The tagline was "High school honor student by day, Hollywood hooker by night." Audiences showed up for the premise and stayed for an incongruously warm-hearted story about found family - wrapped around a necrophiliac serial killer plot.

Donna Wilkes is Molly, the titular ANGEL. Rory Calhoun plays an aging Western movie cowboy who lives on the street. Dick Shawn plays a drag performer. Susan Tyrrell plays the cantankerous landlady who loves her. The cinematography is by Andrew Davis, who would later direct The Fugitive. The score is by Craig Safan, who perhaps most famously composed the music for Cheers.

Angel arrived in January 1984 from New World Pictures - Roger Corman's exploitation factory - and promptly became a sleeper hit, debuting at number eight at the box office with $2.2 million in its opening weekend and holding a top-ten position for several weeks.

Director Robert Vincent O'Neil said the joke was that New World got delivered a movie about a teenage hooker who never took her clothes off and never went to bed with anybody. That restraint is exactly what makes it work. It's lurid and wholesome at the same time, which shouldn't be possible. And yet.

Three sequels followed, each delivering diminishing returns.