Directed by Jack Hill. Written by F.X. Maier
There’s always been so much anxiety about what the youth gets up to that films about “kids these days” might as well be its own genre. Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters is part of that proud tradition, featuring “teens” harassing good people, shooting up roller skating rinks, getting pimped out, and allying themselves with underground militias, all while still going to third period math.
Hill takes the earthbound concerns of the low moral standing of these kids and inflates them like a helium balloon, stretching the fabric beyond the familiar and letting it float off into the unhinged ether. It’s wild, it’s silly, it’s dumb, it’s Switchblade Sisters.
A story of a girl gang and its coupled boy gang, it features petty jealousies, outright rivalries, the politics of street life, and it’s all treated with the same insight and finesse of a 3-year old wielding a crayon. The entertainment value fluctuates accordingly, but it’s not without its interesting ideas.
Two girls are at the center of it: Maggie (Joanne Nail) is new to the inner city area where the Dagger Debs rule. A chance encounter earns herself an audition for membership, and an unlikely friendship forms with its incumbent queen Lace (Robbie Lee). Maggie’s no baby buffalo, however, and her rise to prominence sparks a showdown over gang control.
In this conflict are warring ideas of heteronormativity, its consequences, and a rebellion against every established order, making Switchblade Sisters more than just an exploitation movie featuring an uneven story, violence, and bad line readings. It all builds fast and stays there, and no one can accuse Hill’s film of lollygagging.
Switchblade Sisters aims its knife at mainstream culture and flails its arms wildly. Its hellbent anti-authority attitude is a thrill, and Joanne Nail is a feral house cat as Maggie, basically hissing her way through proceedings. The unapologetic behavior of Maggie and her comrades is Switchblade Sisters’s greatest strength, fueling the movie’s fire when most of its parts don’t offer much kindling, taking youth’s zeal for tunnel-visioned idealism and injecting it straight into an underground counterculture.
Mikkel Frederiksen 