A documentary filmmaker of note from the 1980s, Penelope Spheeris had box office success in the 1990s with the mainstream films Wayne's World, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Little Rascals. Spheeris's documentary films are, as a contributor to Women Filmmakers and Their Films noted, "hard-edged and in-your-face brutal." The same contributor further commented: "In terms of subject matter, they often deal with male adolescent angst as it exists within a grim, realistic urban environment."

Three films forming a loose trilogy of early works document disaffected youth and random violence. Suburbia, Spheeris's first non-documentary feature, looks at the sorry situation of a group of teen runaways residing on the edge of Los Angeles. It opens with a pack of wild dogs attacking a child. The Boys Next Door documents the story of two teen boys who become serial killers and includes footage so raw that it had to be...