abstract
| - Terry is a bitter young woman with an abusive childhood, a criminal record and bad taste in blouses. (She is also "dirt"). Jane is a naif who happens to go on a double date with Terry at the same time the latter seduces a doughy bar patron (who is old enough to be her father) in order to roll him. The planned robbery is foiled, and the two are arrested and booked. Jane's parents sell her down the river for her one error in judgement, and the two females are sentenced to incarceration. Mike, Terry's gun enthusiast punk boyfriend, who has no reservations about killing to meet his needs, intercepts the car that is carrying the women to their state home and they make their escape. Imagining themselves as a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde, they commandeer a farmhouse and terrorize the family within (a sixty-ish couple, later joined by their son visiting from college) while waiting for an accomplice to arrive with money, guns and transport, after which they will decamp to a remote mountain cabin "so far out in the boondocks no one will ever find us!". While waiting, Mike threatens to kill everyone several times and in fact does kill a visiting neighbor, but he doesn't have it so easy either. He must listen to the old man read the bible in a stupefying monotone (the guy reading scripture in the flashback scene from "{The Touch of Satan" was more exciting - almost), he has to sit on hard chairs, and he runs out of cigarettes. Meanwhile Terry tries to seduce the college guy for laughs. The police intercept the accomplice on his way to the farmhouse and so the youthful criminals must go to plan B; taking a hostage in a car and ending up at the Griffith Park Observatory in LA, which is closed to the public for the Thanksgiving weekend but perfectly accessible for anyone who wants to operate the revolving telescope dome. Will the marauding teens pay the price for their depraved actions? Will Jane's claims of innocence be heeded? What is the theoretical limiting magnitude of the Griffith Park Observatory telescope?
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