“Fair is fair!”

Recently, I saw the award-winning stage adaptation of The Outsiders at Oklahoma City’s Civic Center Music Hall. I’m a fan of both the book and the movie — but not the panned 1990s TV show — but I didn’t expect to love the musical as much as I did.

But what I really identified with was the Oklahoma-based “movie” reality. Sure, I haven’t been involved in a “rumble” for some time, but The Outsiders reignites the classic S.E. Hinton world of the Greasers, Socs and other undesirables, and makes them cinematically real, theatrically dangerous and, more to the point, literately bold.

That being said, these filmic outliers (who might be considered the lesser spawn of Oklahoma/Arkansas/Texas white trash) and their criminal foibles started with The Outsiders, with Hinton adaptations of Rumble Fish and Tex at the top of the list.

Which brings me to 1985’s The Legend of Billie Jean, a Texas-based trailer park statement of class warfare where a vandalized dirt bike is the catalyst for a Corpus Christi-set act of justifiable retribution through teenage heroics, innocence lost and telling the world that, to be certain, “fair is fair.”

One summer’s day, teen siblings Billie Jean (Helen Slater) and Binx (Christian Slater) are having a lazy afternoon at the lake when a bunch of well-to-do bullies steal and vandalize his beloved scooter. When Billlie Jean wants restitution for the damaged bike, the bully’s dad, Mr. Pyatt (Richard Bradford), tries to rape her, which ultimately leads to Binx shooting the worn asshole.

With Mr. Pyatt claiming Binx tried to murder him, they go on the run with a fellow classmate (Martha Gehman), as well as the very whiny girl from The Simpsons (Yeardley Smith). Looking for a place to lie low, they break into a U.S. senator’s house, with mask-maker son (Keith Gordon) falling in love with Billie Jean and agreeing to act as her hostage. Going back to Corpus, they take on an abusive father, have a simulated shoot-out with the cops, and and ditches Lisa Simpson when she gets her period because Billie Jean decided she has had enough.

It all cumulates with Binx getting mortally wounded and Mr. Pyatt’s roadside shop of Billie Jean merch gets vandalized, with every person taking up her cause, touting her trademarked “Fair is fair!” for the fairground(?) area, all while Pat Benatar’s hit “Invincible (Theme from The Legend of Billie Jean)” plays out as her effigy burns.

Sure, it’s not based on Hinton’s work, but the bare bones of a young adult novel is there … if there ever was one. Surely a Hinton novelization was put out during that year’s Scholastic Book Fair, right?

Either way, between destined-for-HBO fare like Supergirl, The Secret of My Success and mostly this, Helen Slater really turned my budding hormones in classist overdrive, with Billie Jean’s punk-rock redux making her a real relatable, impressive heroine and a tarnished sex symbol who still musses my hair with the dirty lake water.

Sure, it’s not a great movie, but it was one of favorites growing up in South and Central Texas, and a real turning point in my countercultural adolescence. It was a movie where, hey, all I had to do was pull out an oversized gun, rock a butch haircut and come up with a catchphrase to unite most of Texas in my cause. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

I admit I hadn’t seen the rape-revenge parable Ms .45, mostly because it has far too much brutal rape for my decidedly non-rapey tastes. With the new Arrow Blu-ray, I finally gave it a try and, well, it’s definitely one of the scroungiest, scummiest, rape-filled movies of all time. It scars me every time I close my eyes.

But I now understand why it’s one of the most feminist-coded flicks of all time, even if it didn’t mean to be.

With a truly skeevy atmosphere behind a low-rent, disco-funk soundtrack, mute New Yorker Thana (Zoë Tamerlis, Special Effects) is a low-level seamstress who, on her way home from picking up groceries, is raped by a nameless vagrant … and then, mere minutes later, again raped by a burglar. She bashes the burglar with an iron and, thankfully, kills him. Finding his gun among the debris, she becomes what the alternate title suggest: an Angel of Vengeance.

Exacting her bloody will, the traumatized Thana shoots a “Noo Yawk” guy point-blank in the head, in glorious color. Throughout the next couple of days, she shoots a sleazy pick-up artist, a stereotypical pimp wanting his money, and the total cast of The Warriors coming out to play (on their off-time) and getting killed for their troubles.

In the stunning climax, after lovingly kissing bullets as a preamble to a massacre, Thana lays waste to all the men at the work party, all to an ominously post-punk beat and while dressed as a nun. Man, there’s no way around it: The movie is about a woman who justifiably slaughters half of the most chauvinistic section of New York City proper, with a little left over for the outer boroughs. Where were these copycat murders?

Much like the big city it skewers, it’s an abrasive and downright abusive portrayal of a woman at the end of her noose, and we’re in her bloodstained way. A cloistered holy warrior in a world of unchecked perversion and wanton lust, Ms .45 is the type of film that should be shown to males on their 13th birthday with a chemical-castration prescription as a caustic topper. It’s the least we can do!

I’m glad I saw Ms .45, but I feel like I must volunteer at a battered women’s shelter or something, because it gave me feelings I must deal with — and soon. At least let me pay for your bullets, Zoë! —Louis Fowler

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Turns out ol’ Buddy Ebsen can’t follow a road that isn’t paved in gold bricks. Perhaps encumbered by his unruly eyebrow hair while cruising down the freeway, Ebsen veers out of his lane, causing a catastrophic traffic crisis one might call a Smash-Up on Interstate 5. This made-for-TV disaster movie sure did.

As California Highway Patrol cop Robert Conrad (Palm Springs Weekend) narrates, the July 4 holiday mishap involves 39 vehicles, forcing 14 people to declare independence from the surly bonds of earth. After the crash, Smash-Up jumps back in time two days in an attempt to invest viewers in the various drivers’ and passengers’ lives before the fickle hand of fate did its due diligence.

The soapy story threads include Vera Miles (Psycho) navigating L.A. single life despite looking like Nancy Reagan; a biker gang with Lolita herself (Sue Lyon) just one pair of leather pants away from passing as a PTA mom; and a young couple on the lam after knocking over a grocery store. As one of Conrad’s fellow officers, future U.S. Marshal Tommy Lee Jones turns in what may be his finest acting ever since the role requires smiling.

You know people tuned in to ABC’s Smash-Up on Interstate 5 just to see the titular demolition derby. Hopefully they didn’t switch channels after those initial minutes, because that’s a mere preview of the full, fucked-up mishap awaiting at film’s end. Cars and trucks collide, flip, fly, go willy nilly and so on, as do stuntmen’s rag-dolled bodies.

Director John Llewellyn Moxey (Circus of Fear) is no Hal Needham — see the latter’s Death Car on the Freeway for a superior primetime fender-bender — yet Smash-Up is excitingly shot and skillfully edited where it counts, with a stunningly affecting mix of slow motion and pauses. Buckle up! —Rod Lott

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After a decade of directing such saucy shorts as For Men Only, Pete Walker finally cracked the hourlong barrier with the Carnaby Street crime caper The Big Switch.

One night, professional ad exec and unprofessional blue-eyed fuckboy John Carter (Sebastian Breaks, The Night Digger) leaves a London discotheque with a lovely bird (Erika Raffael, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush). They head to her pad for a proper shagging. Whilst Carter first goes ’round the corner to grab some cigs for post-coital smoking, she’s shot dead by a hitman hiding in her shower. Talk about a case of the blue balls, mate — when Carter finds her body, no wonder he touches the gun left behind and vamooses without phoning the authorities.

Which is exactly what local gangster/club owner Mendez (Derek Alyward, Walker’s School for Sex) counts on. He blackmails Carter into a secret assignment with a beautiful model named Karen (Virginia Wetherell, Walker’s Man of Violence). Neither Karen nor Carter have a clue what they’re in for — and I ain’t telling, either — but they hope it doesn’t involve their deaths.

This sleek, quick pic is a real fanny-slapper, like a men’s pulp paperback come to life. On cheap paper, those hard-charging, easy-bedding heroes could trot through formulaic exploits dozens upon dozens of times. The Carter character could have fronted an equal amount of adventures, yet went no further.

I enjoyed Walker’s first true feature from start to its photo finish, a marvelously fun sequence that places its climactic chase and shootout within a boardwalk arcade and ghost train attraction. After the baddies are dispatched or discombobulated, the po-po show up and invite Karen and Cater to the station for a cuppa tea.

“Sounds groovy,” Karen says earlier in the film, to which Carter coldly replies, “It is.” They may as well be talking up The Big Switch. —Rod Lott

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Seven Snipers is one of those movies where you just know the first line of dialogue telegraphs — if not DMs — how the climax will play out. That’s standard op procedure for a setup so plain and simple: With a $10 million bounty on her head, former sniper Voodoo Child (Radha Mitchell, Silent Hill) is targeted for death by people from her past.

Having 116 verified kills over your career is bound to do that to a girl. Since leaving that particular skill set behind, Voodoo’s lived off the grid in the picturesque Australian countryside with a daughter (Annabel Wolfe, My Pet Dinosaur) bratty enough to skip school to bang boymeat.

One morning, a supposed real estate developer (Ryan Kwanten, Flight 7500) shows up at packin’ more than a fancy business card. One shootout — and bulldozer attack — later, Voodoo knows the next person to turn up for revenge will be The Dragon (Tim Roth, 2022’s Resurrection), so she calls former co-workers for reinforcement. Dropping in via helicopter, they also have stupid codenames, such as Milk (Ioan Gruffudd, San Andreas).  

I wish I could say Seven Snipers has more to offer than exchanges of gunfire while Roth scurries around in a shaggy grass suit for camouflage. But that’s all it is. Although it’s nice to see a woman, The Dustwalker’s Sandra Sciberras, in the director’s chair of something as male-coded as gun porn, the Oz action film is predictable, right down to trained experts exhibiting perfect aim … except when presented with the easiest, clearest shots, of course. Like everything in the characters’ sights, you see each beat coming from a mile away. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.