Switchblade Sisters

Jack Hill does Othello with a teenage girl gang, and it is far smarter than it needed to be. The Dagger Debs navigate loyalty, betrayal and a power struggle as a new girl upends their hierarchy, and Hill gives the melodrama real Shakespearean shape under the exploitation surface.

Tarantino loved it enough to re-release it through his own distribution label, and Robbie Lee and Joanne Nail commit fully to the heightened emotions. It takes its young women seriously as characters, which most of the genre did not.

Trash with genuine tragic architecture underneath.