Suburbia (1984)

Suburbia, also known as Rebel Streets and The Wild Side, is a 1984 film written and directed by Penelope Spheeris about suburban punks who run away from home. The kids take up a punk lifestyle by squatting in abandoned suburban tract homes. The punks are played by Chris Pedersen, Bill Coyne, Timothy O'Brien and Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist Flea, amongst others.

Director Penelope Spheeris recruited street kids and punk rock musicians to play each role, rather than hire young actors to portray punk rockers.

Suburbia was filmed in and around the cities of Downey and Norwalk in California. The abandoned housing tract was a former neighborhood along the west side of I-605, around the Alondra Bl offramp; Firestone Bl CA 42 was to its north, with Alondra Bl to its south.
The entire area was Eminent Domain starting in the late 1960s / early 1970s, wherein it sat mostly vacant until its demolition in c.1990; some houses still had inhabitants up until c.1980. This was a gang-infested area; many abandoned houses were "drug houses", or, just as in the film, "crash houses" (e.g. the "T.R. House" ). I-105 now occupies most of the property, and has since the early '90s.

Vincent Canby called it a "clear-eyed, compassionate melodrama about a bunch of young dropouts" and "probably the best teen-agers-in-revolt movie since Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge."

The movie contains live footage of D.I. performing "Richard Hung Himself", T.S.O.L. performing "Wash Away" and "Darker My Love," and The Vandals performing "The Legend of Pat Brown". In turn, the movie inspired the Pet Shop Boys song "Suburbia."

The film is a part of Shout Factory's Roger Corman Cult Classics series, reissued on DVD in May 2010.

Synopsis

A hitchhiking teenage runaway, Sheila (Jennifer Clay), is picked up on Interstate 605 in the Greater Los Angeles Area by a woman with a toddler. When the car gets a flat tire, they find a telephone booth on the edge of an abandoned tract housing district. While the mother is on the phone, the toddler is attacked and killed by a stray dog.

Actors