“What do you get if you cross ‘Animal House’ with ‘Death Wish’? Young Warriors– a unique combination of fraternity hijinks, high-speed action, wildly imaginative animation, and hard-drivin’ rock!”

Obviously that’s what got me to watch the movie. I couldn’t really imagine a movie that fit that description – can you? Put the tape in and it’s even more confounding because it starts with this dedication:

THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO
KING VIDOR
WITH DEEPEST APPRECIATION
FOR HIS INVALUABLE
CREATIVE ASSISTANCE.

King Vidor started directing with THE GRAND MILITARY PARADE in 1913. He has 77 directing credits on IMDb. He did the black and white parts of THE WIZARD OF OZ. He did DUEL IN THE SUN and WAR AND PEACE. He died in 1982, so this might’ve been the last movie he gave his invaluable creative assistance to. So he gets this dedication.

Then, the opening scene. Closeups on the bodies of a man and a woman on a beach who have just come from skinny dipping, now taking part in a RAMBO-suiting-up-style sequence of putting on their graduation gowns. The man puts on some giant headphones with a built-in radio, they get on a motorcycle and drive to their graduation ceremony where they show up just in time to drive up (scaring the shit out of everybody) and grab the guy’s diploma. He pulls up to his friends and yells “We are free! WHOOO HOOOO!!!” A slow motion overhead shot shows them throwing their hats (and headphones) in the air. It freezes on their smiles, happy music playing, and says:

THESE ARE
THE GRADUATES OF MALIBU HIGH
AND THIS IS THEIR STORY…

then some ominous keyboards and militaristic drums begin as the splattery YOUNG WARRIORS logo splashes across them.

It’s kinda too bad the cover gives it away, because the weirdest thing about this movie is the slide from wacky fraternity hijinks to violence and nihilism. The first part is about some dudes who live in an attic together at Pacific Coast College drinking beer, hazing new pledges, setting a herd of hogs loose at a party, etc. Then one character’s sister gets gang raped to death, they steal a bunch of weapons from the military and go around shooting criminals. At the end they all die. (SPOILER)

The main kid is Kevin (James Van Patten), who’s shown animating shirtless one morning in the frat house, which is decorated with bikini posters, a dart board, and a skeleton. There is a dispute involving a baseball bat and a clock radio. A dude says “Everyone, I’d like you to meet Ginger” and produces a naked woman in his bed. One of the other dudes is a medical student so he puts his stethoscope on her tits, says “she’s a 34 C”, chases her away naked, and they all laugh.

“How the hell is anybody supposed to get any work around this madhouse?” Kevin complains. One guy throws a beer to other guy, both of them wearing nothing but towels. So that’s the sort of vibe we got here, a bunch of dudes who get drunk and smarmily joke about getting laid and share women like they’re joints. But Kevin is emotionally troubled. As he explains to his animation professor who hates his trippy experimental piece, “Well, I guess the only thing I can really say is that I got alot of things going on inside me, and uh, it seems that the only way I can really express my true feelings is through my animation.”

“But Kevin,” the teacher says, “art is a creative endeavor, and that also has restrictions and end points and a reason to be. It’s just like life. If you haven’t got a direction you’re just playing with yourself. You have to make up your mind and take a stand.”

“But sir, I don’t know where I stand.”

The director and co-writer of the movie is Lawrence D. Foldes (DON’T GO NEAR THE PARK), and I think it’s fair to assume he was trying to take some kind of a stand with this movie. And he might not have known where to stand either. What’s interesting about the movie, even if I don’t know what it means, is the way it draws parallels between PORKY’S type horny-dude hijinks and straight up gang rape.

The first section is all about aggressive sex:  A guy goes to the library, says he’s looking for “The Joy of Sex,” ends up fucking a young librarian in the stacks while a nerd nearby says “Oh, good heavens!” The guys hit each other in the crotch, talk about “nympho nurses” and cowgirls for their party, joke about each other’s sex lives.

At home Kevin wants to come into the bathroom while his sister Tiffany (April Dawn) is naked in there. She comes out wrapped in a towel and he pins her up against the wall to joke around with her, then acts protective of her about the guy she’s going to the prom with.

While she’s out they have their frat party. A guy gets pantsed. There are shots of shaking butts on the dance floor. The guys force a pledge to drop his pants, cut a hole in his boxers, shave his butthole, make him sit on an olive and drop it into a martini, then drink it. They tie bricks to two guy’s dicks and make them throw them out the window. You know, just boys being boys, fun kind of Abu Ghraib type stuff.

But while that’s going on Tiffany and her prom date get run off the road and attacked. Her terrifying car crash is intercut with a wacky drunken car crash on the frathouse lawn. Shots of the laughing rapists cut to party-goers cheering on the JACKASS antics.

Tiffany’s ordeal is so traumatic she reverts to a little girl, screaming “Mommy! Mommy!” over and over again. Later, when Kevin finds out his sister is dead, he reacts differently to feeling helpless. He rages at his police officer dad (Ernest Borgnine) and partner (Richard Roundtree), thinking they’re too cowardly to solve the case or something. He rages at his professor (comedian Dick Shawn in a serious role), who’s one of those ’80s movie smarmy heartless upper class liberal prick professors: “Are you implying that things like rape and murder are no longer immoral?” And before long it’s “Oh, you think I’m crazy? I’ll show you what crazy is!” and he throws a chair out the window. He even rages at his buddies, who try to be supportive about his animation project (”Well, it’s still good. It’s just… a little unusual”) and cheer him up by talking about dicks and drinking beer. But Kevin yells “Screw the whole bunch of you!” and storms off.

That goes right into one of those romantic sex scenes with tons of candles but after that he’s in a really dark place and it’s time to go track down the rapists and get revenge. They investigate the crime scene and, let me just say, movie criminals need to learn not to always carry around matchbooks with the logos of the places that they spend most of their time, or at least not to drop those matchbooks at the scenes of their crimes. That would be one way for them to get away with alot more, in my opinion. Anyway, they go to this bar and start asking around trying to find some guys driving a black van (that really narrows it down).

The investigation is going slow (no shit, the professionals haven’t found the killers yet either) so they decide they should also just go after criminals in general, and they get a bunch of guns and hand grenades. You know how it is in a movie when somebody wants to be either a vigilante or a super hero, they just go around at night and spot people openly committing crimes all over the place. So our boys find some black guys stealing the wheels off a car, etc. They get more into it, they go too far, they kill some big time drug guys in a rickety van. They dump out their huge stash of coke but steal their arsenal of guns and grenades. (This is weird because they already explained that a frat brother who’s in the military stole their weapons from a base. It seems like they could use the military base excuse or the found-in-drug-dealer’s-van excuse, but they don’t really need both in one movie.)

The characters are kind of hard to tell apart because they’re all handsome jock dudes with similar early ’80s hair. The one character that stands out is Butch, because he’s a dog that’s always wearing sunglasses, a hat and a handkerchief. It will just randomly cut to him all the time to be, you know, funny. Even after the movie has turned serious it cuts from a dramatic scene where he breaks up with his girlfriend directly to the sunglasses-dog holding a beer in his mouth.

The weirdest part tonally is when the boys go out on patrol and bring Butch with them. In context it just does not seem possible that they’re trying to make a joke out of this scene. His sister has been raped and killed, he’s lost faith in his father and the system, he’s acting out in school and broken off his relationship with his girlfriend, he’s gotten one friend killed and dragged his others into a dangerous and illegal activity, he’s zeroing in on the rapists, the keyboard music is very dark and serious, they’re in a Jeep wearing camo and holding guns… and there’s a fuckin dog wearing sunglasses in the car with them. And (SPOILER) the dog gets killed in a shootout with drug dealers, and then shit gets even more personal.

During all this Kevin still has time for animation. They don’t show him working on it but he keeps debuting new pieces in his class. It’s weird spacescapes and killer snakes and shit. Simple but it would take a while to do, especially in those days. So I hope he got a good grade in that class, he must’ve been working his ass off.

How the fuck did this movie happen? Well, apparently it’s kind of a sequel to one from 1979 called MALIBU HIGH about a high school girl who becomes a prostitute. Foldes wrote that one and got his UCLA Low Budget Film Production teacher Irwin Berwick to direct it. When he made YOUNG WARRIORS it was originally released as THE GRADUATES OF MALIBU HIGH. There aren’t any connecting characters or anything but that high school graduation opening doesn’t seem to serve much purpose except to say “and then after Malibu High this is what those type of kids got up to.”

I went ahead and watched MALIBU HIGH to see how it compared. It’s kind of like a ’70s porn movie with the good parts cut out. This teenage girl gets dumped by her boyfriend and doesn’t get along with her mom, so she decides to ask her drug connection to pimp her out. From there she moves up to a higher class prostitute and then to a hit woman. When she leaves her first pimp she calls him and says “Hey Tony, this is Kim. Yeah, I got a message for you, pal. GET FUCKED.”

Of course, she’s not putting as much effort into her courses as she ought to so she tries to seduce her teachers.

My favorite aspect of the movie is the funky library music. There’s alot of music that comes on with hilarious timing, like the upbeat tune that that plays right after the line “And maybe daddy wouldn’t have had to kill himself because he couldn’t get it up anymore!” and the “dun dun DUHHHHN” type dramatic cue that follows her giving her ex-boyfriend a double flip-off at his locker. It also uses what we now know as The People’s Court theme during the climactic slow foot chase down some stairs to a beach.

Unfortunately MALIBU HIGH isn’t nearly as interesting or weird as YOUNG WARRIORS. But if you insist on seeing it it’s on one of those “Welcome to the Grindhouse” drive-in double feature DVDs along with one called TRIP WITH THE TEACHER.

further reading:

Janet Maslin’s forgiving New York Times review of YOUNG WARRIORS

If you never saw the first one I forgive you. And I think you’re gonna be okay without it. Of the many mixed martial arts/underground fighting movies of the last few years it’s the slickest and most Hollywood. It’s the standard teen subculture movie but with MMA instead of breakdancing or BMX bikes or whatever. Troubled new kid in town wants girl, she belongs to popular rich bully who also is the king of a notorious underground fighting tournament. I can’t recommend it when BLOOD AND BONE, DAMAGE, UNDISPUTED II-III and FIGHTING have all come out in recent years, but I did sort of enjoy the absurdity of these allegedly high school age dudes having their own Kumite Lite.

NEVER BACK DOWN 2 is the DTV sequel and it happens to be directed by the star of two of the above-mentioned better underground fight movies, Mr. Michael Jai White.

I was hoping NBD2 was just gonna take the name and do something totally unrelated, but MJW and original writer Chris Haughty do about half sticking with the feel of the original and half straightup badass. They keep the same corny teenager shit (now they’re college age) but since it’s done on a way lower budget it’s a different type of shitty. In part 1 there was a party scene with fancy crane shots of hundreds of people dancing outside at this big house overlooking a beach. In this movie the party could be in an actual dorm room or basement, there’s an ugly tie-dyed sheet hanging on the wall, but the camera floats around and changes speeds to show you how awesome it is. To be fair there is a guy about to score with a girl and another girl comes over and joins, so it’s a decent party.

There’s still the new kid at school who’s ashamed of his dad and has his eye on the hot girlfriend of the douchey guy, but this time the two are forced to learn together along with two other fighters. Their sensei is MJW himself as Case Walker, gruff ex-con fallen MMA star living and teaching out of a beat-up old trailer named Daisy on a lot he doesn’t own. He says “You pay me in blood, sweat and money” but also asks for a 20 lb. bag of potatoes as part of his first week’s fee.

Case is a great character, a scary Mr. Miyagi who’s not about to give his Daniel-San a car, and says he doesn’t expect to get any Christmas cards from his students. Which doesn’t mean he’s Jewish, it means they’re not exactly gonna have warm and fuzzy feelings for him. But he’s being modest. Even Pai Mei gets Christmas cards. Still, Case is an intimidating dude. One of his rules is “My bad, I forgot to mention shut the fuck up.”

During the teen movie parts MJW doesn’t seem like a better than average director, but he sure knows how to handle his own parts. Case has a classic entrance where he steps out of some shadows, just looks at a bunch of armed street thugs and causes them to run away. In other words he makes them back down! Don’t they know you never do that? Case doesn’t talk when he doesn’t have to, is rarely nice and never smiles. A great performance and character.

I guess they figured they needed some “real actors” in this thing besides MJW, some pretty boys that the audience is supposed to relate to. Apparently the main kid, Dean Geyer (the wrestler), is a blackbelt in karate, but he’s known for being on Australian Idol and a soap opera called Neighbours. The other dude, Alex Meraz (the boxer), plays somebody named “Paul” in all but the first TWILIGHT movie. I can’t imagine anybody disagreeing with me that the two experienced MMA fighters in the cast are way more interesting than those two. I’ll take friendly giant Todd Duffee’s stiff line readings and natural likability over those slick Saved By the Bell kids any day.

The weirdest character is Justin (Scottie Epstein), the kid with dyed black “emo” hair and eyeliner who another kid calls “Kurt Cobain.” He works at a comics shop, is rejected by a girl (”Not gonna happen, dork”), gets stabbed and robbed by thugs, and comes to Case to learn how to stand up for himself. He’s not as big as Marko Zaror in KILTRO but looks similarly ridiculous in the getup, even before I knew he was a real MMA fighter who usually has minimal hair and is packing a bunch of muscle under those baggy clothes. He seems at first like a corny KARATE KID type character who learns martial arts to stop bullies and get girls, then like comic relief, then goes in directions I didn’t expect at all.

The sub-titular “Beatdown” is a fight tournament that returns from part 1, now run by Max (Evan Peters), the geek sidekick from that installment. He’s a kid who became a big shot by knowing all the different fighters and without actually fighting himself. “It’s like a rave, only instead of drugs we get stoked on mayhem,” is how he describes his event.

The Beatdown is one of the lamer underground fighting tournaments in movies, because there’s no weapons, no fighting to the death, no exotic locations, and it’s just in a beat up old gym with local (admittedly topnotch) talent. The cops don’t even try to break it up. The only thing that makes it stand out from other small MMA events is an annoying DJ/commentator (Eddie Bravo). But like in most movies, and not real life, the winner has to go through multiple opponents in one night. That actually was a cool part of the early UFCs before they had to change all the rules because Senator John McCain was campaigning to ban the sport, calling it “human cockfighting.”

I feel good that I understood most of the MMA references (Case is friends with Lyoto Machida, we hear he’s fought Bas Rutten and Kevin Randleman, etc.), but those are pretty silly and they’re meaningless to non-MMA watchers. I don’t think that would be a drawback to enjoying the movie though.

I can’t claim this is on the level of UNDISPUTED II or BLOOD AND BONE. I didn’t like the two lead kids that much, there’s lots of cheesy rock music and you gotta be patient with the melodrama of the first 15 minutes before MJW shows up to make you care. I prefer action movies in a pure world of macho danger, not a college dorm where the heroes are worried about trying to ask out girls. Despite all that I kinda loved this movie, found myself re-watching it and showing people my favorite scenes (the first time we see Case, the first time Case sees the kids). It’s the original NEVER BACK DOWN hit with an MJW 2-knuckled straight punch to the face.

If nothing else, this movie is notable for the character of Case Walker, a main character but you’re left wanting more, hoping part 3 will just be about him fighting and not being a teacher. He has many quotable lines, but his facial expressions are even more memorable.

This movie almost could’ve not happened because he almost scares away the guys that come to train with him. They think they have an in because Max sent them, but he says “Max? You tell that little wannabe Dana White next time he sends a couple bitches over to train with me he gonna have some damn problems, now get the fuck outta here.” When one of his students insults another one he doesn’t tell him to cut it out, he tells the other kid to “Punch his ass in the face.” The nicest thing he does in the movie is not break a kid’s arm when he refuses to tap. He’s gotta be one of the most credible and intimidating fight mentors in an American movie. Would’ve been a hell of a brawl if he ever came across Bone or Iceman Chambers when he was locked up.

Having a great presence like that in the movie lures you in for the primal effectiveness of the sports movie cliches. I mean I know what they’re doing to me, still I want to tune in to see if they’ll win the tournament. It helps that the formula gets tweaked a little bit. The characters that fit the bill of good guy and bad guy don’t end up hating each other, and the guy that fits the geek wish fulfillment role the most turns out to be a psycho and kind of a bully himself.

The fight choreography is by Larnell Stovall (UNDISPUTED III, MORTAL KOMBAT LEGACY, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: A NEW DIMENSION) and it’s good. It’s way more grounded in real MMA than the high flying stuff in the UNDISPUTEDs, using all kinds of grappling moves, submission holds and reversals. But it’s still exaggerated for the cameras, going quickly from move to move to put on a good show. There are a whole bunch of training montages with some impressive continuous shots where the camera weaves through multiple fighters sparring. Also MJW fights a bunch of cops while handcuffed.

NEVER BACK DOWN 2: THE BEATDOWN fulfills its responsibility to be a DTV sequel that’s way better than the theatrical original, as well as its mission to create another classic role for Michael Jai White. Next I would like to see White direct himself in an action movie where he’s not tethered to notions of appealing to a young demographic or fans of a previous movie that’s not very good. I want to see Michael Jai White in STRAIGHT-AHEAD ACTION MOVIE, a film by Michael Jai White. But this’ll do for now.

.

NEVER BACK DOWN 2 comes out September 13. For fuck’s sake get it legit-style to support the production of movies like this.

It stars American IRON CHEF host Mark Dacascos and it’s directed by long-time Van Damme collaborator Sheldon Lettich. This is his third directational work after LIONHEART and DOUBLE IMPACT. Dacascos plays Louis Stevens, a peace time Green Beret who fell in love with the martial art capoeira while stationed in Brazil. He was apparently some kind of troublemaking kid until a good teacher named Mr. Kerrigan (EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE sidekick Geoffrey Lewis) turned him around and convinced him to join the military. Once he gets out he returns to the school to see if there’s any way he can work there and try to make a difference in other young people’s lives. The school is a hellhole and he pretty much gets tossed out on his ass.

But as he’s leaving he sees the Haitian lieutenant of a drug gang causing trouble and ends up getting in a fight with the guy, using acrobatic capoeria kicks and flips. Kerrigan sees how the deadbeat students’ eyes light up when they see a guy kicking ass like that, and he gets an idea.

Long story short, they start a daring new program at the school where Louis takes the 12 biggest troublemakers in the school out to an abandoned building and teaches them how to kick ass. Some of these kids are real dorky, like characters from a later ELM STREET sequel. For example there’s a white kid (Ryan Bollman, BLACK DAWN) who wears sunglasses and plays shitty dance music on a big boombox. These goofballs have the nerve to laugh at Louis when he starts playing Brazilian drum music and doing the dance moves that make up the foundation of this fighting style. But then the boombox guy takes the tape home and does his own remix of it. (Bonding.)

Dacascos has a weird appeal in this movie. Like now he’s a cross between a badass and a pretty boy – he’s got muscles and very convincing moves but his face looks like a GQ model. And morseo than now he has a quiet, kind of boyish voice. It makes him seem like kind of a nerd, which totally works for this character. He has to struggle a little to win over the kids.

The teaching part of the movie is enough to make it enjoyable, but there’s a big turning point scene that completely sold me on this as a ’90s action gem. Orlando (Richard Coca, LONE STAR) is the one student in the class who refuses to participate, and Louis really needs to get through to him because he knows he’s been working for his crimelord cousin Silverio (Paco Christian Prieto, who fought Van Damme in the swimming pool in LIONHEART). Louis tracks down Orlando on a basketball court outside of school, trying to win him over like Belushi did that one kid in THE PRINCIPAL. But Silverio and his henchmen are there and try to make Louis leave.

Of course, Louis ends up busting out the capoeira and beats up all of the henchmen. Silverio is impressed so he tries to hire him to train his men, but of course he refuses. So Silverio – who by the way did I mention happens to be a capoeira master himself – fights Louis.

After this first fight Louis is bloodied and beaten. A storm is brewing in the sky. Thunder explodes in the background as the camera dramatically zooms in on Silverio and he declares that Louis isn’t good enough to train his men after all. Orlando will learn the basics from Louis and then come to him to complete his training.

I try not to use this term because I don’t want to wear it out, but… fucking awesome. What a scene. Nice operatic filmatism, several good fights, a great heavily accented (and pony-tailed) villain, and an actual dramatic twist. The stakes are much higher because now Louis not only has to win over the kid through capoeira, but worry what he’s gonna use it for.

Have you ever noticed that capoeira has all the vowels in it except u? That’s because there’s no ‘you’ in capoeira. Or something.

Unlike THE SUBSTITUTE this one doesn’t keep the action to the school, but that’s okay, because this one isn’t as school-teacher-themed. He doesn’t even teach them at the school anyway. He does drive a school bus instead of a car, that’s pretty cool. I laughed that he was driving it for their field trip, but it’s even better when he keeps driving around in it afterwards. I kind of doubt the school district okayed that. And when the gang decides it’s time for war they bust into the school, make a big pile of desks and things and start a bonfire using an American Government book as the kindling. (No wonder Silverio has a restraining order to keep him off of school grounds.)

When Louis decides to fight back he puts on his camouflage. This is the movie communicating with us, sending us a message:

MOVIE: Remember, he’s not just a martial artist, he was in the military too.
AUDIENCE: A ha! So that’s why he has the skills to sneak around and take on a bunch of trained fighters.
MOVIE: Exactly.
AUDIENCE: And him putting on the camouflage reminds us of that fact.
MOVIE: That’s the idea.
AUDIENCE: Well, thank you for that.
MOVIE: No problem man.
AUDIENCE: By the way I really enjoy your work, you’re awesome man.
MOVIE: Thanks, that means alot to me man.
AUDIENCE: No, really though.
MOVIE: It means alot.
(awkward silence)
AUDIENCE: Well, see ya later.
MOVIE: Yeah, see ya.

In a scene reminiscent of Dolph’s ARMY OF ONE Louis attacks Silverio’s men at a chop shop. It’s a good sequence but by far the best part is when a welder comes after him in full welding gear. They’re having a martial arts fight and the guy is trying to burn him with the welding torch. And Louis seems to forget that the welding equipment is armor and not the guy’s actual skin, so he punches him hard in the mask, hurting his fist.

Great scene, and even better when you see the credits and realize the welder was Frank Dux, the real guy who Van Damme played in BLOODSPORT. He’s also the fight choreographer for this one.

Another supporting actor worth pointing out is Silverio’s Haitian henchman, the guy Louis fights at the school at the beginning. I noticed it was Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter, who I like to call “the guy who looks kind of like Richard Pryor in MARKED FOR DEATH.” I tried to find a picture of him from that movie so I could have a graphic that says “the guy who looks kind of like Richard Pryor in MARKED FOR DEATH,” but I couldn’t find one. What I found was much better:

I highly recommend ONLY THE STRONG to fans of the old Van Dammes and those types of movies. It’s a real solid example of the genre but also stands out because of the corny school aspects and because it’s as far as I know the only movie completely based around capoeira. Lettich co-wrote it with Luis Esteban, who never wrote another movie, but was transportation co-ordinator on SOUL PLANE. I’m sure he’s pretty good at coordinating, but maybe he should get back to co-writing.

[ratings]

The story is very simple, it’s just about one day in the life of Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko), a middlingly nerdy high school schmo who runs the student store. There’s a new kid starting school today named Buddy Revell (Richard Tyson) whose reputation as a psycho precedes him – everyone is telling stories about all the fights he’s been in the, schools he’s been kicked out of, the authority figures he’s pulled knives on, the weapons he uses. Poor Jerry gets assigned to write a profile on Buddy for the school newspaper, but Buddy is not okay with this because “I don’t like people to know about me.” A terrified Jerry backs down and says he won’t do the story, and reassuringly pats Buddy on the shoulder… forgetting the legend that Buddy is a “touch freak” who will kill you if you touch him. Now Buddy says he’s gonna fight Jerry after school, and there’s no talking him out of it.

(Let me interrupt for a second to compare the DVD cover at right to the movie poster above. The DVD is from the “HIGH SCHOOL REUNION COLLECTION,” whatever the hell that is. It’s not “The High School Reunion Edition” because that would require having extras of some kind. Anyway, I thought it was kind of funny that they actually had somebody repaint the edges of the clock to make it round. They must have some study showing that consumers hate octagons.)

Of course, Buddy is no ordinary teen. He’s not even an ordinary adult walking through a high school. He’s a fucking monster. He looks closer to a pro-wrestler than a teen. He’s also mysterious, with a broody James Dean squint. Part of what makes the movie fun is that he has a little depth to him, he’s not your typical bad kid. You expect him to be a neanderthal, but the few times he talks he’s surprisingly eloquent. And it turns out he’s good at math too. It just happens that he likes to lift other kids up by their necks and smash them through things. It’s something he’s good at, you know. He’s an asshole for going after Jerry, but I kind of liked him anyway. I hoped they’d end up friends.

Jerry tries everything he can think of to weasel out of this fight, but he just keeps making things worse, adding new problems. He goes from anonymous nobody pen salesman to #1 on the watch list for the principal, the head of security (Mitch Pileggi) and even a police detective (Philip Baker Hall). So as the minutes tick away to his personal armageddon he’s also juggling all this other shit. Not a good day at school.

The reality of this world is so heightened that it’s exciting to watch him try to find clean pants to wear to school. When he’s checking out a girl while driving it leads to a spectacular spin and near crash, but his little sister and friend in the car don’t even change expressions. When he tries to ditch school it leads to a thrilling foot chase straight out of POINT BREAK. And the fight at the end is great too. I’ll half spoil the ending: he not only gets the girl, but also the second girl, plus the adult woman. The nerd gets three girls total. That’s the kind of movie this is.

But I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise, we should know this is no ordinary high school movie when we realize that the music is by Tangerine Dream! It’s not as dramatic as what they did for SORCERER but still, it’s pretty cool for a teen comedy. The director is Phil Joanou (GRIDIRON GANG), the writers are Richard Christian Matheson (yes, the son of the author of I Am Legend) and Thomas E. Szollosi. All of them are working at the top of their game I think because this is a brilliantly shot version of a clever script. A simple thing made into something much better than you’d think it ever could be.

Thanks to Clubside for recommending this one. Also for putting this websight together. Two good deeds right there.

[ratings]

That’s not true. I made up everything after the word “principal.” Bruce does play the principal and he does always talk about Iraq. He could almost be the same character from PLANET TERROR. He’s a hostile disciplinarian who’s driven into a fury when students chew gum. He also leads the school in a singalong of a patriotic song he wrote. But it’s not an action movie and he’s not the star.

This is one of those movies like BRICK where they take a typical adult story and recreate it in a teenage world. Isn’t it cute what teens do? They’re just like people only little. Technically this one’s probly not as good as BRICK, but personally I found it a little easier to swallow because the hero is kind of a friendly dork and the tone is lighter, so I didn’t feel pushed to take it all seriously.

Instead of a film noir tribute this one’s based on conspiracy thrillers and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN. Bobby Funke (Reece Thompson) is a wannabe writer for the school paper obsessed with Woodward and Bernstein but all he can get is a fluffy assignment to write a profile of the super-popular and athletic student body president. Meanwhile, the SATs are stolen from Bruce’s office. Funke is a suspect (because he was chewing gum) so he tries to figure out who did it, and ends up fingering the president. But was it a set up?

(See, that’s the assassination. It’s a metaphor. I wasn’t sure going in but I in retrospect it would be weird if the school president actually got his head blown off and some kid had to figure out who did it. Because that seems like more of a police matter. I guess in that movie the debate team would be the Warren Commission.)

They have a detention room that’s treated like a prison or an insane asylum, and he even gets to go in to question an inmate – it’s that kind of stuff. He follows somebody and spies on them for clues while taking his driver’s license test. I thought that was pretty clever.

Thompson is a likable protagonist, Mischa Barton (from a television program that the youths watch, I imagine) fits in well as the unobtainable (but somehow obtained) girlfriend of the president, sort of the femme fatale even though I said this wasn’t a noir. Bruce is good of course, though obviously I prefer roles where he gets to use his humor and charisma. He’s got those on the shelf lately I guess, recharging.

THE ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT was directed by some guy and written by two production assistants from SOUTH PARK. It’s a perfectly decent sold-at-a-film-festival type of indie movie – you know the type. You read about it on the internet and some people who saw it first act like it’s one of the best movies ever, and then everybody forgets about it the next day. A year later you catch it on DVD or cable and it’s fine. I wouldn’t necessarily tell you to watch it, but from a Bruce completist perspective it’s pretty decent.

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It’s the sequel curse, really. People will be mad if you don’t reference stuff from the first one, but if you do they’ve already seen it so it’s not gonna be as great as they thought it would be. It’s like Pop Tarts – they’re fine and everything but every time I eat one I think “that’s right, I forgot, they’re kind of dry and flavorless.” That’s how it is in this sometimes. When it opens with Pee Wee waking up with a boner that’s a cute “we have to do this again” moment instead of an outrageous way to start out a movie. The sequel is Pop Tarts, the original is Toaster Strudel.

The plot of this time is a little more far-fetched, and that leads to both the movie’s strengths and it’s weaknesses. It’s not as real as part 1 because it’s more of a movie conflict: they end up taking on the school board, the religious right and even the Ku Klux Klan. But those storylines also make it kind of interesting because instead of just more horniness and giggling it deals with self righteous censors, corrupt politicians and prejudice against Seminoles. Plus horniness and giggling.

I think it also makes a point of making Wendy a much stronger character with pranking powers equal to a boy’s. She plans and executes the dismantling of a political career through the medium of classy-French-restaurant-slapstick (fake puke, garcons falling in fountains, etc.). That part’s too broad for me, with some laughs here and there. But I like the part where she reveals to Pee Wee, in a genuinely kind of sweet scene, that she’s not really the ho people say she is and that she had sex with him in the bus at the end of part 1 because she actually liked him.

The title implies a HALLOWEEN II (original version) approach, but after initially dealing with Pee Wee’s feelings it doesn’t really matter that it’s the next day, and continues into other days. Also, the establishment known as Porky’s is still demolished, and Porky himself is never seen. From what I’ve read it sounds like they wanted him to be one of the Klansmen, but he wouldn’t do nudity. Porky has standards.

Even after losing his virginity Pee Wee is still insecure, and keeps pretending he has a stable of women to hook the other guys up with. They know he’s full of shit but play along to embarrass him, then he tries to prank them and they try to prank him back. I like how in the scenes where they’re fucking with him they don’t pull it off perfectly. They keep almost cracking up, or you can see their faces smiling but turning away so he doesn’t see them. Still, they’re starting to be like the Impossible Mission Force of pranking, they get pretty elaborate. Alot of cloak and dagger shit goin on here.

My favorite part of the movie is the reaction the cops have to the guy in the excellent zombie makeup who’s supposed to scare people in the cemetery. Usually in a broad comedy like this everybody would be superstitious and think it was a real zombie, or they’d see the zombie and decide to stop drinking. In this one nobody who sees the zombie really reacts much, they just kind of stare at him wondering what his deal is.

Our pal Alan Ormsby (DERANGED, DEATHDREAM, THE SUBSTITUTE) is credited as co-writer along with Roger Swaybill and Bob Clark.

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It also takes place in the ’50s, and it’s kind of a fantasized nostalgia where men play 16 year old boys (director Bob Clark points out that people looked older back then) and everybody’s friends with everybody else and the boys can pull of anything and get a fantastical revenge on a seedy character they really shouldn’t fuck with if this were real life because somebody would get their legs broken. So it’s a nostalgic look at their coming of age years but it’s not the same type of nostalgia George Lucas and others of this generation had. It mostly ignores the cars, the music, the dances, the hairstyles and all that shit that usually gets fetishized in anything about the ’50s.

It does address the era though. There’s some casual racism by white people, and a Jew so used to being picked on that he had to learn Judo. So you know everything’s not hunky dory. In one scene, as a roomful of dudes laugh hysterically at a woman talking about dicks, the camera slowly zooms in on a smiling photo of Eisenhower.

This is about as male as a movie could be. It has a hairy chest and smelly armpits. The women are pretty much treated as pieces of ass or bitches to make fun of. Kim Catrall gets a dirty jockstrap stuffed in her mouth during sex (to be fair it has already been established that the smell turns her on). On the other hand, the women are in charge. They know what they’re doing. It’s the men who are slaves to their dicks, hopelessly chasing “beaver” like it’s the lost ark, carefully maintaining penis growth charts or finding themselves huddling together naked, excited by the sounds of fake sex in the other room. Even the big-dicked muscleman known as “Meat” is rendered helpless by the vague possibility of getting laid.

The movie’s excitement is kind of contagious. By that I don’t mean you’re gonna get a boner like the characters do, but that it’s easy to forgive how juvenile it is and get into the spirit of it. It’s all about bonding: guys giving each other shit, but also looking out for each other; playing pranks on each other, but also planning them together. According to the writer/director, the late Bob Clark, most of it – the angry husband prank, the dick in the hole, the howling sexpot, the phone call for “Mike Hunt,” the Jew and the anti-Semite bonding over a fight – came from his group of friends growing up in Fort Lauderdale. So he’s not trying to build the most outrageous gags like you would do now. He’s just trying to share funny stories about him and his buddies. Same goes for his later movies, like BABY GENIUSES and KARATE DOGS, I think. Totally autogbioraphical. I might have that wrong, I’ll have to look it up, but probly not, I’m pretty sure that’s correct. Yes, I just looked it up and it is correct. BABY GENIUSES 2: SUPERBABIES includes some composite characters but otherwise they’re all very true to the actual events, including some documentary footage of some of the dog karate, etc. Source: wikipedia.

I’m not sure how respectable PORKY’S is considered these days, but I’d say I’m pro-PORKY’S. People dig the nostalgia of Clark’s A CHRISTMAS STORY, this is that movie’s horny older brother. Because of the horniness and the movies it inspired it has a reputation for crudeness, but it’s not just some thrown together crap. On a technical level it’s not as show-offy as Clark’s BLACK CHRISTMAS, but it does have some subtly impressive moves. For example the scene I mentioned with the Eisenhower portrait, where the coaches crack up while Miss Balbricker proposes a manhunt for the penis she saw sticking out of a hole is all done in one 4 minute long take, with the coaches gradually losing their shit and the principal able to hold it in until the very end. And the big showdown in the movie is brilliant because the boys have arranged for the school’s marching band to wait at the county line for their victory over Porky. So the climax and end credits are set to the most over-the-top triumphant music of celebration possible, but it’s right there in the scene, no manipulative score or soundtrack music necessary.

Before we wrap up here I got a couple miscellaneous points to make. #1, please note that in the iconic shower peephole scene the boys are thrilled at the sight of pubic hair. I believe Pee Wee says it’s “enough wool to knit a sweater.” REVENGE OF THE NERDS had a similar voyeurism scene where Booger declared “We have bush!” I only bring this up because I have noticed from the pornography these days that the women seem to shave it all off now. What the fuck is that? I don’t get it. Public hair was once a badge of honor for young people, proof of adulthood. Now all the porn stars are trying to look like pre-teens. I guess this is just a matter of taste, I’m not gonna argue for being “more natural” or something. Or to not shave your legs or armpits. But how bout some centrism on this issue is all I’m saying. Let’s not get carried away with the grooming in my opinion.

Now, the #2 note I have is about Porky himself. He’s a great villain because the guy seems pretty real, and he’s sleazy as fuck and with his brother as the crooked sheriff the system is rigged in his favor, and these kids have to overcome him still. But you know what, man? I kind of think Porky is right, though. Here’s these underage kids coming into his bar, wasting his time with their cheapskate offer for whores, and they really do pose a threat to his business because he could lose his liquor license if the wrong people knew these kids got in. Yeah, his brother’s the sheriff, but the sheriff doesn’t control the state liquor board. Obviously it’s a real threat otherwise Porky wouldn’t back down at the end when he can’t talk about what the “youngsters” did to him without admitting that they’d been getting into his club.

So he has every reason to fuck with them, and it’s not like dumping water on them is that much worse than the pranks they constantly play on each other. He’s working in their medium, speaking their language. He does take their money, you got him on that one. And he is committing some crimes, but then so are the Angel Beach boys – underage drinking, fake IDs, lying to cops, peeping, exposing themselves. They can’t get high and mighty against Porky on some law-abiding-citizen trip.

And what do they do? They completely destroy his place of business. They literally demolish it. Even ignoring the massive property damage you gotta figure there were people inside there, they were lucky they didn’t kill anybody.

I don’t know man, when I get to part 3 we’ll see who I’m rooting for. I like these kids, but I gotta tell it like it is – they’re the wrongdoers in this “blowing up an occupied building and destroying a guy’s life for dumping water on them that one time” situation. Well executed, but unethical. As of part 1 Porky deserves his revenge.

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JoBeth Williams is the idealistic lawyer (and possible love interest) going up against the school. Morgan Freeman is the sleazeball pressuring the teachers about what to say in the deposition. This is mostly a story about adults, but it also follows a few of Nolte’s students: Laura Dern, Ralph Macchio and crazy fuckin’ Crispin Glover. It’s funny to see li’l Ralph Macchio talking tough – I don’t know if I buy that little fella as a streetwise car thief who protects his paranoid best friend Glover. I mean, I acknowledge that he wears a cool guy hat and talks with a New York accent, but I guess I need more. It’s not convincing me. Glover as a nutball who gets shot by cops – that I buy.

When Nolte finds out Macchio can’t read he makes him his personal project. But it’s tough when both the school and the parents just want the kid to pass whether or not he learns anything. No sooner than Nolte has convinced the kid to re-take a reading class do his parents come in and whine about the school can’t make him retake it since they already lazily gave him a passing grade. Ha ha, caught ya on a technicality, you can’t teach our kid how to read, fuck you.

But Nolte makes a connection with the kid, partly by letting him use photography for an assignment instead of a paper. And he figures out that he’s a smart kid. He doesn’t pick up on his potential for karate, though. So he’s not teacher of the year material, but maybe runner up or honorable mention.

Nolte is my favorite actor for playing burnt out guys like this. You can see why his students stick up for him in the inevitable “he’s gonna be fired” climax, even if he doesn’t get as many funny lines as Belushi did in THE PRINCIPAL. That one went down easier because of the action, but this one’s a little smarter since it doesn’t treat any of the kids as monsters that can’t be redeemed. It’s the school that’s fucked up. The one teacher who does keep an orderly class is so boring and distant that he gets through an entire period without anybody noticing that he died while reading the newspaper at his desk (SPOILER). And the one teacher who engages his class (by dressing up as historical figures and acting shit out) turns out to be an escaped mental patient. (That’s a little much in my opinion. Hollywood loves them mental patients. They just want to hug them and get wisdom from them and shit.)

By the way, Nolte wears some Hawaiin shirts in this, so that famous mug shot could be used for this character if they need to do a ROCKY BALBOA.

As many times as Belushi said “sonofaBITCH!” in THE PRINCIPAL, Nolte tells Williams in this one “You’re crazy!” or “You’ve got to be completely nuts!” So some variation on that has gotta be his catch phrase. The last time he says it she’s stripping naked in the hallway to prove herself to him. This was before camera phones and the internet so I think she got away with it. But she should be more careful.

Anyway, not too bad, although lacking in motorcycle chases.

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Here’s one from Cannon Films and our friend Albert Pyun, but I’m sorry to say this is the most boring one I’ve seen so far in my back-to-school marathon. The idea behind it, at least, is different from the other ones I’ve seen. This time the school is overrun with troublemakers spraying graffiti and what not, but they’re not the bad guys – that would be The Sentinels, a group of fascist jocks who patrol Vista Verde High School to keep people in line. Their main job at school is just painting over graffiti, but outside of school they actually track people down wearing masks, beat the shit out of them and make them think they’re going to murder them, then leave them crying out in the middle of the woods. Don’t you hate popular kids?

The leader of the Sentinels is Randy, played by John Stockwell (also co-writer). He’s a rich kid (we know from the modern architecture on his house and his Corvette). He’s trying to get the editor of the school paper (also his pool boy, and the wimpy protagonist of the movie) to cover the Sentinels in a more positive light, so he invites him over, offers him a drink, and introduces him to his parents. Then some other stuff happens, muddily photographed. There are some parts with people silhouetted against eerily lit fog. That was kind of cool.

These guys are such assholes they go after a guy at home for “vandalizing” the school. I think their plan is to spraypaint his house or car or something, but he sees them and then they shoot at him. I think they’re really going after him because he’s the only black guy in school. He’s played by Miguel A. Nunez, Jr. – “Demon” from FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING and “Spider” from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Don Michael Paul is in there somewhere too. Whichever character is “Ripper,” that’s the director of HALF PAST DEAD.

The hero’s best friend (Bradford Bancroft) is named Krooger, but he calls himself “The Kroog Warrior.” He has a mohawk and a Mustang souped up in the tradition of MAD MAX. Maybe the funniest part of the movie is when he’s driving to school and pushes a button on his dashboard that says “deploy” and speakers raise out of the top of the car to blast everybody with cheesy rock music.

I don’t know man, this guy looks like Rambo compared to today’s chicken-legged rock stars, but I still have trouble thinking of a dude wearing eyeliner and dangly earrings as a tough guy. I don’t care how fingerless his gloves are.

These characters are not very interesting, some of them I can’t tell apart very well, the action is rarely exciting and there’s just no momentum to the story. I will give it credit though for a twist at the end that I didn’t expect. (SPOILER.) It turns out that the Sentinels really aren’t the ones who killed the kids who have been murdered – it’s actually their asshole teacher Corrigan. And they get really upset when they realize they helped him figure out which kids to kill. I didn’t expect that.

The video cover makes a big deal about the movie containing Robert Palmer’s song “Addicted To Love.” So when this came out if you didn’t have the Robert Palmer “Riptide” tape yet, and you didn’t have a radio or MTV (which played the god damn thing every other video) then this must’ve been incredibly exciting, because they play part of the song quietly in the background of a scene where they’re driving around. What a great value.

I have no idea why it’s called DANGEROUSLY CLOSE.

Okay, so that one came out in 1986 and it was a bust, but in 1987 John Stockwell graduated from lead actor to director in an infinitely better Cannon high school thriller called UNDER COVER, written by his DANGEROUSLY CLOSE co-writer Scott Fields. It’s funny, I found these two titles doing a keyword search on IMDb for school themed movies, and happened to pick them up at the same time without realizing the Cannon/Stockwell connection at first. UNDER COVER even has a scene where the main character is watching DANGEROUSLY CLOSE on TV.

It’s called UNDER COVER because of the dark secrets that lie hidden in a school, dangerously close to the surface, under the cover of regular small town life. Also because the main guy goes under cover.

The lead is David Neidorf, kind of a Bill Paxton type. He convinces his boss at the Baltimore PD to make him a narc at some hick school in South Carolina, because his partner was killed while undercover there. Of the school movies I’ve been watching this is the only one to play with the idea of adults playing kids in movies. His boss doesn’t think he can pass, he tries to cover up his hairline, some girls think he goes to the state college and when he tells them he’s in high school they say, “you look so old!!” I wanted to use the German video cover above because it was kind of a cool painting, but here’s the American one just to give you a better idea of how old this guy looks.

I never thought about this before, but school movies used to be kind of like kabuki, where women were played by men. They didn’t used to trust actual teens to play teens in movies, but these days they usually do okay. In fact the way things are going pretty soon they’ll cast nothing but 20 year olds to play all the grown ups. You can’t get an actual elderly guy to play an elderly guy, that would be ridiculous. They can’t act. Not to mention all the old people welfare laws and union rules and what not. You’d have to find twins.

Anyway, UNDER COVER does fine – most of the kids look fairly young, and by showing a broad range of little shrimps to hulking jocks they make you realize why Mr. Receding Hairline is able to go undetected.

You gotta figure that would be hard, pretending to be a kid. This movie avoids the issue of what if some girl tries to date him and he’s tempted, or what if a great teacher or mercenary notices he’s distant and tries to butt in and make a difference in his life, or what if a really important election comes up and he wants to vote but somebody spots him and figures out he’s over 18? They do go through the trouble of having him stay with a lady who pretends to be his aunt, but he never really brings any school friends home, so he might as well have just had a cool bachelor pad with a Nintendo and shit.

He’s an interesting character because he seems kind of dumb, and desperate to prove that he’s not. He’s not a smooth talker or clever quipper or supercop. He’s kind of a reformed underachiever, a dude trying hard not to blow it because this is important to him.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is also in here. Never knew she did a Cannon Film. She’s undercover too and works as his partner. If I understood correctly they got a whole squad of narcs in this school, including Mark Holton (Francis from PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE) whose work I last observed in chapters 1-2 of the TEEN WOLF saga.

As a director Stockwell has a reputation for making movies that you think would be bad but are surprisingly better than expected. I’ve heard that about CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL for example and I thought that about TURISTAS. UNDER COVER is his directational debut and it’s surprisingly well done too, in fact spectacularly well done if you consider it’s a god damn Golan and Globus production. There are lots of little touches and qualities they could’ve and you would think would’ve gotten away with leaving out. The accents are good, not too cartoonish. Everybody’s always glistening with sweat, puddles forming on their shirts, but they don’t comment on it being hot. The dialogue isn’t too direct, they don’t explain everything with talking.

I think it handles race in a subtle way too. David Harris (who is Cochise from THE WARRIORS, but to be honest I mistook him for the gay guy from REVENGE OF THE NERDS) plays a tough car thief kid. A white kid fingers Harris for helping him steal an El Dorado that was connected to the partner’s murder, and casually drops the n-word when describing him. Harris ends up arrested, and without saying it you can tell that Neidorf isn’t convinced he’s guilty and seems suspicious of the chief’s rush to blame him. Why? I think it’s because Neidorf is from Baltimore, a city with plenty of segregation and racism, but at least his world is more integrated than here. His boss is black, for example. So he doesn’t go for this small town blame-it-on-the-black-folks business.

Ironically the chief here thinks of it as “the city” and taunts Jennifer Jason Leigh about coming from a smaller town, saying she’ll stay here because she’s becoming a “city girl.” I think Neidorf misses the real city though, and I love how clear that is in the ending. As he drives off he finds an Orioles game on the radio, and he laughs. You can tell how happy he is to be going home.

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The Principal doesn’t have any combat training like Shale and Thomasson in the SUBSTITUTE series, he’s just some stubborn macho dude. He’s introduced drunk at a bar, his ex-wife comes in with their divorce lawyer, so he steals an autographed Louisville Slugger from behind the bar and goes after the lawyer and especially his car. Latimer lives in a shitty apartment, tries to live off of protein shakes but doesn’t even have milk, so he mixes with Coke or Coors. (Tip: try tap water next time.)

A couple other notes about Latimer: he always seems to be hanging out or around the school when it’s empty. I don’t know why he doesn’t just move in. Keep some milk there. Also, I swear he yells “Son-of-a-BITCH!!!” at least four or five times. That almost should be the name of the movie.

Brandel is as out of control as any of the schools in these movies I’ve been watching. These little adult shits got no respect for education, authority, common decency, or anything else. They beat each other up, they openly sell and smoke joints in the school. They don’t even wait for lunch time. Everyone (including teachers and security) is afraid of Victor Duncan, the student who runs the drug trade at the school and has henchmen and everything. In fact he has one henchman who snaps his fingers and everybody knows it means to leave the hallway or whatever when he does it. Anybody who can command a crowd of people by snapping his fingers you don’t want to fuck with, but you especially don’t want to fuck with the guy who the guy who snaps his fingers answers to.

If you ever watched HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET this guy is basically high school Luther Mahoney. But if you ever watched MONEY TALKS he’s actually the actor who played Aaron, Chris Tucker’s old friend and arms provider.

Latimer has fucked up the rest of his life so bad that he decides to draw the line here. He wants to make this school better. His strengths are tenacity and a strong aversion to bullshit. He casually swears in front of students, violently defends himself when necessary, makes threats. He holds his head high, makes smartass remarks. But he’s got a hell of an uphill battle. His get-tough assembly turns into a riot. A student he makes a connection with is put in the hospital. So is a teacher he likes in a special grownup way (Rae Dawn Chong).

Some things The Principal does backfire, but then so do some things that Victor Duncan’s people do. When they dis-assemble Latimer’s motorcycle he has the autoshop students fix it, and they decide to also airbrush “El Principale” on his tank and helmet. He feels so good about it it inspires him to chase after them off school property and fuck with their drug transactions. He carried a baseball bat before LEAN ON ME (but not before the real Joe Clark. But it would’ve been cool if that guy got the idea from James Belushi. Maybe next time).

Latimer drives his motorcycle inside the school and up the stairs when there’s trouble. After a bunch of thugs put a bag over his head and beat the shit out of him he just takes it off and goes back to work, covered in blood. At the end he has to fight the gangsters inside the school while the students wait outside, exactly like in 3:15. He kicks Duncan in the balls and tosses him out the front door of the school, bringing inspiration to the student body and faculty even though it’s just a symbolic gesture and won’t really solve the school’s problems. But who knows, maybe it was like the 300 Spartans and it inspired everybody to finally straighten out Brandel. Or maybe the snapping guy didn’t have it in him to snap anymore, and everything was peaceful again.

Louis Gosset Jr. is the head of security (or custodian?) who seems like a really good guy to have on your side… except he’s not really that much because he doesn’t do jack shit to help until the end of the movie. In one scene a substitute teacher comes storming down the hall, papers falling out of his briefcase, saying, “You can’t pay enough for anyone to substitute here!” And Louis just laughs.

As far as I know this is the only movie so far where the father of someone who played Superman directed the brother of a Blues Brother, but there’s still time for Brandon Routh’s dad to hook up with Peter Aykroyd. I wrote something before about relatives of more famous actors, how it’s unfair that we can’t get it out of  our heads that they’re the less cool son or brother of so-and-so. I think James Belushi suffers from some of that curse, but also he’s had the bad luck to do a bunch of cheesy movies, so maybe we’re just associating him with those. But you guys called it – he’s good in this, I like him. He actually doesn’t remind me of John Belushi here as much as Bill Murray. Burnt out, hair long on the back, receding in the front, hated by many, liked by the audience, mutters smartass comments that only amuse himself. He’s probly a little nicer than most Murray characters would be, though, tutoring Jacob Vargas (SLEEP DEALER, DEATH RACE) to read after school, Kelly Minter (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5) before school so she won’t have to sell drugs, tracking down Baby Emile (Troy Winbush) after school to prove to him that somebody gives a shit. And it’s kind of more touching when it’s coming from this fuckup loser guy than when it’s some saintly crusader like in most of these movies. I’m surprised how much I enjoyed this movie.

[ratings]

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