Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  Daniel’s savior is the local maintenance man, Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki “The Artist Formerly Known as Pat” Morita). A fount of specious Oriental mysticism, Miyagi becomes Danielsan’s sensei, teaching him when to walk away and when to take on an opponent. Of course, Daniel doesn’t immediately realize he’s being granted access to ancient wisdom; he thinks he’s being used as cheap labor to paint Miyagi’s fence and wax his car. Hostilities between Daniel and the disciples of the embittered Vietnam vet, Kreese (Martin Kove), who runs his karate school with such a heavy hand he makes R. Lee Ermey look like Stuart Smalley, reach a peak at a martial arts face-off. Kreese instructs his star pupil to cripple Daniel, and this thug who, in the opening attack was cheerfully gearing up to ride his motorbike across Daniel’s head, starts to snivel like a baby. This has the effect of transferring the mantle of ultimate evil to the corrupt adult. The hapless student hacks away at Daniel’s ankle, causing him to collapse in agony. At the climactic moment, Daniel spreads his arms, raises his leg and strikes the legendary crane stance which enables him to put the other guy on the mat. Emotionally, we the audience are right down there on the ground, writhing with the loser, such is the pummelingly professional job done by Avildsen, Macchio, Morita and Kove. I haven’t been packed in ice, I’ve seen a few movies in my time, but there were times during the final fight I actually found myself worrying that Daniel might not make it.

  Responsible for filling far more dojos than any Van Damme rampage, The Karate Kid went on to inspire three sequels. None was anywhere near as entertaining, but Part II (1986) is worth mentioning being as it started the exact second the first one left off, with Kreese attempting to mete out a sound thrashing to Mr. Miyagi and having both his chopping hands shattered in the process. (An attempt to sire a distaff spin-off in 1994’s Next Karate Kid ended in humiliation and despair. Rather than focusing on a rampaging riot grrrl hellbent on kicking her way to self-esteem, excellently-named femme lead Hilary Swank was forced to essay the role of an ornithologically-inclined problem child who barely has one decent fight in the entire movie!)

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  Do you ever wake up sweating in the middle of one of those dark nights of the soul when you realize how little your life actually amounts to and how much time you’ve devoted to staring blankly at things like Rob Lowe’s rowing movie? In Oxford Blues (1984), he’s a Vegas car valet who fakes his way onto the acceptance list for the venerable British university in order to meet and mate with his dream girl, aristo-wench Lady Victoria (Amanda Pays). Cue culture shock with Lowe’s Nicky D’Angelo navigating his big red car through leafy glades and past tea shops, punching the air in triumph. Oblivious to the disdainful looks and exquisitely constructed put-downs that greet his unwanted appearance in the gleaming spires, he puts some of that brash Yank know-how to good effect, gate-crashing a boatrace and rowing, clad in leather jacket, to a second-place finish. This gets him the attention of Lady Victoria and the enmity of her boyfriend, Colin Gilchrist-Bishop (Julian Sands, working that sneer of cold command), who is, of course, Oxford’s long-established rowing god. Under the tutelage of college professor Routlege (Alan Howard, doing a dissipated swinger thing) and rowing team cox Rona (Ally Sheedy), Nick becomes a little less of a self-centered hey-everybody-look-at-me-I’m-American attention grabber and more of a team player. In the end, Nick and Colin put aside their differences and in a resolutely unrousing climax, row together against Harvard. Oxford Blues is a bomb, of course, but it’s almost worth your indulgence for the scene where the nonverbal Lowe is moved to interrupt a debate titled Should Columbus Have Stayed in Spain? with a spirited defense of the U.S.A.

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  Full of gasping, spluttering young men falling open-mouthed into thick puddles of mud and slithering ungracefully around rain-soaked playing fields, All The Right Moves (1983) is about as unglamorous as a teen sports movie starring Tom Cruise can be. Cruise plays a high-school football star desperate to get out of his dying Pennsylvania mill town to make some sort of life for himself. Lea Thompson as his girlfriend and Craig T. Nelson, taking on the role of coach for the first—but sadly not the last—time, see their futures bound up with his. Johnny Be Good (1988) takes the same setup and makes a pig-brained calamity of it. Johnny Walker (skinny little Anthony Michael Hall, now a hulking, barely recognizable wall of flesh) has such a good arm that scouts from rival colleges lose their minds in his presence, offering him women, money, cars and drugs up the wazoo if he’ll sign with their schools. He takes a hedonistic tour of various colleges before being humbled by his family into realizing that he was in danger of becoming a sell-out and signing up with the one institution who put on the plate only the prospect of a solid education.

  Once you get past the shock of Hall’s appearance (he looks like he’s been bench-pressing buses), there are many other indignities to contend with: Paul Gleason (The Breakfast Club’s Vernon) as Johnny’s sleazy Coach, Uma Thurman, making an unhappy major movie debut as the love interest, Jim McMahon, shown filming an Adidas spot that is included in its entirety, and Judas Priest’s version of the title tune. The only light relief comes from Robert Downey Jr., who looks to be improvising his entire part. The movie grinds to a halt as he launches into a bout of babbling free association. You find yourself letting out a weary sigh when the plot starts up again.

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  “I’m eighteen. I haven’t done anything. I made this deal with myself, this is the year I make my mark.” This messianic burst of introductory resolve heralds what sort of movie? A spiritual awakening? A loss of virginity? A rite of passage? Vision Quest (1985) fancies itself as all of those but what it actually is is a wrestling movie. Louden Swain (Matthew Modine) is a high-school grappler obsessively attempting to drop his body weight so he can get down to 168 pounds and become eligible to take on the legendary, unbeatable Chute.

  At the height of his my-body-is-a-temple insanity, distraction shows up in the deadpan form of Carla (Linda Fiorentino), a would-be artist en route to California whose car breaks down and who ends up staying at the house of Louden and his old man (Ronny Cox). Sexual tension? By the bucketful. Louden’s concentration goes all to hell and pretty soon, he’s furtively picking her panties out of the laundry basket and ecstatically inhaling their warmth. Driven insane by the mistaken belief she’s boffing his English teacher, he throws himself at her and is whacked away. Finally, she accedes to his innocent babbling (confirming that a tender, romantically inclined Linda Fiorentino is not radically different from an icy, contemptuous Linda Fiorentino).

  After a literal roll in the hay with Carla, Louden is amazed that he ever got himself so worked up by a stupid wrestling match. This meandering movie’s one piece of tension is finally introduced. Has Louden lost his edge? Will he step in the ring with Chute? The answers to both questions are in the affirmative. He regains his hunger to choke Chute when Carla takes off unannounced for Cali (she comes back for the big fight, of course) and after a colleague has delivered a tragic monologue about sitting in a hotel room watching a football match on Mexican TV, where the sight of Pele scoring a goal caused him to blubber like a child. Matthew Modine was a good choice to play Louden. Even when he’s squeezing the last breath out of Chute, he still seems like a sensitive guy.

  Action Men

  Concurrent with the rise of the teen flick was the ascension of the Big Dumb Action Movie into the status of international language. Few young actors packed sufficient musculature to kick ass convincingly (and Anthony Michael Hall looked too weird and bloated), but there were a few notable attempts to mate Hollywood’s then-reigning Genres of Shame.

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  Not only is Anthony Edwards one of the few actors to become famous after his hair fell out, but he is also one of the only performers to have starred in a paint-gun action movie. Gotcha! (1985) confirmed the worst fears of every parent who worked their fingers to the bone so their child would have the college education they missed out on. The kids at UCLA do nothing but run around shooting guns loaded
with dye pellets at each other and screaming “Gotcha!” when they score a splattery hit.

  After a stressful semester of dodging the dreaded dye, Jonathan (Edwards) and roomie Manolo (Nick Corri) take off for Paris. Jonathan hasn’t had time to digest a baguette before he’s been propositioned and relieved of his virginity by sultry stranger Sacha (Linda Fiorentino, deadpan and contemptuous). Enamored of her husky Czech accent and skillful manipulation of his schwantz, and oblivious to the fact that she virtually has the words Hi, I’m a spy tattooed on her tongue, he follows her to East Berlin where, she claims, she’s doing some absolutely straightforward courier business. Of course, she’s using the sap to transport secret microfilm across the border. The notion that a babe like Sacha would snuggle up to such a drip stretches the credulity of the East Germans, and the pair are pursued back to UCLA. This is where the months spent messing up the dorms with the pellet gun come in handy. The commies are no match for the wrath of a few good splattergun-toting students. All that remains is for a contrite Sacha to reveal herself as Cheryl Brewster from Pittsburgh and Jonathan to play an I-feel-so-used scene. Maybe one day that nice Dr. Greene will shake his head sadly and lecture some poor victim on the danger of playing Gotcha! Or watching it …

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  Target (1985) is True Lies with Matt Dillon as Jamie Lee Curtis. When Matt’s glammy mom goes on vacation, he dreads having to spend time trapped alone with his drop-dead dull dad (Gene Hackman). Then mom gets herself kidnapped and dad turns out to be a spy who’s as handy with his fists as he is with a piece. Matt’s slack jaw gets a major workout in this cool-dad fantasy.

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  Young Guns (1988), the Brat Pack on horseback movie now best remembered for inspiring the Warren G hit “Regulate,” had a few things going for it: a nifty rock-video title sequence, a slo-mo peyote freakout, Emilio Estevez going gun crazy as Billy the Kid. Mostly, though, the gun-toting ensemble of regulators (Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Dermot Mulroney, Casey Siemaszko) seemed like such contemporary figures, it was at times hard to remember you weren’t watching a time-travel romp. A similar-in-all-respects sequel followed.

  Nice Guys

  Ren McCormick wasn’t looking for trouble. He may have been the big city kid newly arrived in this small, God-fearing town, but he just wanted to cut loose, Footloose (1984). A nice guy who just wants to fit in, Ren (Kevin Bacon) nevertheless stirs up a wasp’s nest among the other teens. Some of them want to be cool like him, some of them want to stomp him into the ground. Preacher’s daughter Ariel (Lori Singer) who is supposed to be willful and mercurial but is portrayed as being out of her mind, is hot for his body. Her father, the very Reverend Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) disapproves of Ren’s presence, especially when the punk has the temerity to demand the right to stage a senior prom. No dancing in this town! After much soul-searching and anguish, the kids shake their booty (outside the city limits) and Ren cuts loose under a shower of silver glitter. Let’s hear it for the boy!

  If you’d corralled a bunch of kids into a cinema in 1955 and shown them a test screening of Footloose, chances are the response sheets would have been returned bearing the phrase “Squaresville, daddio.” But, like the similarly dilapidated Dirty Dancing, Footloose seemed to have been constructed with a sinister tracking device that bypassed audience cynicism and aimed straight at deep-rooted sentimentality. Luckily, later flops like Sing! and Rooftops proved that the device had some design malfunctions.

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  The same bland quality that made Andrew McCarthy the Hootie of the Brat Pack worked to his advantage in Heaven Help Us (1985). In this story of the rigors of a Catholic education, his new kid in school, Michael Dunn, doesn’t do much more than look wary and bewildered but he acts as a center of calm, anchoring the movie’s ensemble of goofballs. Gobbling up the scenery around him are Matt Dillon’s little brother Kevin as the school bully Rooney (who has a real rousing moment when he hauls off and slugs the school’s fearsome disciplinarian priest, Brother Constance), Malcolm Danare as the corpulent egghead, Caesar, and that odd little guy Stephen Geoffreys as Williams, the kid who beats off 5.6 times a day. Best bit: Wallace Shawn’s Brother Abruzzi opening a mixer with a speech on lust. “It’s the beast that wants to spit you into the eternal fires of hell, where for all eternity your flesh will be ripped from your body by serpents with razor-sharp teeth.” And take it easy on the punch …

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  The combination of Ralph Macchio and a curmudgeonly old ethnic geezer worked like a charm in The Karate Kid. In Walter Hill’s Crossroads (1986), Macchio’s eager innocent was a classical guitar prodigy nursing a burning ambition to make his name on the lucrative blues circuit. To this end, he hooks up with grizzled old bluesman Willie Brown (Joe Seneca) a onetime sideman to the legendary Robert Johnson. Macchio’s character Eugene hopes Willie will teach him Johnson’s famous unrecorded 30th song. To prove himself worthy of such an honor, Willie drags Eugene across the Mississippi Delta country, wheezing out epigrams like “Where I come from, you don’t play no harp, you don’t get no pussy,” landing him in fights and sticking him with his bar tab so the kid can, you know, feel the blues.

  It turns out Willie isn’t just fucking with Eugene for the pleasure of watching a white boy squirm. His delta odyssey has a purpose and what a nutball purpose it is. It transpires Willie sold his soul to the devil—or Scratch as he’s known round these parts—many years ago, and now that he’s in the twilight of his years, the deal seems like one of his less-inspired decisions. Once they reach the crossroads between Hell and Earth, Eugene faces off against Scratch’s disciple, a demonic backcombed axe hero (played by guitar bore Steve Vai, then of Whitesnake) in a battle for Willie’s soul.

  Blues purists may have suffered perforated ulcers over the notion that the struggle for the legacy of the blues was being fought by two white kids but there’s no denying the fascination of the spectacle. Big Hair lets loose a finger-blurring assault of arpeggios and feedback. Eugene (or at least the musician whose fingers Macchio attempts to stay in synch with) counters with a chooglin’ 12-bar. And, in the end, his integrity triumphs over hairspray, padded crotches, effects pedals and Satan worship. Crossroads was an unlikely big studio release under any circumstances, but as a teen-aimed movie in the middle of the eighties, it ranks as a quixotic act worthy of our bemused admiration.

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  Bridging the great divide between Moody Rebel and Nice Guy was a kinder, gentler Matt Dillon in The Flamingo Kid (1984). Set in 1963, this, the best of Garry Marshall’s amiable eighties extended sitcoms, finds Brooklyn boy Jeffrey (Dillon) moving on up beyond the block and into a summer job as a cabana boy in the swank El Flamingo Beach Club. There he’s taken under the grimy wing of shifty car dealer Phil Brody (Richard Crenna). Seduced by the sand, the sea and the tan, toned availability of Brody’s hardbodied daughter (played by Janet Jones, who was in even more awesome shape in the otherwise lamentable American Anthem), Jeffrey sees the borough he once thought of as home now transformed into a sucking pit, one that’s already mired his plumber Pop (Hector Elizondo), but one that’s not going to keep him from landing his share of the good life. Who ends up with ultimate possession of Jeffrey’s soul? The poor but honest plumber or the corrupt car dealer? Hmm. Tough one. Best running gag: the noises Jeffrey makes while he’s eating.

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  Girls on Film

  Heathers, Whores, Babysitters, Bitches, Sorority Sisters and Sluts

  What’s that sound? Late at night you hear it, high, mournful and sustained, like a pack of lost dogs baying at the moon, crying for home. But it’s not dogs, not wolves, not coyotes, not cows. It’s the Actress’s Lament: “Noooooo rooooooles,” they’re moaning. Always the supportive wife or the willing girlfriend, the nutty ex or the victim who motivates the hero into ass-kicking action, never the motor that drives the story. “Nooooooo roooooooles.” And if women of substance and stature are sitting shivah for their careers, imagine the purgatorial existence of the st
riving young actress in the eighties. These were the days, lest we forget, when Mr. Short Horny 14 Year Old held Hollywood in his hairy palm. Desperate to appease and arouse this raging satyr, the industry made regular sacrifices of young, firm female flesh. Sometimes, in the T&A category, it was perky bikini filler. In splatter, it was cold, prone and full of holes. If they weren’t on hand to quell any suspicion that the hero was gay, the function of girls in teen movies (except for those helmed by John Hughes) was to display good-natured tolerance in the face of stalking, voyeurism and fumbled attempts at seduction. On the other side of the screen, the female sector of the audience lavished fickle moments of devotion on innumerable pimplefree sub-Brats. The girls in these films were either receptacles or they were about to be knocked off pedestals. Concerted efforts to contrive features that subverted male wish-fulfillment fantasies were doomed from the outset. The femme-helmed splatter misfire Slumber Party Massacre, directed by Amy Jones and written with supposedly satirical intent by Rita Mae Brown, chopped coed meat just as methodically as any other substandard cleaver-wielder. But the fact that women were creating and choreographing the garroting and impaling of empty-headed, bikini-clad sorority sisters failed either to shame or shed any fresh light on the dubious genre. The outcome was similar when the teen sex comedy was replayed through female eyes.