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In the Weird Science/Real Genius/My Science Project race for the teen-genius nomination, the last movie was completely shut out. The most mindless of the three, its scatter-as-many-dumb-gags-explosions-and-effects-as-we-can-to-cover-up-the-fact-we-don’t-have-a-story approach to its subject matter threw up a constant stream of rueful chuckles. With the pressures of coming up with a bright idea for his high-school science project weighing heavy on his mind, Michael Harlan (John Stockwell) digs through a military junkyard, appropriating enough carelessly tossed-away circuit boards and generators to construct a superpowered device that, when switched on, kicks the door of the space/time continuum wide open. Bob Roberts (Dennis Hopper), the hippie science teacher, gets sucked into the void. In exchange, Cleopatra, squads of goose-stepping Nazis, a neanderthal man, a bunch of gladiators and, for a slam-bang finale, Godzilla are plucked from their own time zones and tossed into the maelstrom of Michael’s school. If you mated My Science Project (1985) with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, jettisoning along the way the former’s pallid leads (Stockwell and Fisher Stevens as his murderously annoying buddy, Vince) and the latter’s unhurried pace, you’d have a mad, monstrous beast of a movie. Still, no complaints about the finale, which returns Bob Roberts from the outer limits, driving a VW and proclaiming hoarsely, “The future is a groove!”
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Sure, his Porsche is parked in a place so exclusive that even breathing near it in a manner that could be interpreted as suspicious is sufficient provocation for a squad of security operatives to stomp on the skull of the offender till his eyebrows spring out. But let’s take a moment to show some sympathy for the plight of the Hollywood executive. The power to green light a project is both a blessing and a curse. Because you just don’t know. You pass on some puerile pitch. Someone else says yes and it makes a mint. That’s why a trapdoor failed to open beneath the feet of the hypothetical maniac who, between bong hits, blurted out the following premise: “It’s Mad Max. It’s Starlight Express. It’s young. It’s wild. It’s the future. There’s no water. The government keeps the people in chains. But these kids, these crazy, beautiful kids, they save the day. And they’re on skates, see, so the dark forces of oppression can’t catch them, and did I mention they’re hot-shit hockey players, too? Oh yeah and, there’s this magic sphere that unites the kids, tells them they can make it. It’s got heart. It’s got magic. It’s got kids on skates playing hockey in the future! Solarbabies.” Or something like that. Mel Brooks gave the go-ahead for this exact movie to be made under the aegis of his production company, Brooksfilms and, in doing so, gave himself a cast-iron defense against anyone who might say his name hadn’t been associated with a funny film in years. Jason Patric and gorgeous, hapless Jami Gertz must have figured with the skates and the story they’d signed up for another Lost Boys exercise in high-speed, high camp. But, even though they and their colleagues (including James LeGros and Lukas Haas) are called upon to carry themselves like a chorus line in a Broadway stinker that’ll never see a second night, the agony in their eyes is all too apparent. Shockingly, Solarbabies (1986) was written by Walon Green, best known for scripting The Wild Bunch with Sam Peckinpah, which gives a whole bunch of credence to the auteur theory.
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Imagine if you were but a towheaded tot and one or both of your parents sat you down and made a speech that went as follows, “Your life will be a long string of disappointments. You will end up locked in a loveless sham with someone whose presence will fill you with dread and loathing. Your dreams will crumble to nothing and you will waste your days doing a job you hate and working for people you fear.” If he’d included exactly such a paragraph of dialogue, director Joe Dante couldn’t have done a more consummate job of pissing on the goodwill of his audience than he did in Explorers (1985).
There’s magic in the air as three young boys, dreamer Ben (Ethan Hawke), nerd genius Wolfgang (River Phoenix) and surly punk Steve (Bobby Fite) construct their own spacecraft. When the kids share the same dream and they wake up possessing the knowledge necessary to equip their homemade craft with the capacity for interplanetary travel, you know that someone is calling to them … Out There. You’re ready to abandon yourself to that Spielbergian leap into wonder. Then they make it to the outer reaches of the galaxy and meet the life-forms that reached out to touch them. The aliens are big, stupid squishy lumps of Jell-O mold who receive all their stimuli via trashy American TV and whose only mode of communication is through endless pop-culture references (yeah I know, but at least I never promised you a voyage filled with wonder). The aliens are kids. Green, distended and squishy, but kids, nonetheless. Kids dumbed down by their exposure to mindless entertainment. Sucker us in, then slap us about the face, why don’t you? Dante tries to sugar the pill with a no-place-like-home conclusion, but the damage has been done. Explorers joins Gremlins and his segment of The Twilight Zone movie to provide conclusive proof that Joe Dante is a grim brother whose speciality is making die kinder feel sick and miserable.
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SpaceCamp (1986) is the ultimate “Don’t touch that!” movie. A group of bright sparks are taking a learning course at NASA. They’re inside a rocket for a flight simulation program. One of the kids touches a button after they’ve been explicitly advised to keep their hands to themselves, and before you can say, “Houston, we have a problem…” that big tin can has loosed its moorings. Luckily, Kate Capshaw’s on board (maybe the only time the preceding five words have been used to start a sentence) and is a fully trained astronaut. She’s got her hands full with a crew of wailing, complaining homesick geniuses including Lea Thompson, Kelly Preston, Leaf—now Joaquin—Phoenix (a very chubby little kid) and an actor called Larry B. Scott who had the misfortune to portray the sole black face in many a teen movie (he also had Solarbabies and Revenge of the Nerds on his resume). SpaceCamp has substantially the same plot as Apollo 13, and while it’s not in any way a better film, or better acted, or better written or better directed—in fact, comparisons with The Astronuts are probably more appropriate—its crew of whiners, none of whom have a noble bone in their bodies, make it more fun.
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He takes out the trash. He never talks back. He gets straight As. He’s a star in Little League. He’s too good to be true. He’s D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), or Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform, as he’s known to the dangerous minds at the defense center who constructed him from old bits of string, hair dryers and egg cartons. This potentially lethal weapon (played by Barret Oliver) is stolen from the government and left to fend for himself. He’s quickly adopted by doting parents Michael McKean and Mary Beth Hurt and sucked into the bosom of suburbia. Though his strange affinity for electrical appliances (one touch and he credits dad’s ATM account with thousands of dollars) and ability to knock a baseball into the next town draw bemused glances, he’s accepted as a local prodigy, then the Feds track him down. But Daryl doesn’t want to be a Pinocchio assassin any more. He wants to scrape his knee and drink too much and skip school like a real live kid. I kind of wish this insipid movie had been a hit because it would have had an excellent setup for a teen T2 sequel with the good robot versus the evil cyborg that can morph from school bully into pet dog into hot, panting neighborhood slut (another excellent idea and here I am just throwing it out there to the wolves).
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A 12-year-old kid (Joey Cramer) disappears from his Fort Lauderdale home. After a long fruitless search, his parents come to terms with the fact that he’s never coming back. Eight years later he returns, not a day older than he was when he vanished.
According to Flight of the Navigator (1986), he’s spent the previous years whizzing about the galaxy in a spacecraft overseen by a wacky robotic flight commander (voiced by Paul Reubens under the pseudonym Paul Mall) well-versed in Earth pop culture. Now back home, he has to deal with the parents who had accepted his death and a younger brother who now towers over him. When the inevitable shady government scientists descen
d on him, brandishing ink-blot tests and anal probes, they discover he has mental access to the topography of a million hitherto undiscovered star systems. They want to know what he knows. He starts to buckle under the pressure. Naturally, the alien spacecraft springs him from confinement and takes him back in time to the minute before he was abducted. You got your goofy space adventure side to Flight of the Navigator. You got your serious, somber missing-presumed-dead son returns home to find his world has changed side to Flight of the Navigator. You can be either of these movies but my strong feeling on the matter is, you can’t be both.
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Even though Tron failed to drum up much custom from those constituents joined at the wrists to their joysticks, The Last Starfighter (1984) continued to stroke the arcade rats. Lance Guest plays the trailer-park kid whose only respite from his grim reality is the time of day when he can blast the shit out of some space invaders. His record high score brings him to the attention of a giant lizard (Robert The Music Man Preston under a ton of prosthetics) who claims to be a headhunter for the Star League of Planets. The league is in dire need of hot-shot fighter pilots to defend the universe from space invaders almost exactly like the ones Lance has been zapping on screen. Coming up with a dumb premise and then executing it in a way that best exploits the central conceit, no matter how limited, may not seem to be a momentous achievement. But, as the past entries prove, so many movies try to be more than their basic theme and end up shortchanging the audience. For the reason that it achieves its limited aims—dude shoots aliens—The Last Starfighter deserves respect.
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Finally, the movie that kicked off the eighties teen science cycle. Just as The Fonz found his greatest big-screen success playing against type in Night Shift, so Chachi shook off his Bad Boy image, playing the geek in Zapped! (1982). Scott Baio’s Barney starts the movie nagged and derided by his shrill and unpleasant parents, who disapprove of all the hours he spends in the lab working on pointless experiments. Little do they know, he’s cultivating some primo hemp, and for reasons apparently unconnected with sheer cruelty, teaching mice to scuba dive into a vat of alcohol. While he’s engaged in this activity, baseball coach Scatman Crothers accidentally knocks a beaker of some mysterious liquid into a jar containing another. The two compounds when combined produce a mysterious telekinetic effect which means that the mice can attract cheese by the power of thought, and more important, Barney can pop blouse buttons. He alternately does this and frets about doing it up until the school prom when he does it to such an extent that he loses his powers.
Zapped! is Carrie played for laughs, except that there’s no movie, just a succession of lame stunts. Barney continually plays second banana to his stud bud Payton (Willie Aames; yup, we’re witnessing a virtual prequel to the decidedly non-telekinetic Charles in Charge) and his bossy girlfriend, Roberta (Felice Schachter). Best bit: under the influence of Barney’s primo hemp, Coach Scatman Crothers hallucinates meeting Einstein, then being chased by his wife who is riding a chariot and firing salamis at him.
7
Boys to Men
Hoodlums, Heartthrobs, Yuppies, Preppies, Sportos and Streetfighters
“I’m the bad guy? How did that happen?” wondered Michael Douglas’s embodiment of angry, white maledom in Falling Down a split second before he was erased from a world that no longer tolerated his brutish ways. Always the most intuitive of A-list actors, Michael Douglas knew that for his stock character, the flawed white guy, the jig was up. Nobody had the time to listen to him whine, to lend a shoulder to his neuroses, provide constant reassurances of his potency, excuse his thoughtless behavior or indulge his delusions of grandeur. Suddenly, testosterone was second in line only to acid rain as the chief despoiler of our natural resources. Suddenly, accusations were rife that being a man meant belonging to a club whose entrance requirements included aggression, abuse, lying, cheating and cowardice, and whose motto was Trap, Dominate, Fuck, Destroy. (I fully accepted the accusations, I just couldn’t get past the bastard at the door.) All of which makes a retrospective appreciation of male-targeted teen fare a task one takes on with mixed emotions. Because the eighties was Disneyland for guys. A whole galaxy of reprehensible behavior is on show in these movies. Dumb guys, deadly guys, bullies, buffoons, betrayers, predators, punks and thugs. And they’re all celebrated; their alienation is the result of an adult world unworthy of them, their hooliganism is a stirring example of youthful high spirits, their stupidity excused by naiveté or, in one notorious example, patriotism. The fulfillment of male fantasies is, of course, still a major function of the movies but today its tempered with self-awareness; the Action Dudes know that we know they’re impossibly over-developed slabs of lunkhead beef, the comics break themselves up with their doody-obsessed Big Kid schtick. Back in the days when the multiplex was a boy’s town, the audience was sincerely invited to share the hero’s pain, exult in his triumphs, sympathize with his sulks and burn with his desires. Now that the parameters of our tolerance for masculine misbehavior have narrowed, how do these movies that expected us to invest our emotions in the well-being of white guys hold up?
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Let’s start at the top. What film is more Boy and more eighties than Risky Business (1983)? As I stated in the introduction, most of the movies of the era fly in the face of the prevalent—and still prevailing—perceptions of the decade. Though the eighties are commonly held to be about Greed, Power and Excess, the most successful of the teen films cautioned against avarice, attempted to bridge social divides and sided with the underdog, except this one. It started off like another glossy, frisky, suburban teen sex farce but Risky Business soon turned out to have a heart of glass. The guy we’re rooting for, Joel Goodsen (Tom Cruise), isn’t just a good son, he’s a paragon of virtue, a grade-A student so focused on his future even his hormonally instigated fantasies of naked girls soaking in the shower are interrupted by nightmares about being three hours late for his SATs. His adrenaline is set racing at the prospect of being named a Future Enterpriser in a scheme set up by his high school to find the capitalist tools of tomorrow. With priorities so far out of whack, is it any wonder his parents prize their lad almost as much as they enjoy the many material possessions littering their lovely home? It is with considerable reluctance that the Goodsens take off for the weekend, leaving the spoils of their labor in the care of Joel, but if parents didn’t disappear for weekends teen movies would be marketed as family fare.
So out of the picture they go and the stage is set for the scene that constitutes the sole reason Risky Business is fondly recalled as a big-hearted festival of fun. Mom and Dad are history, out comes the Chivas and Coke, Seger blasts from the speakers and Joel, in his jockeys, redefines unshackled white suburbanite liberation with his air guitar, his pelvic thrusts and his couch humping. “Just take those old records off the shelf…” Joel’s thin veneer of civilization may have melted away but even in his pants-free primal state, he’s still buttoned down next to his unsightly friend, Miles (Curtis Armstrong, the Most Exalted Potentate of Grossout). Miles, a motivational speaker specializing in mischief, sees it as his mission to makes sure Joel uses his time sans parents as unwisely as possible. “Joel, you wanna know something? Every now and then, say ‘what the fuck.’ ‘What the fuck’ gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future.” So saying, he dials a hooker and leaves a message on her machine, giving Joel’s name and address. The black transvestite who shows up takes one look at the trembling, tight-lipped Joel and, every inch a pro, says “I know what you need.” Enter Rebecca DeMornay’s Hitchcockian frosty blond sex specialist, Lana. “Are you ready for me … Ralph?” she murmurs, putting mocking emphasis on Joel’s hastily assumed nom de plume. Accompanied by the Arctic blasts of Tangerine Dream’s score, Lana gives of herself so unselfishly that Joel and we believe that he has touched that one spot that she keeps at a far remove from the johns. But when morning comes and Joel finds, to his consternation, that he lac
ks enough ready cash to meet her $300 fee, she’s all ice and all business, refusing to leave the house until he meets his part of the arrangement.
Flustered, he rushes off to the bank to cash in a savings bond. But when he returns, not only is Lana gone but also conspicuous by its absence is his mother’s beloved Steuben glass egg. He goes in frantic search of the hooker and the bauble and winds up rescuing Lana from her vicious pimp, Guido (Joe Pantoliano). Saving her requires a car chase that climaxes with Joel’s dad’s revered Porsche ending up at the bottom of Lake Michigan (situated in the same city that houses the wreck of Cameron Frye’s father’s beloved Ferrari). First the egg, now the car, and it gets worse! By the time Joel gets home, Guido and associates have stripped the Goodsen spread of furniture, holding it as ransom till he’s repaid the loss of Lana’s earning power.
His parents are due back in a day, and the interviewer from Princeton is about to drop in on Joel to find out what he’s made of. He doesn’t leave town and begin a new life under the name Ralph. He doesn’t even swallow a handful of pills. He exploits the weakness that got him into this pickle. Lana recruits a bunch of cheerful colleagues, and they turn Joel’s empty home into a suburban bordello. Suddenly, he’s a cool dude, glancing knowingly over the top of his Ray-Bans, the fate of a hundred high school virgins in his hands. His savoir faire and acumen even steamrollers the doubts of the Princeton guy, who finds he’s doing an interview in a house of ill repute.
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