My review was written in October 1985 after a Times Square screening.
William Szarka's "South Bronx Heroes" is the sort of earnest U. S. indie feature which might play on public tv but lacks the oomph and tough approach to make waves on the action film circuit. Filmed two years ago as "Runaways" (with another alternate title, "Revenge of the Innocents"), pic is the second theatrical release in the last month from Continental Video.
Unusual story structure presents parallel tales of two sets of brother-sister combos, one white and one black. Paul (Brendan Ward) and Michelle (Melissa Esposito) are, respectively, 14 and 11-year-old runaways from their evil foster father Bennett (Martin Zurla), who hole up in the basement of a derelict South Bronx apartment building, scrounging food out of trash cans. Tony (Mario van Peebles), is just out of a Mexican jail and moves in with his sister Chrissie (Megan van Peebles), who earns their keep working as a teacher while Tony loafs.
The two couples meet halfway through the pic when Paul & Michelle (it sounds like a Lewis Gilbert pic) break into the van Peebles' apartment in order to take much-needed showers. Fleeing, Paul accidentally drops his cache of incriminating kiddie porn photos taken by Bennett, who used another foster child, six-year-old Scott (Jordan Abeles) in his porn pictures before killing the kid. When Paul returns to fetch the stills, Tony grabs him and they decide to blackmail Bennett together. A highly artificial happy ending has the young heroes trapping Bennett and turning him over to the FBI.
With child abuse and perils of existence on the South Bronx turf (filmed on location) as topics, Szarka takes an unfortunately wimpy approach, even substituting the artificially squeaky-clean pairs of siblings format for any romantic or sexual content. Hoary use of fadeouts between scenes and generally sluggish pacing hurt as well.
Bendan Ward is impressive as the young hero, particularly in a lengthy monolog recalling how Bennett abused his foster brother Scott. Mario van Peebles is overly theatrical at times, but has some entertaining scenes, especially when he dresses up, referring to himself as "Dark Gable" and serves his sister some "brown champagne" (a bottle of Pepsi). Effective casting has his real-life, beautiful sibling Megan van Peebles as sister Chrissie. These central performances deserved a more realistic, hard hitting story treatment.
