Back Street Jane

This is a black-and-white, 16 mm, do-it-yourself film noir by Denver's most famous low-budget film auteur Ronnie Cramer. It actually shows some of the same promise as some of Stanley Kubrick's or Sam Fuller's early film noirs from the 50's except it has a very late 80's plot with two sexy female wannabe criminals trying to rip-off a vicious female coke dealer and her two male accomplices. People that have seen this film at all dismiss it as a Tarantino imitation, even though it was made several years before "Resevoir Dogs" when Tarantino was just another annoying video store clerk. I actually met the director once back in 1992. He was selling this film himself at the time, but it was going nowhere because it was filmed in black-and-white. Unfortunately, after this film he had gotten involved in a truly awful project called "Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend" which was little more than a lot of shot-on-video footage of some not-very-attractive Denver and Lincoln, Nebraska strippers strung together by the most bare-bones plot imaginable. Still it got a glowing review from "drive-in movie critic" Joe Bob Briggs and was a big hit, and Cramer would probably STILL be making sequels to it if his male lead Andrew Scott (who I also met once) hadn't been tragically killed in a 7-11 hold-up. (Similar events might well have happened to Kubrick or Fuller if they had had to work in the 1990's DIY film market).

This film isn't as good as Kubrick's "Killer's Kiss" or Fuller's "The Naked Kiss" of course , but it's infinitely better than the other Denver noir, the horrible big-budget Andy Garcia movie "Things to Do in Denver When Your Dead". It's not wall-to-wall breasts like Cramer's other movies, but it does have a shot of star Sheila Ivy Traister (who I, unfortunately, never did get to meet) in her underwear that's worth all the stripper footage in the other films combined. She is very good and very sexy as the hard-as-nails coke dealer. The ending is truly shocking, even if it is not as effective as it could be due to (very)the low-budget. Cramer's band Alarming Trends does the soundtrack and they're not bad either. See it if you can find it.

Pretty depressing, but the acting and cinematography are superb.

For me, this film has been unforgettable as simply the darkest and most sinister and most degenerately-erotic - and yet most commonplace in its settings - that I have ever seen. I tend to have a particular appreciation for low-budget works, and this one requires little more than momentary use of a few parking lots, three apartments, an old car, one city sidewalk, and a stairway or two as settings. As additional props are required a little sugar to simulate cocaine, a baseball bat, and a small quantity of alcohol (could be cognac or calvados) for the end-scene "garce flambee dans la bathtub". The film, as I recall, was shot in black-and-white.

Films like this one urge me to acquire my own camera, a few friends, and start shooting one of my own. But the one time I tried, I couldn't get those friends to take the acting seriously!

Film Noir is definitely not a genre I am naturally attracted to, but this one is super-noir and will remain burned in my memory - a film I would rate quite highly, though I never want to see another like it.

When I saw it I was amazed that anyone could put together a film this slow and unprofessional anymore, the filmmakers seemed to know nothing about technique or pacing. Just a bad warm-up by some filmmakers that need a lot more lessons. Oh, and the story, when I could stay awake, wasn't of much interest. I would hold my opinion of the actors until they were actually in a movie.