This Gary Sherman shoestringer, rooted much more solidly in a verifiable reality than either his Dead and Buried or Raw Meat, undertakes a semidocumentary rummaging through the streets of Hollywood at night, and it firms up its sense of veracity with a gritty, grainy, abrasive image (John Alcott, who worked for Kubrick on Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining, was the cinematographer). The plot, tidily compacted into one busy night, develops into a triple-pathed manhunt (and womanhunt) in which a sadistic pimp named Ramrod, all duded up in Burrito Brothers clothes, searches for the streetwalker who double-crossed him, while the police search for both of them. The path taken by the prostitute regrettably takes the same bad turn as Buñuel's Belle de Jour, a series of comic vignettes in which the working girl is continually experiencing something new and different and freaky ("I tell you, nobody wants straight sex anymore"); and the pimp seems a blatant copy of the terrifying one in Darker Than Amber, a heavy-breathing beast with too much pent-up energy and too little patience. But the movie invariably bounces back in its action scenes, and the inevitable intersection of the paths of all the hunters and hunted pays off in a thrillingly extended climax: Sherman, like an outmanned soldier conserving a dwindling ammunition supply and beautifully maintaining his composure, makes every shot count. Season Hubley, Gary Swanson, Wings Hauser. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd