Decades before Marvel’s blockbuster Wonder Woman hit summer screens worldwide, Roberta Findlay was one of a handful of female filmmakers making truly badass films for the worldwide theatrical market. Initially slapped with an ‘X’ rating for graphic violence and brazen brutality, this 1985 urban shocker graphically details the siege of a South Bronx housing project by a gang of drug-crazed, rodent-munching, sadistic punks. After witnessing the miscreants shooting up heroin and dining on roasted rats, a concerned apartment dweller calls the cops on the squatters.
The police arrest the gang but justice does not prevail and they are soon released back into society. The gang returns to their squalid basement hellhole with a new strategy- revenge- and they spring into immediate action and begin a hostile takeover of the entire building! Using extreme terrorist tactics, the gang proceeds to systematically maim, torture and slay each resident, floor by floor. Will the tenants will to live and fight for survival succeed against the gnarly gang’s punk-powered, apocalyptic, homicidal rage?
Director Roberta Findlay was perhaps the most prolific and pioneering woman filmmaker in the sordid, male-dominated world of independent exploitation cinema in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s where she shattered the glass ceiling multiple times in the horror, erotic and action film genres.
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