Streets (1990) Katt Shea

Tough drama looks at the plight of a young L.A. prostitute, who shoots heroin to get through the day, sells sex just to survive, and eats roadkill sometimes when there isn't anything else available. Into this futile existence is thrown a psycho killer, who gets off on raping and slaughtering the girls he catches on the streets. Sy is a straight kid from Sanata Barbara, who gets drawn into this scuzzy underworld and tries to rescue the young prostitute from the killer and her existence. 

"Streets" is a compelling look at the lives of the forgotten and abandon children forced into early adulthood combined competently with gripping psycho-killer action. The violence is superb Corman-esquire exploitation with a nice amount of gore, mostly due to the killer's use of a special gun capable of blasting material into oblivion. However one of the more violent executions is entirely off screen accompanied by a descriptively muffled bang.

The performances are convincing and Katt Shea's direction is outstanding. There are many inventive sequences that utilize techniques that are often misused by others. There is a first-rate use of off screen sound and dialogue, especially Bob's rants, plus a gorgeous temporal ellipsis that brings the audience from one time to the next within the same space. When watching this I was struck how the image of the motorcycle cop hunting down the innocence of a child is something that we've assigned almost icon status to the villain in Terminator 2, however this film demonstrated that same notion of a symbol of protection and justice twisted into the complete opposite -and a couple years before James Cameron's version.