramrod is a Cowboy hat wearing sadist with a Texas strut and lots of imaginative ways to torture women that disappoint him, and as such he is given plenty of cruel, nasty and amazingly unpleasant dialogue and Wings Hauser delivers it all with wonderfully controlled gusto that ensures Ramrod is a monstrously memorable creation for sure, but also a creation that never whizzes off into unintentional humour and so remains a genuinely frightening presence. A facet which is essential if the film is to really deliver the shock and grit it outwardly promises.
Ramrod is also one of the most consistently and brutally violent characters ever put on film and again, Hauser is to be applauded for essaying such a violent character so carefully.
It’s not just that every word Ramrod speaks drips with loathing and hate (with “Bitch” being his description of choice as far as women go) and that he’s also astonishingly arrogant in actions and attitude, but its that he’s actually got the psychotic balls to back the whole damn lot up.
A classic scene to illustrate this is when a raging, shrieking Ramrod defiantly stands his ground in front of a whole squad of gun toting Cops, while at the same time bashing his female hostage in the head with a bar stool!

Season Hubley (just off ‘Hooker Duty’ in Paul Schraders overly melodramatic but thoroughly entertaining “Hardcore”) gives a gutsy, likeable performance and she makes ‘Princess’ a powerful mix of hope and tragedy, bravery and desperation. She’s also suitably sexy, despite not having the traditionally buxom figure you normally find on movie hookers, and turns the charm on and off wonderfully while dealing with clients.

Swanson , in the less showy role, is also excellent and makes the hard driven Walsh a rough, tough and yet ultimately caring man who truly feels empathy for the working girls and he makes a suitably stoic, no-nonsense nemesis to Hauser’s monstrous pimp.

What may be surprising to some is the lack of explicit nudity, sex and violence in the film.
That is not to say these ingredients are not present, they most certainly are, but that they are generally restrained from a visual point of view.
Sherman instead opts to deliver loads of violence and sleaze into the film to ensure it literally drips with an extreme, harsh atmosphere on the whole but without actually showing too much in individual scenes.

For example, there are plenty of beatings and tortures but most are off screen and only shown in aftermath, thus leaving the extremely threatening build ups to them, and bloody consequences of them, to bludgeon the viewer rather than the actual hits on the victims themselves.
And quite simply the idea and the sight (plus obvious use of ) the brutally phallic ‘Pimp Stick’ is enough to curdle the blood without Sherman showing ever showing it being used for more than a single strike on a victim.
Only during the finale is the violence more on-screen, in your face and bloodthirsty.

Also the nudity takes in quite a lot of T&A to ensure something is always there to catch our attention, and to build up the sleaze factor, but full frontal shots are surprisingly avoided.
And the sex may also not be explicit but the fact it’s always kinky, rough, cruel and dirty means that once again the oppressive atmosphere of sleaze and grime is built up without any dips into lazy and obvious porn that could damage the carefully built up seriousness or cause trouble with the vapid and simple-minded censors.
None of that is to say the film wasn’t controversial though. The unflinching brutality of Ramrod towards his female victims, and the abrasive language used towards the female characters in general, caused a mild uproar and Sherman was accused of misogyny.
Famously though Sherman and his film had a few well-known champions. Not least of which was Martin Scorsese himself who infamously had a bust up with the President of Paramount/Columbia Dawn Steel at a Paramount dinner bash. Scorsese said the Academy had missed an opportunity in that year’s Oscar nominations, “The best film this year is a film that the Academy doesn’t have the guts to nominate”. Dawn Steel asked which one and Scorsese says, “VICE SQUAD”, much to Steel’s shock and anger!

Despite the heavy Pimp/Prostitute aspect of the plot, and the general nastiness and sleaze, the film is still at heart your typical hardboiled thriller and as such the second half of the movie plays more like your typical Cop on a mission/chase movie and as such comes across as more staid and slightly sluggish compared to the first half , as the Walsh and his squad race around in their cars and kick down doors in their hunt for Ramrod.
Luckily though some suitably wacky ’client’ sequences involving ’Princess’, some respectfully serious moments in the coverage of the prostitutes lives and Ramrod’s increasingly fragile grip on what sanity he has left help to keep the more wild (and even thought provoking) aspects of the movie ticking over nicely until we reach the balls-out finale that delivers exactly what the audience, by this juncture, is demanding it delivers.

‘Anchor Bay’ have released “Vice Squad” on a very nice, long anticipated, DVD so you now have no excuses not to enjoy this truly well crafted mix of nostalgic camp, serious drama, tough action, brutal violence, sleazy sex and even soulful and socially astute observation. “Vice Squad” may be justly famous for Wings Hauser’s fantastic, tour de force performance, but as you can see there is far more to it than just that.