It took a 21-year-old exploitation picture to draw the angriest response at a recent Seattle International Film Festival.

Even though it was presented as a campy midnight movie, Quentin Tarantino's restoration of Jack Hill's Switchblade Sisters (1975) roused enough women in the audience to start a protest. During a post-screening question-and-answer session with the director, one of them accused Hill of making a sexist movie.

"I came to see this film expecting to see a campy,fun, woman-empowering flick," wrote another woman who voiced her complaints in a letter to The Seattle Times. "I left feeling disappointed,deceived and angry."

She went on to applaud "this woman along with her women friends," who "felt enough passion and conviction to not just chalk this up as `another sexist film' but spoke out against oppressive attitudes and stereotypes. . . . In an age of anti-p.c. sentiment there was a brave soul (who) spoke her piece."

Thanks to an overwrought new trailer that uses critics' quotes to set the film up as some kind of feminist manifesto, Switchblade Sisters could be accused of not delivering what it promised. But Hill finds the quotes more amusing than accurate, and he points out that he didn't create them.

He made the picture as a deliberately tacky sendup of women-in-prison cliches and female- gang melodramas. It's hard to take seriously the scenes in which a gang fight is staged in a roller rink, or a sadistic lesbian prison-guard who's straight out of a Greek Active production threatens a swaggering high-school gang.

And that dialogue: "Everybody's gotta be in a gang to stay healthy," "If you go, it's gonna turn out baaaad." Hill and his screenwriter, Francis Maier, are clearly mocking stereotypes, not endorsing them.

It's also hard to stop watching Robbie Lee as Lace, the gang's hysterical leader, who is losing her boyfriend (Asher Brauner) to the new girl in town (Joanne Nail). She's one of those rare actors (why do Pia Zadora and Troy Donahue come to mind?) who is best when at her worst, ruthlessly trying to hang on to an emotion that's utterly false. Lee is fascinating, especially when she seems completely inadequate to the task at hand.

When she's off-screen, the movie loses most of its energy. We just don't care what happens to her boyfriend or the new girl or the one-eyed, Iago-like friend (Monica Gayle) who likes to keep jealousy alive within the gang. But leatherclad, operatic, deliriously irrational Lace . . . she's like a force of nature, and it doesn't much matter if that's bad or good.

Campfest or unenlightened schlock? "Switchblade Sisters" will continue to be interpreted both ways. (For the record, the festival's full-series pass holders gave it more votes for "guilty pleasure" than any other festival entry.)

But its biggest drawback may be that it doesn't do a very good job of sustaining the joke. At 91 minutes, despite the valiant efforts of Robbie Lee, it simply runs out of outrageousness.

[Rewind]