Simultaneously cool AND cheesy!
I read an article recently that referred to ‘Walter Hill’s 80s rock n roll gang movie’ Streets of Fire and wondered why I hadn’t heard of it previously. If you are presently wondering the same thing then let me take about 500 words to illuminate you.
Streets of Fire is ‘a Rock and Roll fable set in another time and place’, at least that’s what the opening blurb says. For the record my best guess is Chicago in the musical 80s but background 50s – if that makes any sense. (If not Chicago then a city with lots of steamy backlit alleys…)
The action starts when a motorcycle gang lead by a vampirishly wan, vinyl wearing trannie pig farmer Willem Dafoe (you worked out why you haven’t heard about this yet?) kidnaps Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) – the Pat Benetar / Joan Jett of her day, whatever that day is – from the very stage mid-performance in front of her adoring fans and manager-slash-boyfriend Billy Fish (Rick Moranis), a smarmy and cocky git.
Everyone knows who did it.
Almost everyone knows where they took her.
But no-one has the courage or balls to head in and extricate Ellen from her predicament.
And really, who knows how to handle a gang dressed gayer than the Village People lead by a pasty transvestite plastic-clad pig farmer?
Handsome loner and former local Tom (Michael Pare), that’s who.
When Tom and his pretty boy James Dean hair ride into town in his big red stolen steed to save the day, a collective gasp is(n’t) heard throughout the land. After being reluctantly contracted to assist by Billy Fish Tom teams with a tom-boy named McCoy (Mare Winningham), who in truth is closer to being a boy named Tom than a tomboy.
Streets of Fire is as strange as it is boring – and it is pretty boring folks. The film might boast an unfamiliar setting but it all rolls out quite predictably, Pare is predictable as the tough guy cliché and Rick Moranis is predictably non-threatening as Billy Fish, though I don’t think that was the intent. Diane Lane gives it her best shot as a rock star, and she is pretty damn sexy in her onstage leotard-y type figure-hugging outfit. (Perhaps the strangest thing of all is that the occasional musical numbers injected into this low rent rock n roll opera are the highlights of a bland film.)
But without doubt the oddest character of all is McCoy, a frankly weird sidekick / inexplicable potential love interest. To describe McCoy’s appearance as merely ‘plain’ would be a disservice to plain women everywhere. As McCoy Winningham appears like a career mechanic with the comportment of a career gambler with a history of losing. Her inclusion does the film no favours – definitely does Winningham no favours with winning a retrospective Maxim cover – and given that it is the one memory that continues to pervade my recollections of Streets of Fire, is a pretty savage indictment of the rest of the film.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. For a film that so obviously wants to be seen as an ambitious genre blending affair Streets of fire is depressingly formulaic and dull. And THAT’S why you haven’t heard of it before.
