1729

Dance ’til Dawn

When I was a teenager, I spent a little too much time thinking about what my senior prom would be like.  I wouldn’t call it an obsession, but I thought about the big end-of-high-school dance enough to keep my thoughts to myself as if they were some sort of dirty little secret.  If I wasn’t writing about it, that is.  Track down a copy of Collage, the Sayville High School literary magazine from 1995 and you’ll see a story called “Scenes from a High School Prom,” which is some sort of boy-finally-gets-the-girl story that only a lovesick teenager would write, or maybe even dream about (literally, in fact, because it’s based on a dream I once had).   I even incorporated prom (specifically, that story) into a novel I wrote nearly a decade ago; although by then the message wasn’t so much about the fairytale of the perfect prom night but what happens the morning after and the baggage that comes with it.

In real life, I never had baggage concerning my senior prom experience.  In fact, I had a great time mostly due to the fact that I went with someone very cool and avoided most of the bullshit drama that my particular group of friends was involved with at the time (at least for one night — certain friends of mine, if they’re reading this, know that there was drama that I definitely got sucked into during and after our senior year of high school).  So I was never disappointed in my prom night, mainly because I was surprisingly well-adjusted coming out of high school (though I am the first to admit that I was both high-strung and immature … but enough about my issues).  Still, I would be lying if I didn’t say that the prom fantasy definitely factored into my perception of what my prom would be like.

That fantasy, btw?  The one featured in that short story I wrote in senior year creative writing?  Well, boy takes friend on whom he has a crush to prom and at the last chance to finally do it, he tells her he loves her and she says she loves him and they kiss and everyone lives happily ever after.  And where did I get the idea that this is what was going to happen at my prom because this is what happened at every prom?  Usually I would have some long explanation regarding my unpopularity in high school coupled with my testimony of junior high dances being special, magical places; however, all I have to do is say three words:

Dance ’til Dawn.

(more…)

Scary Evening

There are some kids who aren’t scared of anything and there are some kids who are scared of everything.  I spent most of my childhood in the latter camp, doing my best to avoid any situation that was a little scary, whether it be climbing aboard a roller coaster or climbing the ropes in gym class.  Scary movies definitely fell into this category.  I think that by the time I was ten years old, the scariest movie I had watched might have been a WPIX airing of Carrie (which really wasn’t scary) or an old Hammer Studios flick like Dracula: Prince of Darkness.  In other words, despite my fascination with the video boxes for horror movies, I really wasn’t up for renting one.

I can’t tell if spending my early years being relatively sheltered from the sights and sounds of scary movies had a positive or negative effect on my life.  I mean, the negative is that I was a complete pussy when it came to watching even Alien for the first time, and one scary scene could give me a really bad nightmare to the point where I insisted that my closet door be closed each night before I went to bed.  Then again, the fact that I remembered that one scary scene so well has made me really appreciate what goes into a quality horror movie.  In other words, I’m not one to sit back and simply let The Exorcist or The Blair Witch Project simply happen.  If I’m watching one of those films, I’m involved.

(more…)

Horror in a Box (Portions NSFW)

The poster for 1981’s “The Howling,” which was one video box I could never stop staring at when I was a kid.

I am not a horror movie guy.  Sure, I’ll sit down and watch stuff like Halloween or Night of the Living Dead on occasion, but I am not the type to line up outside of a movie theater on the opening night of the latest Saw movie because I am promised that there are going to be 50% more genital mutilations.  However, I’ve always been fascinated by horror films, especially those which are outside of the mainstream.

This fascination began at an early age, when Sayville’s Video Empire opened in 1984.  This wasn’t the first video store that my parents frequented–that distinction belongs to Video Village, which was located in a very small house-like building next to what was Chicken Delight but is now Hot Bagels on Montauk Highway in Sayville; and Video Zone, which was across from the Oakdale train station–and those video stores were pretty cramped establishements with very little to offer me except for repeated rentals of Superman: The Movie and video collections of Mickey Mouse cartoons which, if you waited long enough after the cartoons were over, featured a long and terrible trailer for Disney’s long and terrible sci-fi movie, The Black Hole.

Video Empire, as I’ve mentioned before, quickly became my home video store after it opened because it was on the same side of Main Street/Montauk Highway as my parents’ house was, so that meant I didn’t have to worry about crossing it to get there on my bike; and it was pretty huge for a video store.  Now, it was nowhere near the size of a Blockbuster Video but for a mom and pop operation, it was pretty large.  The children’s section of the store was right as you came in, to the right, and if you kept walking toward the counter you found that the kiddie videos transitioned into the sci-fi/horror videos.  By this time in my life I had seen Star Wars a ton of times, so I would peruse the shelves hoping to find The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, both of which had just come out on video back in the mid-1980s and were highly sought after by Video Empire’s customers.

While perusing, my eyes would eventually land on the box for one of the many horror movies available.  These included your obvious classics, such as the Friday the 13th series (which at that point was up to Part IV, or The Final Chapter), the Halloween series (at the awful Season of the Witch), or something random like Psycho or Alien.  But they also included movies that probably didn’t make a lot of money at the box office and whose studios had decided to recoup whatever losses they had by making them readily available for the bourgeoning video rental market.  If there’s nothing else out, they have to rent something, right?  I mean, it’s a decent rationale.  Eventually, while my dad tried to figure out what new release action flick to rent and my sister looked for The Last Unicorn or some shit, I would pick up one of those boxes and turn them over, reading the description.

(more…)

Death from Spaaaaaace!

I am sure that everyone has a movie that he’s meant to see but never gotten around to.  Moreover, I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there who are weirdly obsessed with the possibility that they may watch a certain movie, yet never seem to get around to watching.  Or, as my father often says, they’ve seen “bits and pieces” of certain films.

For years, whenever I would walk into Sayville’s Video Empire with my dad, the first place I would check out would be the science fiction/horror section.  The reason for this was twofold: Star Wars movies fell under this classification and they were located along the right-hand wall next to the new releases.  On the shelves were always random movies that to this day I’m sure nobody ever rented (ah, the early days of video stores where inventory meant whatever was actually available at the time) as well as the popular flicks.  One of those was the 1984 movie Night of the Comet.

A film about teenagers having to make it in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Night of the Comet didn’t do much at the box office and I would never had heard of it if I hadn’t been watching At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert on a regular basis and saw their review, which was pretty good for a movie that was nearly a B movie and didn’t do that well at the box office. 

But the concept intrigued me: everyone in the world has been wiped out, a few teenagers seem to have survived, and all is not as it seems.  Plus, the poster (and the subsequent video box) was really cool looking.  How could you go wrong with this?

(more…)

Top That!

My wife is 33 years old today, and as a special birthday present (don’t worry, I’m not so much of a cheap-ass that I think that this is a good replacement for an actual gift), I decided that instead of focusing on something that is important to me, I would do an entry on something in pop culture that “matters” to her. 

Now, there are lots of things and I’m sure that I could dig through her iTunes library and pick a song or an album or thumb through one of the many books she’s read or is reading.  But I’ve decided to go with a movie here and not just any movie, but the 1989 Robyn Lively cult classic, Teen Witch.

That’s right, my wife is one of the many who have seen Teen Witch (probably during one of the many thousands of times it has popped up on cable in the last two decades) and has a definitely love for it, so much so that yesterday morning, my son and I were watching an advertisement for the newfangled version of The Electric Company and she asked if we were watching the film. 

And I guess if I weren’t me, I would not understand why she loves the movie so much.  But considering that I actually own a copy of Megaforce, her love of Teen Witch makes perfect sense.  It also reinforces that she’s a true 1980s fan, something I’ve never called into question, but I’ve come across so many superficial Eighties fans since … oh, The Wedding Singer first came out (mostly students of mine who weren’t even freaking born in the 1980s, which … uh, no, I don’t think so.  Go back to your shitty emo vampires and your Miley, kiddies) … that I think that there are certain pieces of 1980s pop culture that can be held up as benchmarks of “Eighties Cred.”  And Teen Witch is clearly one of those benchmarks.

Why?  Because it has nobody who’s really well-known (read: no Coreys), it’s insanely cheesy, and in spite of that (or maybe because of that) you just can’t get it out of your freakin’ head after you’ve watched it.  Seriously, come across it on cable one night and see if you don’t wind up looking at the clock and realize that 45 minutes have gone by, especially if you drop in the middle of one of the jaw-dropping musical numbers.  Oh that’s right, I said musical numbers.  Teen Witch is almost like the “girl Megaforce.” 

(more…)

Fleet of DOOM!

Clearly, the Voltron cartoon series and the associated toys are a benchmark in my childhood, the first time that I ever felt I’d “discovered” something really cool, something that I hadn’t been told to like by commercials.  And as evidenced by the lengths I went to get the lion Voltron and the fact that I was one of a few people so fully vested in the cartoon that I also had the vehicle Voltron, I was one of those kids who watched the show religiously, even when both cartoons had cycled completely through and WPIX began re-airing the original lion stories.

But as Voltron fans, my second-grade friends and I were not fully satisfied by what we were seeing on television.  After a slew of lion stories , what seemed like an interminable amount of vehicle stories, and endless debates on which Voltron could win in a fight, we wanted a crossover.  I mean, He-Man and She-Ra could do it (and later on in the 1980s, G.I. Joe and The Transformers would do it) so why not the lion and vehicle Voltrons?

In 1986, we got our wish with an extra-long episode entitled Fleet of Doom, although I don’t know if most of my friends knew it.  I first learned about the crossover episode when my dad took me to Video Empire one day and my sister and I spent a few minutes combing through the children’s section looking for something other than the same five Disney cartoon tapes we’d rented since the day the store opened in 1984.  There, two shelves above my head, were two or three Voltron video boxes.  I jumped up and got them down, then studied the synopsis on the back of each (I have loved reading the back of videocassette/DVD boxes since I first stepped into a video store).  Two of them were shows I had already seen—the original five-parter and some of the episodes hat immediately followed—but the third was called “Fleet of Doom” and was about a team-up between both the lion and the vehicle Voltron.

I was sold.  I went home, watched it, and apparently remembered very little about it because when I watched it last week (thank you, Netflix) it really felt like I had never seen it before.  I mean, even with American Ninja, which I hadn’t seen in 25 years either, I at least had some flashbacks to when I originally watched it.  Fleet of Doom?  Nothing.  No memory of what it was about; honestly, I can see why.

(more…)

Silent, but deadly

Am I the only person who wanted this poster as a kid?

When you’re a kid, you like to make up movies, usually starring all of the action figures you’ve played with, and featuring all of the stuff you find cool.  It’s very rare, if ever, that such movies are made.  Sure, you get comic book movies that feature storylines you’ve loved since you were a kid, or movies based on a line of toys where the right actor is playing the right role, but nobody does a “kitchen sink” type of movie.

Except for American Ninja.

Produced by Golan-Globus for Cannon Films (the same company that gave us classics like Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, and Ninja III: The Domination), American Ninja came out in 1985, right around the time that toys like G.I. Joe were getting very popular among boys.  I was about eight at the time and didn’t see it in the theater but wound up renting the film on video and watching it with friends.  It was rated R and may have been the very first R-rated movie I saw (or that was Commando).  But even though it was a pretty violent action movie, watching it again after 25 years, I can see that the movie was clearly geared towards those kids with permissive parents.

Take, for instance, the opening scene.  After some witty banter between a toady-looking Army douche named Charlie and some other G.I.s wherein the star, Michael Dudikoff, stands against a jeep playing with a switchblade and saying absolutely nothing, a convoy gets going.  Among the precious cargo that this convoy is hauling is Patricia (Judy Aronson), the daughter of a very influential colonel.  Sure enough, the convoy is hijacked by the go-to villians in the 1980s–Latin American guerillas.  They rough up the troops but Dudikoff decides he’s not going to take their shit and starts throwing some karate moves about, including throwing a screwdriver so it lands in someone’s carteroid artery, taking someone out with a tire iron, and karate kicking people left and right.

Patricia, who apparently is your typical “Army brat” then decides to commandeer the car that she’s in and promptly drives it into the jungle, where it crashes.  This is around the time that a shitload of ninjas show up, led by a super-ninja who has a black star on his face (and actually is known as “Black Star Ninja”, the most deadly ninja in the world).

Seriously, read that back again.  I can imagine the people who created this movie sitting around a table with this scene and someone saying, “I know what would make this awesome:  NINJAS!  And the leader should have a black star!”

(more…)

Let off some steam, Bennett!

John Matrix -- the ultimate badass.

In one of my classes today, I was covering the end of Frankenstein.  If you’re unfamiliar with the novel, it doesn’t end as spectacularly as most film versions.  As Mary Shelley writes it, Victor Frankenstein dies from a prolonged sickness brought about by the anguish of dealing with the monster he created and what that monster has done to his life by murdering those around him.  Then, the monster shows up and tells Captain Walton (to whom Frankenstein was telling his story) that he has no reason to live either and will go commit suicide.  Surely enough, he ventures out into the Arctic ice presumably to die.

As I was recapping this for my students and we were discussing what parts of this scene represents, I went off on a little bit of a tangent as to what Frankenstein would be like if it were a 1980s-era Schwarzenegger movie (with Schwarzenegger as the monster).  Walton, probably played by a relative unknown although this would be a great part for a Cobra-era Stallone, sees the monster run off.  “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he screams before telling his men to turn the ship around and follow the monster while he goes below to suit up.

A few moments later, Walton comes back armed to the teeth and says, “It’s payback time.  THIS IS FOR VICTOR!” and starts opening fire with a vast array of automatic weapons (which I realize were not invented in 1816, but this is a motherfucking action sequence so you can suspend disbelief).  The monster is gunned down in a hail of bullets — I think I compared it to the scene in Predator where Jesse Ventura gets his guts blown out and Bill Duke mows down half of the Amazon in rage — and there is a heroic song by Stan Bush or 707 to take us through the closing credits.

Of course, this never did happen and will never happen, but it is a testimony to how my mind has been warped over the years by viewing too many action movies.  That’s not an unusual thing, of course — every boy in my generation had at least one G.I. Joe figure in the 1980s and at some point before we left elementary school we graduated from Star Wars and cartoons to R-rated violence and gratuitous bloodshed with a high body count.

For me, it started when I was in the fourth grade with Commando.

(more…)

Comin’ on like a MEGAFORCE!

Are you man enough? A comic book ad for the film.

In some ways, I think that my fascination with the odd, often terrible things in popular culture starts with Megaforce.  I get the feeling that few people know about this particular film and if there are people who do, I would be hard pressed to find some serious fans.  It was a total misfire of a film when it came out and hasn’t at all better with age.

I first saw Megaforce on television when I was a kid.  Well, to be honest, I saw the last ten minutes of it.  Megaforce was one of those movies that netowrk affiliates would show when there was a hole in their schedules on a weekend afternoon because someone else was airing a baseball or football game and we weren’t in the era of all-golf, all-the-time on Saturdays and Sundays when Notre Dame isn’t playing.  Saturday is still kind of a wasteland, but back then it wasn’t half bad because you could every once in a while come across The Breakfast Club or Better off Dead on WPIX if your mom hadn’t chased you out of the house already.

It was fine, anyway.  Most of my Saturdays were spent at friends’ houses or having them at my house to play Nintendo until mom threw me out of the basement with some sort of speech about playing outside.  And if she wasn’t effective, the television was effective because this wasteland of programming would bore us enough to death to cause us to go outside and play wiffle ball in the backyard, eventually getting half of our balls caught in our huge elm tree.

The first time I remember seeing the end of Megaforce was on one of these random Saturday afternoons.  Tom Hackett and I had just switched off the Nintendo and rapidly turned the knob on the cheap Sharp Linytron television to see if we could find what was on the ten or so channels my house actually got.  The images flashed by very quickly with a thip-thip-thip-thip so I don’t know how we saw the movie but we wound up landing on channel 7, WABC, and spent the next few minutes watching this guy on a soupe-up motorcylce.  He was being chased by bad guys and tring to board what looked like a huge cargo plane.  His compatriots were urging him on, and after a few moments, he figured out how to work what was obviously an experimental flying feature on the motorcycle, then flew through the air.  Overjoyed, he hooted and hollared until he landed on the plane.

We sat dumbfounded.  The credits rolled.  Then, the guy who was obviously the villain came on the screen and that hero uttered one of the best lines in movie history: “I just wanted to say goobye and remind you that the good guys always win.  Even in the Eighties.”

(more…)