Jeff Goldblum as Freak #1

Gangs in movies these days are far too cool for their own good, with their spotless sports wear, complicated hand signals and Shakespearean dialogue like “Suck on this you bitch ass trick”. In fact this piece of dynamite dialogue from 1993’s Menace II Society pretty much sums up cinema’s current depiction of gang members. They’re macho, drug slinging ghetto kids spouting pimpology and cliché ridden catchphrases like, “It’s all in the game, dawg”. And although I enjoy all that stuff there is a part of me that yearns for the kind of gangs portrayed in the films of my youth.

The first real difference between then and now is the attire. There are no baggy white t-shirts or ostentatious gold and diamond grills. Instead the focus is on fresh and funky leather covered in rhinestones and studs, tight cycling shorts, cut off denim jackets with stencilled slogans on the back, optional facial piercings and the whole shebang topped off with a Mohawk or military beret. Additional accoutrements include absurdly over-sized ghetto blasters, booze bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and cheap looking flick knives.

The second, and most noticeable difference between these street toughs of old and the raft of new fangled hustlers and g’s is their criminal motivation. What makes characters like Zed from Police Academy 2 and the punks on the receiving end of Arnie’s wrath at the beginning of Terminator so fabulous and bizarre in a modern context is how, more often than not, they aren’t really in pursuit of a perceivable goal such as money or respect. Instead they seem driven by a mindless taste for anarchy, chaos or half arsed revenge. A perfect example is the scrawny little bastard that inexplicably murders the ice cream man and little girl at the beginning of John Carpenter’s classic Assault on Precinct 13. He doesn’t even appear to have enjoyed the random murder, whilst his fellow sadists merely leer uncomfortably before trudging back to their car and slowly driving off seeming oddly deflated.

A slight off-shoot representative of this nihilistic mania is the Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry. Everything from his high chattering voice to his ridiculously bad haircut screams of the anarchic, dead eyed pessimism present in so much art from the 1970’s and 80’s. This unbearably omnipresent despondency can be felt in everything from Neil Young’s On The Beach, to films like Scanners or Five Easy Pieces, and even Hunter S Thompson’s rabid yet bleak account of the 1972 American presidential election Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It was like a blanket of bad vibes had permeated the zeitgeist and vomited up these hate filled harbingers of stab wounds, car jacking and old lady muggings. These bad boys come on like a rancid combination of Hell’s Angels, new wave punks, the contents of Cyndi Lauper’s closet and mentally deranged Vietnam veterans; uniformly demented, witless and cruel.

The are several stand out performances within this obscure sub genre. Jeff Goldblum’s amazing turn as smirking Freak #1 in Death Wish is memorable for many reasons, not least of which is his now legendary delivery of the line, “Goddamn rich cunt!”. Also worth checking out is David Patrick Kelly as Luther in The Warriors, whose pointlessly antagonistic nastiness fuels a great deal of the films brilliance. Notable mention must also go to the entire cast of the video to Michael Jackson’s Beat It, managing to visually depict what I’ve been trying to describe in a nifty 4 minutes and 57 seconds.

God knows what I love so much about these miscreants. Perhaps it is the lack of cynicism borne of their utter mindlessness. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia for a time when multi ethnic groups of hoodlums just wanted to break stuff and push over hobo’s shopping trolleys filled with rusty cans, as opposed to wanting to sell you crack rock or film you being sodomised in the stairwell of an abandoned building. Ah yes, thems were the days.