Another Day in Paradise

After a scuffle with a guard during a bungled robbery, Bobbie (Kartheiser) is nursed back to health by Mel (Woods), who lectures him on the error of his unambitious ways. An outgoing, even generous scoundrel, Mel decides that the teenager and his girl Rosie (Wagner) should take to the road with himself and his lover Sid (Griffith) to learn the ropes. So starts an odyssey around the Oklahoma back roads for a surrogate family united in its devotion to drugs, booze and outlawdom; trouble is, the junk, Mel's crazed authoritarianism and the lowlifes they're forced to deal with take their toll. While Clark's follow-up to Kids shares both that film's amorality and its raw, hand held 'realism', it mostly and mercifully eschews its duplicitous sociological posturing and, despite a few truly nasty violent scenes, its all too evident desire to shock. It's considerably more appealing than its predecessor, then, and surprisingly compelling. Woods is on charismatic, virtuoso form, while Griffith is simply superb.