Heat Street This amateurish, video-shot feature is a good example of the lower level of dreck that could get into the video rental market in the 1980s. It's sort of a 10th-rate "Death Wish" knockoff in which a retired black boxer's daughter is raped by "punky" L.A. hoodlums (they wear makeup more glam than Adam Ant, and pastier than the zombies in "Dawn of the Dead"), and his greasy white aging "Saturday Night Fever"-looking repo-man pal is enlisted to help look for the perps.
It's aaaaaalmost a "good" bad movie, but the energy level often drags and the performances are weak without being colorfully so. If you're really into cheesy 80s Z-grade genre trash, this is worth a look. Otherwise, it's a trash-cinema footnote you can certainly live without experiencing, as it's both dumb fun and a bit of a chore to get through. The posters who gave this a "10" surely must have been involved with its production, because nobody else in their right mind would defend this as more than a low-budget mediocrity at best.
If you're looking for an early video-shot direct-to-video howler, go with the crazy-silly 1982 horror "Boarding House." The ending here is notably lame, as if the filmmakers had simply run out of money to film the closing sequences that would have wrapped things up in a really climactic sense. Plus side: Technically, it could be worse. The photography and editing are adequate for this sort of thing.
