Note: I wanted to review all the best picture nominees this year but I haven’t even reviewed DUNE PART ONE and I’m just not ready to do a good job of PART TWO yet so please accept as a placeholder this review of a different movie with one of the same cast members.
If you saw my review of DANCIN’ – IT’S ON! a few weeks ago you saw me learning of the magical existence of David Winters, a dancer in the original Broadway run of West Side Story and choreographer of Elvis movies who later became a director of b-movies including SPACE MUTINY. One of the things that came up in my research was that when he directed the 1986 skatesploitation movie THRASHIN’ the producers wouldn’t let him cast pre-21 Jump Street Johnny Depp, and he was so mad about it he went off and founded a new production company so that he would have more control. Well, obviously after I read that I knew that THRASHIN’ – it’s on!
Josh Brolin (whose only previous movie was THE GOONIES) plays Corey Webster, a “Valley Boy” who goes to stay in a friend’s motor home in L.A. while he prepares for a pool skating competition and a downhill race called L.A. Massacre. His buddies Tyler (Brooke McCarter, THE LOST BOYS), Radley (Josh Richman, RIVER’S EDGE, director of Guns N’ Roses “Live And Let Die” video), and Bozo (Brett Marx, BAD NEWS BEARS movies) call themselves The Ramp Locals. They bring him to the different hangouts, they clash with a rival skate crew called the Daggers who kind of act like a gang, and he falls in love-at-first-sight with Chrissy (Pamela Gidley in her film debut, soon to play the title character in CHERRY 2000). At first it seems like Corey is trying to steal the girlfriend of scary Daggers leader Tommy Hook (Robert Rusler, WEIRD SCIENCE, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2), but luckily she turns out to be his sister. Unluckily he’s one of those SCARFACE type brothers who’s creepily possessive of his sister and forbids people from dating her.
Catherine Hardwicke got her first production design credit for this (she later did TAPEHEADS, FREAKED and TANK GIRL and directed LORDS OF DOGTOWN, THE NATIVITY STORY and TWILIGHT). Apparently she’s one of the two women swooning over Corey when her name comes up on the opening credits. There are many graffiti walls, graffiti cars, graffiti vans and graffiti houses full of inflatable skeletons and other random junk. The Ramp Locals cut the top off of Bozo’s dad’s car and spray paint all over it. He’s worried at first but they convince him it’s okay because it makes it a cabriolet.
It’s a very L.A. movie. They skate ramps and rooftops in various neighborhoods, and also terrorize the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Since Corey falls in love, obviously there’s a carnival/Hollywood Boulevard date montage. There’s a punk show where skaters bring their boards and do tricks on the dance floor, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are there performing “Blackeyed Blond” from their George-Clinton-produced second album Freaky Styley. It’s the original lineup with drummer Jack Irons and guitarist Hillel Slovak, who died in ’88.
Corey does well in the pool competition (except for crashing when the Daggers pour jacks into the pool and somehow nobody sees it) and then introduces himself to Sam Flood (Chuck McCann in his followup to HAMBURGER: THE MOTION PICTURE), the owner of Smash Skateboards. “I mean, they say he invented skateboarding,” says Corey. Sam gives Corey a tour of his factory (must be a real skate company?) and says he hopes to sponsor him, but only if he wins the downhill race.
Brolin clearly does most of the skating that’s not too crazy, and is declared “a good skater” by cast members on the commentary track. He travels around by holding onto various vehicles Marty McFly style, doing a flip into the back of an El Camino, and somehow getting on top of a bus. There’s a long chase scene where legendary pro Christian Hosoi (playing one of the Daggers) crashes into a street sweeper. Some other guy gets speed wobbles and flies off a parking garage (if he died nobody ever mentions it).
Tyler is a funny villain. He knows how to always be in the middle front of the crew, leading them in many evil entrances. He drinks the generic beer from REPO MAN. His friends sit around watching and applauding him doing air guitar. He builds himself a studded metal arm for the downhill race?
When Corey tries to call Chrissy, Tyler answers the phone and tells him he can’t see her anymore or he’s “dead meat.” But Tyler’s most powerful dis is to say he has “one more thing” and then hang up without saying one more thing. Just leaving him hanging forever. Cruel and unusual. Corey knows he’s done for.
I wanted Corey to call back and say, “Sorry, I think we got disconnected. You were saying?” only to get hung up on again. Or I wanted Tyler to tell him the one other thing later, when he least expects it. Or for Corey to pull the same trick on Tyler and cause him to completely break down. But it never comes up again.
Instead, Tyler challenges Corey to what he calls a joust, and they kind of act like it’s Thunderdome, but it’s just skating back and forth in a cement ditch surrounded by torches and swinging padded maces at each other. Then just fighting until the cops come. He gets his arm broken.
Sherilyn Fenn (after THE WILD LIFE, OUT OF CONTROL and JUST ONE OF THE GUYS) plays Tyler’s girlfriend/Chrissy’s friend Velvet. It’s not that big of a part but she does paint both of their faces and give Tyler a lock of her hair before the joust.
Corey and Chrissy have a fight after he breaks his arm so she takes a bus back home to Indiana but then decides to get off and hitchhike back. I bring this up mainly to explain how she gets picked up by Large Marge herself, Alice Nunn! They barely show her, though. I wouldn’t have known it was her without seeing it on IMDb. There’s another part with a driver that I swear is Winters himself, but I haven’t found that verified anywhere.
Chrissy gets back in time to surprise Corey after his climactic victory (spoiler) at the L.A. Massacre. I didn’t remember downhill racing being a thing, and in the DVD extras producer Alan Sacks – the co-creator of Welcome Back, Kotter who conceived the movie and co-wrote it with Paul Brown (PARTY CAMP, CAMP ROCK) – says they made that part up but it later became a real thing. He says he hired Winters to direct specifically because of West Side Story – this was supposed to be kind of a Romeo and Juliet story and he also felt that someone who knew how to film dancing would know how to film skating. There’s also second unit footage shot by skate legend Stacy Peralta, now an acclaimed documentarian (DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS, RIDING GIANTS, CRIPS AND BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA).
Just as in DANCIN’ – IT’S ON!, Tyler out of nowhere chills out, has good sportsmanship and acts like a normal human at the end when he loses. I guess it’s hard to stay mad at Brolin, with his aura of Stand Up Guy. I’ve seen conflicting reports of whether Winters really wanted Depp for this role or if it was for the villain, but either way Brolin is a pretty weird choice to represent this punk-aligned subculture. He’s such a square-jawed handsome dude, dead-ringer for his dad, the star of THE CAR. He makes Corey seem like a jock, other than some of the bands he’s supposed to like (this may be the only movie where a sex scene starts with taking off a Siouxsie and the Banshees muscle shirt). His charisma makes it work, though it’s a loss for us culturally that they didn’t feel they had to give him a blue mohawk or something.
The soundtrack does feature some straight up punk bands like Fear and The Circle Jerks, but also some poppy stuff you can’t imagine those guys liking (“Arrow Through Your Heart” by Jimmy Demers, “Don’t Think Twice” by France Joli) and some good ol’ montage rock type bullshit (“Touch The Sky” by White Sister). The title song is by Meat Loaf, and I swear he’s imitating Devo, but later there’s a song by the actual Devo.
It’s pretty fun as a time capsule. We know from marquees that THE HITCHER is playing in theaters at this time. Also THE COLOR PURPLE. Mostly it’s a snapshot of a subculture through the filter of how they’re exaggerated and fictionalized in movies like this. If the title wasn’t enough, THRASHIN’ seems to set itself up as competition for BREAKIN’ by having Tyler get in the face of some breakers at Venice Beach and tell them breakin’ is not on. Of course, he’s the bad guy. He’s wrong. Both breakin’ and thrashin’ were in the Olympics last year.
THRASHIN’ is a movie of my youth, but (unlike BREAKIN’ and BEAT STREET) not one that was important to me, just one that I saw once and got a laugh out of even though I believe it was at the exact time when it was most aimed at me. I saw it on video a couple years after it came out, during the brief skater phase me and most of my friends went through. I remember thinking it was exactly the same as RAD but with skateboards instead of bikes, but I don’t know where I got that from. They both are about a guy entering a race, hoping to get a sponsor, and getting a new girlfriend, but that’s it.
I don’t think THRASHIN’ is as out of touch as many of these trendsploitation movies, but it must’ve been too cheesy for us to take seriously. I remember being more excited about GLEAMING THE CUBE, which isn’t even that much about skating. This did have all the legendary pros of the time – Tony Hawk, Tony Alva, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain, Mount McGill, etc. But, you know, we mostly knew them as names on skateboards and from black and white photos in Thrasher magazine – I don’t remember if we were able to spot them in the movie. (We did recognize the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or at least two of them.)
I don’t think I could say I ever participated in thrashin’ (“an aggressive style of skating” according to the movie), I never got more advanced than a kickflip, I never skated a pool like the advanced Californians in the movie, certainly never jousted (I’m pretending I believe that’s a real thing), and I remember during my minimal half pipe experience being made fun of by some kid for doing the same one trick every time.
I don’t know, was I a poseur, our ultimate insult at that time? I would say no. I wasn’t pretending to be more than I was. I was just an earnest skater who wasn’t very good! What was more meaningful than my mediocre athleticism was the participation in a mildly rebellious lifestyle, finding or learning of places to skate with friends, knowing we’d eventually be chased away, sometimes by cops but usually just by some unknown adult authority figure. I remember when some friends brought me to a condemned building where someone had built a rickety half pipe out of crates and scrap lumber. We had to go through the woods behind the elementary school, climb a fence and sneak through a junkyard. We were inside there for a while before suddenly some guy burst in yelling “HEY!!!”
So we darted the fuck out of there, hauled ass through the junkyard, over the fence, across a creek, around a trail and then there’s the guy in front of us, but he’s buckled over, out of breath, laughing. “Sorry! Sorry! I was just kidding!” In retrospect if he was an adult he was maybe 20. He was just older than us, maybe one of the people who built the ramp. And he warned us that there was a guy to look out for who really would be mad if he caught us, but it wasn’t him.
We fancied ourselves weirdos or punks or later “alternative” or some shit, and definitely some of that was just a different version of the conformity that we claimed we were so against. There were traditions or tropes people were following (like the liberty spike mohawk) but they were also trying to invent some new thing to do within the confines of various mediums – drawing on their leather jacket or jean jacket or shoes, shaving or coloring hair in different ways, designing their own tattoos. In the movie it’s surprising that they don’t give Corey much customized flair, but he’s really excited about designing the art for his skate deck if he ever gets sponsored (Chrissy calls his drawing of a giant spider about to rape a lady “a little aggressive”) and his big trademark is that he cuts out parts of his grip tape (the traction on the top of the skateboard) to make a spider web design. I remember we used to do stuff like that, but I can’t remember if it was inspired by this movie.
For me the biggest laugh in THRASHIN’ is a scene early on where Tommy is vainly patting his hair in the mirror, and he asks Chrissy if he should just wear the dangly dagger earring or if he should add a hoop. She makes a joke and he seems hurt by it, says very sincerely, “This is important to me!” It’s comical to reveal up front that this menacing figure is stressing about looking cool at a party, but it’s also relatable. Trying to make your board or your hair or you clothes stand out for being cool and original, that’s stuff I can get behind even though it’s some type of posing. I think yearning to be recognized as an individual, that’s part of being human. Or maybe it’s just my hangup. Anyway, good job Josh Brolin. Eventually I may catch up with your later, more desert planet based works. Until then, THRASHIN’ is pretty fun.
And one more thing.
