Avenging Angel (1985) Review

Four years on, the protagonist is at university studying law, having been taken in and supported. Her former detective is killed. She returns to the boulevard, reassembles the people she knew, and goes after the men responsible.

The 3 is for a sequel that identified the wrong thing as the appeal. The first film’s asset was a supporting cast and a place, and this one keeps most of the cast and replaces everything else with a plot.

The single improvement is that the lead is now an adult, which removes the earlier film’s central objection and simultaneously removes the premise it was built on, leaving a film with no reason to exist.

That is a real trap and it is worth naming. A sequel that fixes the objection to the original by removing the thing the original was about has solved one problem and abolished the whole property at the same time.

The Recasting Problem

Betsy Russell replaces Donna Wilkes and the change is not a matter of quality. It is that the two performances are of different characters.

Wilkes played somebody frightened and improvising. Russell plays somebody capable and in control, which is a legitimate reading of a character four years older and is also a different person.

The opening also asks the audience to accept a considerable amount very quickly. Four years have passed, she has a scholarship, a legal career ahead of her and a stable home, and the film delivers all of it in a voiceover over a campus.

That break matters because the sequel depends on continuity of attachment. The audience is asked to care about a return to a place based on a relationship established in a previous film by somebody else.

The supporting cast staying is what makes the problem visible. Susan Tyrrell, Rory Calhoun and Ossie Davis are recognizably continuing, and the person at the center is not, which throws the discontinuity into relief.

Revenge Replaces Observation

The first film was a character piece with a killer in it. This one is a revenge plot with characters attached.

That inversion is the whole decline. The earlier picture spent its time on a landlady, a street performer, a drag artist and a detective, and the murders were a pressure applied to that world. Here the pressure is the subject and the world is set dressing.

The mechanism is a real estate conspiracy. A developer wants the boulevard cleared, hires people to clear it, and the plot is a sequence of confrontations working up a chain of command.

There is a genuinely good film in that premise and this is not it. Property development as the force that destroys a district is what really happened to Hollywood Boulevard, and the film uses it as a villain and not as a process.

The process version would have been the better film and it would not have sold. A developer as a villain can be shot, and a redevelopment plan approved by a city council cannot, which is exactly why the second is worth writing and the first is what gets made.

What Survives

The supporting performances are still the reason to sit through it, and Susan Tyrrell in particular is doing the same work in a worse film.

Rory Calhoun’s Kit Carson gets more to do and the material is better for him. The ageing actor who performs for tourists is given a sequence involving an actual gunfight, and Calhoun plays a man discovering that the persona has some use.

The shootout he gets is also staged with some care. He is old, is slow, knows it, and the film gives him a position behind cover and a limited number of shots instead of a sudden competence the character has not earned.

Ossie Davis joins as the new detective and is the film’s most interesting addition. He is played as somebody who has been doing this a long time, is unimpressed by everybody, and treats the protagonist’s plan as a problem and not as heroism.

Davis also gets the one line that names what the film could have been about. He observes that the people being cleared off the boulevard have nowhere else to be, and nobody in the picture picks the thought up.

Davis was a considerable figure by 1985, had directed features, written plays and been a central participant in the civil rights movement, and he is here playing a supporting detective in a Corman sequel. The industry produced that arrangement routinely.

Tyrrell’s best scene is a refusal. She tells the protagonist that going back is a decision she does not have to make, states plainly what it will cost, and the film gives her the argument and then ignores it.

Tyrrell is also the only returning character who behaves as though the first film happened to her. Everybody else treats the reunion as a plot requirement and she plays it as somebody who has been waiting for four years and had stopped expecting anybody to come back for her at all.

That is the film in one exchange. It contains the argument against its own plot, delivered by its best performer, and then proceeds with the plot because the plot is what was commissioned.

The Boulevard Again

The location work continues and is less interesting because the film is less interested.

Two years after the first picture the street is filmed with the same access and considerably less curiosity. Establishing shots, exteriors, and a great deal of interior work that could be anywhere.

The interiors are also visibly cheaper than the first film’s. Fewer extras, smaller rooms, and a nightclub sequence that is plainly a set, which tells you where the budget went between the two productions.

What the film does add is a sense of the district under pressure, which is accidental and real. The real estate plot required empty buildings and boarded frontages, and the production found them. By 1985 the redevelopment was already beginning, and the film is documenting the early stage of the thing its plot is about.

By 1990 the Hollywood Redevelopment Project was substantially underway, and the boulevard in these frames is the version immediately before the version that replaced it.

That is the most interesting fact about it and the film has no awareness of it. A picture in which a developer clears a district, shot in a district being cleared, is a coincidence the production did not notice.

The Series Continued Without Anybody

Two further films followed, each recasting the lead again, which means four actors played the same character across four pictures in six years.

Each recasting also required the premise to be slightly re-explained, which is the tell. A property that needs reintroducing every two years was never carrying a character forward, only a title and a poster.

Betsy Russell was replaced by Mitzi Kapture and then by Darlene Vogel, and the later entries moved the character into private investigation and then into a straight action register, which is a property being tried in different markets.

That pattern is the clearest statement of what the property was. The character was a premise instead of a person, and a premise can be recast indefinitely because nothing about it depended on who was performing it.

It also explains the first film’s rating more precisely than any single criticism. A property built on a tagline produces sequels built on the same tagline, and the individual craft inside any entry is incidental to the object.

The honest closing observation is that a great many capable people worked on all four of these and none of that work is recoverable. The films exist as a series and the series is what the market bought.

Should you watch Avenging Angel?

Barely, and only for Tyrrell, Calhoun and Ossie Davis. A sequel that recast its lead, replaced a character piece with a revenge plot, used property development as a villain and not as a process, and accidentally documented the early stage of the clearance its own plot describes.

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