Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  Salvation from humiliation comes in the shape of Monique, the foreign exchange student (Diane Franklin, the faithless wench from The Last American Virgin) marooned in the house of Lane’s neighbor Ricky, a fat freak who sits at home all day with his crochet, his nasal spray and his monstrous mother. (The portrayal of Ricky crosses the movie from cartoon pranks into David Lynch–like grotesquerie. He does have one shining moment, though, when he steps onto the dance floor looking like he’s going to pull off the fat-guy trick of being limber on his feet. Instead, he belly flops on to the ground and lies motionless.) Many of the movie’s stupid set pieces went nowhere and the climactic ski race, complete with triumphant blaring sound track, is perplexingly conventional, but Better Off Dead is one of the few teen flicks of the decade to eschew sentimentality and titillation, relying on sheer idiot entertainment. Long may its cable life endure!

  The subsequent One Crazy Summer (1986), a bikini-free vacation movie set in Nantucket and again starring John Cusack (the De Niro to Savage Steve’s Scorsese), an openly miserable Demi Moore, Curtis Armstrong (the Pesci to …) and Bobcat Goldthwait was a similar smorgasbord (even ending with a stirring boat race) but failed to wring as many unexpected laughs out of stock situations.

  Rounding out the Savage Steve troika, How I Got Into College (1989) replaced Cusack with Corey Parker and featured a recurring joke wherein the A and B variables, famous from many mathematical problems, become live-action characters who torment the hero till he blows them up at the end. Which is to say, nothing else about the movie need ever trouble you.

  * * *

  Many scrawny and embittered screenwriters and directors sought retribution for the rejection, solitude and sand—literal and metaphorical—kicked in their faces during their formative years by using teen movies to rewrite their stories with happier endings. I happen to think that Revenge of the Nerds (1984) is not one of these movies. It panders to a non-nerd’s idea of what might constitute an underdog fantasy. It methodically ticks items off a checklist that features such geek-associated paraphernalia as computers, pocket protectors, buck teeth and thick-rimmed glasses. It misses the yearning to belong and the overpowering sense of disassociation from those earmarked as similarly blighted members of the tribe. If the talent behind the movie had truly been in touch with the feelings of its subjects, its ending would have been a flash-forward fantasy where the nerd-tormentors now worked for their former victims instead of Robert Carradine’s impassioned “We Are All Nerds” address.

  That said, Carradine and Anthony Edwards imbue their spat-upon teen geniuses Lewis and Gilbert with a complete sweetness. Curtis Armstrong works chunky, bestubbled, phlegmy magic as Booger. Timothy Busfield’s Poindexter seems more hilarious when you consider he was only a couple of years away from thirtysomething. Remember also Larry B. Scott’s mincing black homosexual, Lamar, a stereotype so garish you’d think he was trying out for a Wayans brothers movie. Forget Nerds’ barely felt message of universal suffrage and recall instead scenes like the one where the wonks have planted video cameras in the sorority house. Sprawled around, slurping down beer and stuffing themselves with Doritos and sniggering “Focus on the crotch! Do we have bush? We have bush!” the nerds finally, fleetingly, fit in.

  The Fort Lauderdale–based sequel Revenge of the Nerds 2: Nerds In Paradise (1987) is only notable for giving Robert Carradine a romance with Melrose Place’s Courtney Thorne-Smith and the fact that it was directed by movie industry heavy hitter Joe Roth.

  * * *

  The premise of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)—time-traveling metalheads collecting actual figures of historical import to help them with their homework—borders on genius. Almost everything Keanu Reeves (Ted “Theodore” Logan) and Alex Winter (Bill S. Preston, Esquire) do and say is funny. (A highlight: the poker scene with Billy the Kid where Winter is told to show a poker face and bursts into a cheery grin.) The trouble is, there’s a few too many stretches where they don’t do anything at all. Watch it again and squirm in your seat at the length of the sequences where they hurtle through time, where they meet the rulers of the universe, and where Joan of Arc frolics on the waterslide.

  This problem was solved with the sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) which, in common with Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, Superman 2, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, is better than the original. Highlights include B&T beating Death (William Sadler) at Twister.

  * * *

  One of the biggest selling editions of National Lampoon was almost entirely given over to a rambling, scabrous slice of fiction entitled “The Ugly, Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs” wherein two smart-ass white supremacists (the archetypal Lampoon heroes) hurl abuse at anyone who isn’t them. Directed by Robert Altman during his long dry spell, the big-screen adaptation was made in 1984 but not released till 1987. The little-seen O.C. and Stiggs has garnered something of a reputation as a great Lost Teen Classic. This is not entirely deserved. The funniest moment comes in the first three seconds when the MGM lion roars, “O.C.… Stiggs.” From there on, the sneering titular duo (Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry) slouch their way through a story that has them declaring war on insurance magnate Randall Schwab (Paul Dooley) for canceling the old age insurance of O.C.’s grandfather (Ray Walston). The same elements that bedeviled Popeye—Altman’s snatches of overheard conversation and overlapping dialogue that work so well in a naturalistic situation and so horribly in a fantasy—kill most of O.C.’s gags stone dead. The two mavericks don’t indulge in prankage much more mind-roasting than outing a teacher and fixing a water faucet so it blasts Schwab’s geekoid son (Jon Cryer). Everyone seems to be in different movies. That’s good news when O.C. and his would-be girlfriend (Cynthia Nixon) break out into a top-hat-and tails dance number. It’s very unfortunate when Dennis Hopper, in the middle of his long dry spell, shows up as a zonked fighter pilot.

  * * *

  White nerds. White geeks. White jocks. White princesses. White stoners. The cinema of eighties teens seem to be a triumph of ethnic cleansing. But, in the heart of this Norman Rockwell–like suburban dreamscape, a lone voice shattered the calm with ugly truths about racial divisions, bigotry and hatred. That voice belonged to C. Thomas Howell. In Soul Man (1986), he plays Mark Watson, a self-satisfied smart-ass with a big future and a place in Harvard Law School. Then, convinced by a therapist to put his own needs first, Mark’s dad rescinds his offer to pay his son’s school fees. All seems lost till Mark comes across a scholarship intended to make Harvard accessible for black students. One dose of miracle bronzing pills, one kinky Afro and Mark gets his place in school, cheerfully rationalizing his decision by saying “This is the Cosby decade. America loves blacks!” He’s soon barfing up his words, introduced to reality by a white girl with Mandingo fantasies, the outlandish expectations of the school basketball team, the cops who throw him in jail on suspicion of having stolen his own car and the winsome presence of Rae Dawn Chong. Soul Man is as crass as a film can possibly be but, as the only feature of its era even to recognize the existence of another race, it has to be given credit for having its heart in the right place. But where was its kinky Afro’d head at?

  2

  Dead Teenagers

  Boogeymen, Bloodbaths, Slashers, Psychos and Screaming Coeds

  You’re ugly and pustulent. You’re oozing and repugnant. You’re self-obsessed but apt to fixate on others. You’re moody and uncommunicative. You act like you’re going to live forever but you’re eaten up with dread about death. You’re … well, you could be the editor of The New Yorker but, for the purposes of this paragraph, you’re Everyteen, morbid and miserable, paranoid and tragic, sick and scared. All those hours spent alone and brooding up in your bedroom, all those fetching black ensembles, the bad poetry, body embellishments and death-metal discography. You are, in fact, the audience whose appetite for the dark side caused the horror movie to thrive in the eighties.

  The predominant school of terror duri
ng the era was, of course, the slasher, wherein a clutch of the young, dumb and comely were decapitated, eviscerated and used as examples of the efficiency of contemporary garden and kitchen hardware. Teens weaned on creature-feature midnight double bills finally got a chance to see the gory deaths that previously only occurred offscreen. The slasher shared many similarities with the T&A movie. It was most often viewed in a darkened living room to the rhythmic accompaniment of Dorito chomping and groans of “That’s fucked up!” Its casts were made up of recognizable high-school stereotypes, whose objectives were nearly always of a sexual nature. But there the genres parted company. Getting laid was the T&A’s raison d’être. In the world of the slasher, the sex act unleashed unstoppable forces of darkness whose sole function was to rid the earth of pimply fornicators. Spectating on the hacking up of the popular, the beautiful and the promiscuous at the hands of some ski-masked misfit with a grudge was initially a rewarding evening’s entertainment (and unbeatable as a source of first date physical contact); this was the real revenge of the nerds. The amount of sadism and cynicism that went into these movies increased apace, swiftly sucking the fun out of them. Franchise requirements dictated that every episode run along the same rails: a group of dupes was whittled down to one who managed to dispatch the bogeyman who, in the final seconds, showed signs of stirring back to life. Worse still was the way the viewer was made an unblinking accomplice in the rape and murder of women.

  But the slasher survives, albeit on life support, to this very day due to the patronage of a peculiar consumer that came into being in the eighties: the Gorehound. The Gorehound is perpetually doomed to disappointment; you can see his letters every month in the splatter bible Fangoria (“I just saw Friday the 13th, Part 7. What a piece of crap. I thought 4, 5 and 6 were bad, but…”). He knows the films reek but he’s besotted by the FX. He’s enthralled by mutilations, amputations and thick, viscous, sticky, squirting blood. His heroes are makeup mavens like Tom Savini. The first time he tried, stuttering and mumbling, to purchase a pack of condoms was so he could fill them with raspberry sauce, stick them under a latex mask and simulate a gaping cheek wound. Hollywood recognized the existence of the Gorehound but consistently shat on him. His wages were frequently frittered on just-boil-and-serve sequels, failed attempts at horror-comedy crossovers and bigger budget flicks that skimped on the scares in an attempt to lure in the mainstream. Having said that, I must acknowledge the fact that many of my favorite horror movies were made in the eighties, playing to largely teenage audiences. But as these films—and I’m thinking of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and From Beyond and George Romero’s Day of the Dead—fail to address specifically teenage concerns or feature adolescents in any kind of substantial role, they are ineligible for inclusion. My hands are tied.

  In the nineties, prepubescent audiences are moved to leave the nightlight on by R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series and Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? shows. Psychological serial killer studies have supplanted the slasher. The teen horror flick is largely moribund. But mold-encrusted though they may be, the franchises grind on. Somewhere, a few gore-hounds still show up for the latest Jason or Freddy, hoping against hope that this one will deliver the kick that they remember from all those years ago …

  The Treacherous Three

  Pioneer Slasher Movies

  No discussion of the slasher oeuvre could begin or end without mention of the night he came home. Simply put, Halloween is the shit. Even after you’ve sprawled semi-lidded through a million giftless knockoffs, John Carpenter’s 1978 original still has the power to suck you in and keep you squirming in your seat. None of the films that followed had an ounce of Halloween’s atmosphere, its claustrophobia or its shock value. None of them had a heroine as resourceful or authoritative as Jamie Lee Curtis’ embattled babysitter, Laurie Strode, none of them had a prophet of doom as peculiar as Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis. Most of them boasted Butchers from Hell like Michael Myers, but he was the first. From Halloween, a generation learned that the correct response to a suspicious sound of someone in the house is to go down to the basement in your underwear. From Halloween, we learned that the first scare was just the tease—there’s nothing waiting behind the door—and, just as you’ve exhaled, the killer comes out from the bottom of the stairs, causing you to spill your drink onto your lap. From Halloween, we learned the shorts-soiling strength of a properly ominous score.

  Unfortunately, those lessons were taken as gospel, and during the next decade, filmmakers looking to siphon a few fast bucks from the gorehounds (and no one ever went broke making a horror movie) rarely strayed from Carpenter’s blueprint, with the result that the shiver of anticipation was rapidly replaced by sitcom familiarity. Halloween was as much a victim of its influence as the movies that came in its wake: Halloween 2 (1981), with Rick Rosenthal taking over the reins from John Carpenter, featured an ingenious array of hospital-based homicides (the corpse of Michael Myers having come unexpectedly back to life) but lacked the anything-can-happen-oh-shit factor of the original. When an enemy cannot be killed, the victory of the last man or woman standing is an empty one.

  The law of diminishing returns dictates that by the time a movie title is followed by a number or Roman numeral indicating that it has reached its third episode, watching it is an experience as rewarding as watching two raindrops as they dribble down a window. Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1984) is worth mentioning, though, if only for the fact that it marks the sole occasion that a movie franchise has ditched its signature plot and characters, bringing in an entirely separate story under its rubric. In this one, the Silver Shamrock toy company plans to commemorate Halloween with a line of demonic masks that, once affixed, cause snakes and creepy crawlies to writhe out of the wearer’s eyes, nose and mouth. “It’s the best joke of all,” hissed the toy boss, “a joke on the children.” Audiences, however, were disgruntled by the lack of slash action and when the series resumed at the end of the eighties Michael Myers was back, unstoppable as ever, with Donald Pleasence’s batty Dr. Loomis always just a few steps behind. (That situation will now sadly remain the same forever, as Pleasence died shortly after completing 1995’s Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers.)

  * * *

  In 1957, a camper named Jason Voorhees drowned at Camp Crystal Lake, a victim of neglect on the part of two camp counselors lost in the throes of passion. This was bad news because it signaled the start of the Friday the 13th series. Unlike Halloween, this franchise never had any heights from which to tumble. It was always a crude, barely competent exercise in pandering to an audience who would have been just as happy to see footage of meat being prepared, as long as blood flowed and sharp objects were utilized. Nevertheless, the first Friday the 13th (1980) is successful on its own terms, establishing a tone of idiot foreboding from the get-go with the sawing of Harry Manfredini’s ssh-ssh-ssh-aah-aah-aah score. The story makes sense, too. The camp counselors (Kevin Bacon among them) are so perky, boisterous and adorable that you can empathize with the peevishness burning behind the hockey mask. And, before our collective goodwill was wiped away by a decade’s worth of “aw, come on” Idiot Twist endings, the film’s staggering climactic revelation that Jason’s mad old mom was behind the carnage was met by dazed grins of acceptance. No way is Friday the 13th anything approximating a good movie, but you can’t deny its ability to provoke starts, squeals and the sudden desire to view the movie through the cracks of your fingers. Only an audience of Amish could have been given the willies by the next episodes. The longevity of the series is due to its transformation into a crowd-participation vehicle. The knuckleheadedness of campers and counselors tempted to skinny-dip in Crystal Lake or go for a midnight walk in the woods was a signal for paying customers to hurl abuse at the screen.

  Attempts to defibrillate the walking corpse occurred in 1982’s Part 3 (filmed in 3-D so that knife was … comin’ at ya!), 1984’s Part 4 (billed a
s The Final Chapter, and boasting its most star-studded roster: Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover), 1986’s Part 6 (Jason Lives: the cadaver is revived by a stray bolt of lightning) and 1988’s Part 7 (The New Blood: one of Jason’s stalkees turns out to possess telekinetic powers and, as such, is a worthy opponent), but the series was its star, a lumbering moron adept only in the fields of slicing and dicing. Like Michael Myers, Jason survives into the nineties. The given explanation is that he has shrugged off bodily constrictions and ascended to a higher plateau of evil. Somehow, I can’t imagine anyone in the multiplex having enough energy to shout back at the screen by that point.

  * * *

  As soon as you heard the skreee of Freddy Krueger’s Ginsu fingernails along the pipes of his purgatorial boiler room, you knew there was a new sheriff in slash ’n’ stalk territory. In Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the sins of the fathers are visited on a group of suburban high schoolers when the child-murderer burned to death a decade ago by their vigilante parents returns to slaughter them in their dreams. This Krueger (played by Robert Englund) was no silent, masked emissary of Doom. With his barbecued visage, dirty striped sweater, rakishly tilted fedora and finger accessories, he was the personification of cackling malice. His killings were elaborately staged, hideously appropriate and capped by a lame quip. In the course of the series, he would dispatch the physically infirm, the drug addicted, the deaf, the asthmatic and the bulimic in creatively personalized ways. His wise cracking approach to teen-slicing made him an instant icon. It also quickly denatured the character, turning him into a Captain Hook–type ham.