Angel 4: Undercover Reviews

What began as incredibly trashy fun in ANGEL, the story of a vengeful teenage hooker, has degenerated into routine cops-and-crooks action in sleazy Lotus Land. Treading water with a barely serviceable screenplay, this soporific actioner is something its campy predecessors never were---dull, dull, dull. Small fry promoter Rich Walter (Alan Picardi) has reneged on a payola deal with music mogul Geoffrey Kagen (Roddy McDowall). During a confrontation with Kagen's enforcer, Hank (Patrick Kilpatrick), he accidentally falls from the roof of a radio station. Police shutterbug Molly (Darlene Vogel)--formerly Angel, the Hollywood Boulevard hooker--arrives to photograph the crime scene. Molly doesn't realize that her own boyfriend, deejay Joel Hemmert (Mark DeCarlo), has toyed with accepting a bribe from the managers of a rock group called AK47. Molly reminisces with Paula (Kerrie Clark), another retired lady-of-the-night, and discovers that she's now a groupie smitten with AK47's lead vocalist, Piston Jones (Shane Fraser). One night, a spaced-out Piston confuses offstage lovemaking with drug flashbacks of onstage violence and attacks Paula. Jealous lover Jade (Sam Phillips) bursts into his pad, garrotes Paula with a guitar wire, and lets pill-popping Piston believe he's the murderer. Molly, working undercover, nearly destroys her relationship with Joel as she infiltrates the rock world and alters her appearance to resemble Marilyn, the deceased love of Piston's life. Thwarted by Jade's rages and diverted by sex play with the man she suspects of killing her friend, Molly finally manages to dig up evidence of Paula's slaying. At a rock video shoot in which the increasingly unhinged Piston plans to commit suicide on camera, Molly rushes in from the police pathology lab and reveals that Jade killed Paula. A confused Piston accidentally hangs himself on chains. Jade dives from a high platform, trying to kill Molly, and is impaled on a jagged piece of a shattered guitar. Having solved the mystery of her friend Paula's slaying, Molly is reunited with her remarkably patient boyfriend Joel. Despite relatively polished production values, this familiar crime drama is completely perfunctory. The payola subplot seems dated; the details of the rock milieu are authentically subterranean but worn out from overuse; the shabbily constructed screenplay can't crank up any suspense. ANGEL 4 bides its time with unexciting detective legwork, standard pathology lab rigmarole, and yawn-inducing peeks into the decadent world of rock 'n' roll. The ethereal Fraser fills the bill physically as the death-obsessed pop musician, but his singing is ludicrously bad. Doomed from the start by an inferior screenplay, ANGEL 4 relies on sex (fair), violence (above average), and rock n' roll (flaccid) to occasionally jump-start its pulse and show some signs of life. What ANGEL 4 fails to deliver is the kind of snap, crackle, and pop that die-hard action fans demand of their crimeworld escapism. (Extreme profanity, extensive nudity, graphic violence.)