Hollywood Vice Squad follows a team of vice cops in LA led by their captain, played by Ronny Cox. When a woman from Ohio comes to find her runaway daughter (played by Trish Van Devere and Robin Wright in her first film respectively), she goes to Cox, and he realizes that she's in the hands of one of the worst pimps in the city, played by Frank Gorshin. Cox puts his two best cops on it, Leon Isaac Kennedy and Cec Verrell, hoping they can get her out in time. At the same time, Carrie Fisher is new to the squad and trying to make her name, so she works to take down an S&M video ring that's using underage actors. Her partners don't take her seriously, so she needs to earn their respect first in order to be successful.
This is a lot of fun, as much fun as a movie like this can be despite some of the extreme content. Evil pimps getting young girls from Ohio strung out on drugs and making them turn tricks, or a BDSM porn ring using underage kids in their films, isn't exactly fun; but there are definitely a lot of fun moments, like this one above where Carrie Fisher is undercover trying to get Marvin Kaplan from Alice to solicit her for sex. To some extent, you can see with all the fun moments where we get the Spheeris films from the 90s like Wayne's World or Black Sheep, and that juxtaposition with the tense, harsh moments, combined with the great cast and 80s nostalgia I talked about, makes this one overall a winner.
There's something about the Penelope Spheeris movie, whether it's a feature film, a documentary, or a music video, that feels like the 80s and 90s I grew up in, and this film captures that vibe I've always gotten from her films. I'm a little bit younger than the John Hughes slice of Gen X, maybe a little more Nirvana than Simple Minds--I think they call us "X-ennials" because we're between the two generations--but for me Spheeris is up there with Hughes as an influential a filmmaker in that period, plus her influence went further into the 90s. When I look at her filmography, there are probably some others, like Suburbia, that technically fit the DTV definition, so we could include them here on the site, but I think out of all of them, this is the most DTV in tone and feeling, it's very much a late 80s/early 90s late night cable offering or video store pick, which is something I love going back to.
Out of everyone in this, Ronny Cox is the one most known on this site. He's also on the list of people who have played presidents on this site, along with Jerry Springer, Roy Scheider (twice), Rutger Hauer, Mel Novak, and now Vivica A. Fox after our Crossbreed review. In the Captain America post I said I had trouble reconciling him as a good guy after all the baddie turns I've seen him in, and after seeing him in this, I realize that was a bad take. He's great in this kind of positive leader role, and the same way every scene he was in in RoboCop had a sense of impending menace and doom, here every scene had a sense of good and that whatever was wrong with the world would be taken care of. Here's to you Ronny Cox, you're one of the great ones.
Carrie Fisher is the main person on the cover, but her role is more the lead of one of the side stories. It's kind of crazy to think that 1986 was only three years removed from Return of the Jedi. At that time, beyond Harrison Ford, the rest of the cast was having trouble getting roles, and I think this was one here for Fisher to do something outside the Star Wars realm. While I like the film's running time, and overall think it worked, one complaint I might have is that it would have been nicer if her storyline had a bit more meat to it, because the small amount we did get was great.
This is only our second Frank Gorshin film, the other being Bloodmoon, the Gary Daniels classic. Here he plays a real baddie, much more so than the fantastic Riddler he played on the old Batman series--which, as you know, is the definitive version of Batman for me. According to his imdb bio, he has a ton of other credits, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, that we should get a hold of. Hopefully we'll make some of those happen soon, because I can't think of anything better than an alum from one of my all-time favorite TV shows making it into the DTVC Hall of Fame.
On that note, let's leave it here. This is the Penelope Spheeris late 80s late night actioner that you came for. Great cast, great action, and great nostalgia factor. Right now it's on Prime and Tubi, so you can stream for no money. Definitely worth a shot.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091213
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