Spoiled rich girl Allison gives la vida loca a try.

A long time ago, back when the world was innocent and young, before there were countries or Presidents,, you couldn’t just make a movie with a lot of sex, nudity, and drugs in it. No; you had to dress it up as something it wasn’t — a documentary about nudists, for example, or a morality tale. Now, we don’t really need such pretense; but the urge to justify is still strong. So we get the film Havoc, about a group of wannabe-gangsta teenagers (they call themselves the “PLC”) from the very affluent Palisades. When they take a trip into the gang territory of East Los Angeles, you know immediately it won’t end well. And you’re right, just not quite in the way you think.

Havoc has a lot over the exploitation films of fifty years ago. For starters, it had a roughly $9 million dollar budget, which doesn’t buy a lot of special effects or explosions any more but does, at least, give you the ability to choose good film stock, quality actors, and quality crew. The movie is beautifully shot and the acting is more than serviceable. Anne Hathaway establishes Allison very early on as a nice girl trying to act hard. We don’t need to have this exposited at us; it’s in her face when she doesn’t think the rest of the PLC are looking.

We don’t need to have it exposited, but we get it anyway. Of all the multiple and complex themes one could explore with this clash of cultures, the one we get stuck with is the “rich white brats have it tough, too” because they’re bored and ignored by their busybusybusy parents. This message is hammered home as often and in as many ways as possible, but mostly through the mechanism of interview scenes led by budding documentarist Eric (Matt O’Leary) and his ever-present digital video camera. In one of the best scenes of the movie, Allison snaps effortlessly from being a California teen to hip-hop queen to Deadhead parent to virgin/whore porn starlet. This last performance embarrasses and disgusts Eric, who shuts off his camera and tells Allison she is “the loneliest person I have ever met.”

The loneliest person Eric has ever met is pretty darn photogenic, though.

Regardless of the pointed questions asked by Eric or Allison’s ineffectual parents offering to “talk,” Allison and her best friend Emily (Bijou Phillips) sink deeper into the Latino gang culture. Allison is drawn to East Los by both by her attraction to Hector (Freddy Rodríguez) — a crack dealer and big in the Sixteenth Street gang — and by her belief that her privileged, sheltered life is “fake.” This involves several round trips between the Palisades and East Los, getting in trouble either with gang members or the law, then retreating back to the Palisades to confront ineffectual parenting and other gangsta-wannabe friends. As you know they must, her adventures finally end in an flurry of violence and sexual assault, shattering her last romantic notions about life on the street.

It is at this point that the movie ought to really pick up. Allison’s relationship with Emily is stretched well beyond the breaking point; Allison faces a significant ethical question about her relationship with Hector and responsibility for what happened; and the boys in the PLC cowboy up and head to Sixteeth Street to prove they’re every bit as bad as ? well, Michael Jackson at least. But the movie only handles one of these threads — Emily and Allison patch things up. The resolution of the ethical question is cursorily dealt with almost as soon as it’s raised, and is also likely to make most rape-prevention and rape-counseling professionals very uneasy.

“All right, stop! Collaborate and listen.”

As far as the gangland showdown? Well, I’m going to ruin it for you, since the movie ruined it for me. The PLC and Sixteenth pass each other on the street. The screen goes black. We hear tires squealing, screaming, and shooting. And no one ever says anything about what happened between them. I consider this “lady or the tiger” trick the absolute worst cop-out of a weak screenwriter, and it’s hard to redeem a film that pulls this kind of stunt. It doesn’t help that the screenwriter chooses to deal honestly and fully with the simplest, least complicated of the three crises that finish the movie.

In between all of this, there’s plenty of sex and nudity, which is what puts me in mind of the old exploitation films (even as Allison and Emily reconcile, one of them is topless). The acting may be better, the production better, but in the end the movie feels more like voyeurism dressed up like sermon. While Eric interviews Allison, she asks him if his project is less about wiggers and more about Eric being attracted to her — but when she fires up the porn act, Eric shuts off his camera in disgust. The real cameras just keep rolling — until it really matters.

“We hate cowardly screenwriters!”