Bonnie’s Kids like the kind of
kicks that could kill you!
Hang out with “Bonnie’s Kids”—you’ll have a blast!
Bonnie’s Kids—they’ll blow you…away.
Lurid sleaze abounds
when Bonnie’s Kids strut their stuff!
Sisters Ellie and Myra are nothing but trouble—in and out of bed! But ripping
off gangsters is never smart, no matter how sexy you are. Will these bad girls
make it? To find out, see Bonnie’s Kids!
Forgotten and largely
unseen since its initial release
in 1973, Bonnie’s Kids is a lost neo-noir sleaze classic that deserves rediscovering. It’s so much more than drive-in/grindhouse filler: It’s a great twist on the “femme fatale on the run” theme, one that really toys with the audience, like an especially malicious cat with a hapless mouse.
in 1973, Bonnie’s Kids is a lost neo-noir sleaze classic that deserves rediscovering. It’s so much more than drive-in/grindhouse filler: It’s a great twist on the “femme fatale on the run” theme, one that really toys with the audience, like an especially malicious cat with a hapless mouse.
Rather than a film, Bonnie’s Kids honestly feels more like a
sleazy paperback book you’d pick up in a junkshop while on vacation—and you
only picked it up in the first place because of its lurid cover—but you cannot
stop reading it once you’ve started. When you’re done, you want to tell all
your friends about it. (Which is sort of how I saw it: Mack Daddy SqDave gave me a copy of Bonnie’s Kids, and once I finally watched it, wow! I was hooked!
I’m even trying to get it screened at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater.)
Written and directed
by Arthur Marks, what starts off as a dopey white-trash teen-sex-romp rapidly
mutates into something else far more sinister, finally metastasizing into the
savage B-movie love child of Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford. Marks had an
interesting, if uneventful career, but Bonnie’s Kids is his masterpiece.
With both barrels of
a shotgun, Ellie (Tiffany Bolling) and her jailbait sister, 15-year-old Myra
(the oh-so-naughty Robin Mattson),
have escaped the clutches of their molesting stepdad, and split to the big city
of San Jose (!?!) to enjoy the good life with their Uncle Ben (veteran
character actor Scott Brady; this flick is overflowing with recognizable faces),
a gent whose publishing empire is a cross between Playboy and Hustler.
While Ben’s lesbian
wife takes a shining to young Myra, Ellie oozes her charms at the publisher
until he uses her to “run an errand,” which means picking up a half a million
dollars of stolen loot!
After hooking up with
a lunkheaded but handsome private eye (Steve Sandor, later the evil biker from The Ninth Configuration), Ellie double-crosses
Ben—and of course he sends henchmen
after her. And this is where things really pick up: the goons are a salt &
pepper team, Digger (Timothy Brown) and Eddie (Alex Rocco, veteran of a zillion hard-boiled flicks, but best remembered for getting shot in the eye in The Godfather). Eddie is the leader, and
he’s like a cousin of Richard Stark’s paperback novel anti-hero “Parker,” a
no-bullshit professional, but both he and Digger are also intelligent,
hard-working and tenacious—as well as ruthlessly vicious.
Although usually set in
the bright, almost blinding sunshine, Bonnie’s
Kids continues the film noir tradition of creating a world that is dark,
brutal and hopeless—an existential nightmare. For the most part, everyone is
mean or on the make, and the nicest character is considered by others to be a
“pervert” and a “creep.”
Like a good pulp
thriller, Bonnie’s Kids is willing to
throw you curveballs. As the film advances, it gets more and more
mean-spirited: innocent bystanders are slaughtered, good Samaritans have their
heads kicked in, and blood and mayhem are left in the awesomely tawdry Ellie’s
wake. Meanwhile, she and her Private Dick get worse and worse: they are
not nice people.
Through the help of
crisp cinematography, great use of unique locations in the Southwest (all of
which are now probably gone due to expanding urban development), and a grim,
fatalistic and genuinely ironic ending, Bonnie’s
Kids is a wonderfully nasty neo-noir. Subtlety isn’t its strong suit, but
soon what had been a TV-movie-style of artlessness, becomes a cold,
dispassionate vision—akin to villain Alex Rocco’s point of view, almost as if
he was infusing the film with his personality.
This is a B-movie
that keeps getting better and better as it moves along—tracking its
protagonists on their one-way express trip straight to hell. But it’s the
superbly crafted rise and fall of Ellie, the doomed trailer trash valkyrie who
risked it all for the sweet life, that really makes the flick.
Played with loads of
killer attitude by the superfine Tiffany Bolling (also the star of The Candy Snatchers, as well as Kingdom of the Spiders), femme fatale
Ellie is the missing link between Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, the psycho go-go girls of Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! and ice-cold evil super-genius Wendy
Kroy of The Last Seduction. A white
trash demoness using razor-sharp guile and a body built for sin to get what she
wants, Ellie’s only semi-civilized, though, and still a danger to herself—not
to mention everybody else around her…
And as for sweet,
sexy Myra? Heh-heh-heh, just watch
the movie and you’ll find out… (But it’s really a perfect ending—honestly!)
Bonnie’s Kids has
been available on both VHS and DVD, but now is in the public domain and
can be seen HERE.
(And sorry I’ve been
away so long; I’ll explain as soon as I can…)
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