B-Movie Review: "Summer Camp Nightmare" (1987)

High school Bolsheviks take over a youth program operated by a religious fundamentalist, with plenty of rape and opaque allusions to Chairman Mao following suit ...

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

At this point, it feels like I’ve seen all the summer-camp-themed slasher flicks worth watching. The Burning, the Sleepaway Camp trilogy, and, of course Friday the 13ths 1, 2 and 6 (which, mind-blowingly, are the only three movies in the Jason canon that actually feature the summer camp motif.)

So naturally, as soon as I stumbled upon Summer Camp Nightmare, my curiosity was more than piqued. I mean, how did a horror movie starring The Rifleman himself about teenagers murderin’ one another fly under my radar for so long?

Well, despite the namesake and the fairly suggestive VHS box art, Summer Camp Nightmare isn’t a slasher flick. Rather, it’s this weird combination of Lord of the Flies, Meatballs and that old British movie If… that’s too goofy to be come off as a legit criticism of authoritarianism but still too grim and violent to be passed off as a more risque Camp Nowhere.

Ultimately, the movie’s a pretty mixed bag, but on the whole, it’s a mostly entertaining little novelty from the late ‘80s that you might consider an overachiever, and you certainly have to give it credit for trying something different with the whole “dead teenager” formula.

So, how about we fire up the VCR player and take a trip down memory lane, why don’t we?

We start off with a fleet of yellow school buses en route to summer camp. They do the whole "Hail to the Bus Driver" song except the lyrics  are altered a little bit. We're briefly introduced to a few characters, including a black dude in a Cubs cab, this nerd that audio records everything and this one little cuck who pees on himself.

The counselors at Camp North Pines get on the PA system and everybody is introduced to their bunks. The kids immediately begin trading contraband, which primarily comes in the form of Baby Ruth bars and girly mags. Then they play two-hand touch football for awhile and the audio-recording nerd is confronted by a bigger "counselor-in-training" who threatens to cream him for calling him a "purple dork" or something along those lines. Then it's time for everybody to hit up the mess hall, and since this is the late 1980s, none of the kids are fat, which is just one of those things I can't help but notice in movies from way back when.

Chuck Connors plays the head camp counselor and he shows the kids his butterfly collection and he leads a lunchtime prayer. His second in-command, this Uncle Tom who looks like Tracy Morgan, gives him a formal introduction to the kids, and holy shit does that guy look like Willem Defoe. Apparently, he's a religious zealot who jerry-rigged the TV to only pick up the local preachin' channel. He also warns 'em to not use the old rope bridge, not just because it connects them to the girls' camp, but because it's old and dilapidated and dangerous. So, naturally, a whole bunch of kids go out to cross it and then Mr. Warren (that's Chuck Connors character) makes an edict that the kids have to go swimming everyday. Then the camp nurse shows up and she's a MILF and that one dorky kid with the audio recorder almost drowns and this one camp counselor everybody refers to as a rich boy pulls him out of the drink to make himself look all heroic and shit.

Then the rich boy counselor talks to this five-year-old kid and he tells another counselor he thinks Mr. Warren might be "a bigger freak " than they assumed and he convinces the audio-recording nerd to climb atop the roof and tinker around with the TV antenna so they can get more channels. And sure enough, he manages to unscramble the porno channels, just in time for Mr. Warren to waltz in, yank out the plug and read 'em the riot act. Warren sends the nerd and his camp counselor to "the meditation room" and Franklin (that's the rich boy counselor) makes another crack about him being a pederast and then it's time for the Camp South Pines girls to make their appearance at the talent show. The fat black dude raps and then a bunch of hoochies dressed like Cyndi Lauper do a song and dance number and the boys catcall 'em like middle-aged construction workers and NOBODY accuses anyone of sexism or "verbal rape" like they probably would if that shit happened today.

You know, it's only a fall of, like, six feet. I'm pretty sure that's probably not gonna' kill him, guys.

So the older boys and girls schmooze while a two-man heavy metal act called "The Horn Dogs" perform the shittiest song you've ever heard in your life while the fat black kid bangs on the drums. Of course, Warren is gravely offended by all this and suspends the talent show AND cancels the upcoming dance, because that's something Jesus probably wouldn't like or something. This leads to one of the kids stating "what a gonad," which yeah, is pretty dadgum funny.

Some of the older counselors rendezvous with some girls from the other camp and some of them make out for a bit then Franklin holds a fireside meeting where he tries to convince the other counselors to REVOLT against Warren's authoritarian regime.

Then the fat black kid makes a joke about Mr. Warren's second-in-command succeeding in a "white supremacist" world and everybody laughs because of how preposterous it sounds (my, how things have changed there) and all the kids start chanting "free Chris Wayne," who was one of the counselors who got sent to the "meditation room" earlier in the movie. Then all of the counselors tell Warren he's a "pedo" to his face, Franklin pulls out a handgun(!) and forces Warren to lock himself into his own prayer building, along with all the rest of the adult counselors.

Franklin and his Republican Guard then amble on over to the girls camp and pull a gun on the heads of THAT camp and we cut to a bunch of campers spying on some girls with binoculars. And that's our cue for a good old fashioned panty raid, complete with games of grab-ass that DON'T result in sex crime prosecutions. Franklin says he's going to merge the boys and girls camps as one and he tells all the other kids that all of the adult counselors "have gone on a trip" and left the properties to his oversight. He appoints a couple of skanks to his "supreme executive committee." Then he makes all of the kids take an oath to the "Supreme Revolution" and since he's promising them a social mixer, of course all the kids are going to go along with it.

The kids wheel Mr. Warren out and this one skank dances on him like a stripper. He tells the kids their actions are "sinful" and asks them to please think of the consequences. Warren tries to make a break for it in the woods (he even gets a few good headbutts in) but with his hands tied, he isn't able to put up much of a fight against this one ruffian, who produces a hunting knife and STABS HIM DEAD WITH IT. Welp, shit's getting deep now, ain't it?

Franklin gets on the PA system and appoints a couple of new kids to "Supreme Revolution Committee" positions and tells them to shun these two counselors that pissed him off, and sure as sugar, those kids get shunned something wicked. Then this sixth-grader girl tells the audio-recording nerd she'll teach him how to dance and then the counselors grease each other up and chase chickens and pigs around. Then they SYMBOLICALLY destroy Warren's butterfly collection ... no wait, they LITERALLY destroy it in a fire and then they roast a LIVE pig over a fire. Well, it only took us an hour, but it looks like we're finally getting into that inevitable "Lord of the Flies" territory now. And that leads to the audio nerd and his girlfriend stumbling upon one of Franklin's lieutenants RAPING another camper so Franklin has to put him on trial for his misdeeds. His victim says he deserves to die for what he did to her and Richard tells his police force to take him back to his administration office so he can sleep on it.

So, the rapist's punishment? Franklin makes him cross that rope bridge from earlier ... if he makes it all the way across, he lives. If he falls? Then I guess Franklin will shoot him or something. His final words? "Speaking of bologna, all you women can eat my beef bologna." Well goddamn, that was quite the zinger. Of course, the dude makes it all the way across and all the female campers grab him and carry him off into the wilderness, where his fate, to this very day, remains unknown.  Oh wait, never mind ... they literally lynched him like a runaway slave. How about that.

Franklin grabs his pistol and one of the counselors frees the nerdy audio kid from his makeshift prison. He tells him that Franklin made up all those stories about Warren molesting everybody and he kvetches about being made to cross to rope bridge, too. And sure enough, the little audio nerd is sentenced to cross the rope bridge. Then Franklin and Chris, the one camp counselor "shunned" earlier, get into a scuffle while nerd boy dangles off the rope bridge. And that's when the police show up, rather fortuitously. The detectives listen to the audio nerd's recordings (see, it had a payoff after all!) and the cops tell them to get back on the bus and go back home, as Franklin gets placed in the back of a squad car. Cue some REALLY awesome-sounding synth music for the outro, and that, folks, is all she wrote.

Because teenage communist revolutionaries with boom boxes are the worst kind of teenage communist revolutionaries.

Well, not that it should be a surprise to anyone, but the flick was originally released under Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures label, which I suppose explains the movie’s distinct “made for TV” look and feel.

The movie was directed by this guy named Bert L. Dragin, who went on to direct one more feature length film (1988’s Twice Dead) before calling it a career as an auteur. Interestingly, he co-wrote the screenplay alongside Penelope Spheeris, who also directed all of those great The Decline of Western Civilization movies and a whole bunch of mainstream 1990s comedies (Black Sheep, Senseless, The Little Rascals) that she surely wishes you’d forget about by now. Oh, and the movie itself was based on a real book, titled The Butterfly Revolution, that was penned by this guy named William Butler back in 1961. Obviously, the film adaptation takes a LOT of liberties with the source material, but a quick read-through of the Wikipedia article leads me to believe it’s more or less the same central story, so whatever.

Of course, the most noteworthy name from the flick is Chuck Connors, one of the few people to ever play in the MLB and the NBA and I’m pretty sure the only person to ever play in the MLB and the NBA and become a huge Western star on TV. Charlie Stratton, the guy who played Franklin, mostly stuck to TV work after his not-exactly-star-turning role here, including a stint on the ill-fated Dirty Dancing television show that NOBODY remembers actually happened in the late 1980s. Harold Pruett, who played Chris Wade, actually died in 2002 at the absurdly young age of 32, but hey, at least he got to make out with Jennifer Tilly in Embrace of the Vampire, which I guess kinda’ sorta’ makes up for the early demise. Adam Carl, who portrayed the audio-recorder nerd, also starred in cult classic The Monster Squad and provided the voice of Donatello in the The Secret of the Ooze, and he’s done pretty much nothin’ but TV work ever since. Oh, and if the actress who played Debbie sounded just slightly familiar, that’s because she was played by voice actor Samantha Newark, who is probably most famous for voicing the main character in the old school Jem cartoon.

Even now I’m not sure if the movie is supposed to be taken as a serious criticism of communist totalitarianism or if it’s meant to be some sort of sly parody ripping on Reagan-era Soviet paranoia. Needless to say, whatever message the filmmakers thought they were getting across definitely didn’t come out as clear and discernible as they thought, but then again, anybody going into a movie called Summer Camp Nightmare expecting an Animal Farm-caliber political parable DESERVES to be disappointed.

Obviously, Summer Camp Nightmare is a movie with some structural problems, but for the most part, I thought it was a fairly entertaining no-budget youth drama that, while never really doing anything to distinguish itself that much, never really became disinteresting, either. The acting isn’t great, but it’s good enough, and there’s at least one or two laugh out loud scenes. And as corny as they may be, those rope-bridge scenes are nonetheless semi-harrowing, and it is fun watching the junior high commie utopia slowly devolve into Pol Pot’s primary school … even if the ending leaves a lot to be desired.

Is it worth going out of your way to see? Eh, not really, but if by some mysterious turn of fate you do wind up catching it on TV, you likely won’t hate yourself for sinking an hour and a half of your life into watching it. All in all, it’s perfectly adequate seasonal fare, and a pretty good mood setter to prepare yourself for that splendid summer-to-autumn transitional phase; like S’mores, you probably won’t feel like catching this most times of the year, but for whatever reason, it nonetheless makes for an oddly filling snack while we’re asses-and-elbows-deep in all this humid, late July weather.

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VHS Review: 'Dorf Goes Fishing' (1993)

Yep … people actually paid $19.99 for this crap back in the day.

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@JimboX

Like all bygone eras, people tend to overly-romanticize the 1990s. Sure, the decade certainly had its finer aspects (Sega, Dunkaroos, actual NHL coverage on ESPN, etc.) but by and large it wasn’t that much different from the modern world we inhabit today.

Yes, mobile technologies have changed the way we work, communicate and navigate the world around us, and people do seem to be considerably fatter than they were 25 years ago, but beyond that? Daily life was practically indistinguishable from life in 2018. You woke up, you had coffee, you watched TV for a little bit, you went to the office, you fielded phone calls, you complained over the printers not working right, you sat in traffic for an ungodly amount of time, you went home, your wife yelled at you for working too long and you usually fell asleep while watching reruns of Good Times, or, if you were feeling a little more cerebral, after reading five pages of the latest Tom Wolfe novel.

You see, our pop cultural uber alles hivemind wants us to remember the 1990s as Jurassic Park and Nirvana and the Super Nintendo, while conveniently glossing over the fact that (ironically) 90 percent of the decade’s commercialized entertainment fodder was downright stupid. For every Pinkerton and Gunstar Heroes, you had about 15 Snow albums, 24 Chester Cheetah video games and, at last approximation, around 87 or 89 TV shows starring Matthew Lawrence … not to mention the deluge of Power Rangers imitators, half-baked Mortal Kombat klones and — dare I say it? — the plethora of releases from Enya, Kenny G and, heaven help us, fuckin' Chant.

Long story short, there was a lot of suck in the 1990s, and you 2000s-era babies who thought it was a golden epoch for all things don’t even KNOW what kind of crap you (luckily) missed out on. You kids want to see what the 1990s was REALLY like? Unplug the Playstation and toss that Crash Bandicoot disc in the garbage, there is NO singular pop cultural product that TRULY demonstrates the core essence of the decade more than this pile of magnetic-tape-powered dookie we’re looking at today called Dorf Goes Fishing.

… I don’t even know how to begin this one. There’s really no way to explain this to anybody who didn’t grow up in the 1990s, so I already feel like I’m having to teach you Chinese arithmetic in Roman numerals. Still, it’s my job as a writer to at least try, and well, here goes nothin’.

Tim Conway is this comedian guy that had a shtick where he got on his knees, socked shoes over his patellas and pretended to be a midget. Sometimes they’d stick his legs in holes so he could lean forward and backward all crazily-like, but for the most part? That was his entire gimmick. And yeah, I know he was on The Carol Burnett Show, but do I look like somebody who would even remotely care about such nonsense?

Anyway, Conway’s character Dorf somehow managed to star in his own series of straight-to-video specials, and trust me, advertisements for those things were nigh inescapable in the mid-1990s. It seemed like commercials for Dorf Goes Fishing aired every hour or so on The Weather Channel, and I recall one Christmas in which no less than three members of my family received copies of the video as gifts. Come to think of it, I seem to recall my grandpa having a VHS copy, although I’m not entirely sure he ever removed the factory plastic. Regardless, we never screened it at his humble abode — even when the cable went off.

And after rewatching this relic for the first time in at least 25 years, I understand why — a static, grey scrambled screen actually is preferable to the product itself in this case. But hey, don’t take my word for it — how about we relive the wonder and the splendor together, readers?

The video begins with Tim Conway extolling the therapeutic benefits of fishing — and of course, his fishing line keeps fucking up on him, because THAT IS COMEDY.

...but when I whack my wife over the head with a cooler, all of a sudden it becomes "domestic abuse" instead of slapstick.

By the way, is Tim Conway alive or dead? Eh, I'm too lazy to Google it. We join Dorf as he reminisces on the first time he went fishing next to a sandy cove. And yep, he's falling back and forth and side to side because, good golly, is that ever hilarious.

Next, we cut to a skit about how a caveman (also played by Conway) discovered fishing. By the way, the segment is narrated by Conway, who is using a crappy Italian accent, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Man, this production values are WAY lower than I remembered. As in, the actual stock of the video is just barely above cable access quality. Also — with that bush mustache and parted hairdo, Conway does indeed look a lot like Hitler. 

Anyway, "Grunt the Caveman" tries to use all sorts of inventions to fish, including a bow and arrow and a big stick with a rock tied to it like a baseball bat. Then he gets slung into the wild blue yonder by a computer-generated palm tree. Yep, this is CONSIDERABLY lamer than I remembered, and I honestly didn't think that was possible.

Now Dorf is giving us a primer on what wardrobe to wear for a fishing trip, complete with some of the worst greenscreen effects you've seen ... well, probably ever. Oh boy, just wait until he tries to put the fanny pack on ... it's a goddamn laugh riot. Oh, and I hope you like jokes about Dorf accidentally punching himself in the lips while zipping up his jacket ... because they use that gag TWICE.

Man, I'm starting to get motion sickness from this camerawork, and I'm not even joshing you. Well, anyway, after that segment drags on for about four minutes (no, for real), we hop back to Dorf (again rocking that awful Italian accent) and he's brought his big, fat annoying ballbusting, complaining bitch of a wife fishing with him because she wants to take pictures of their afternoon out and they bicker and complain to each other for awhile and then she conks him over the head with a cooler. Apparently, Conway and pals were just pleased as punch with that one — hence, its prominent placement in the TV commercials for the video.

An interesting aside; while the commercials for this tape featured a laugh track, the actual video cassette itself doesn't. But we DO get a lot of cartoon-quality sound effects, though, if that makes up for it.

So Dorf's wife fishes with bacon while he fishes with some high tech expensive lure. Now his accent has transitioned into a bad Mike Ditka impersonation. Then he yanks bubble gum out of his wife's mouth in a sped-up sequence, because that CLEARLY makes the act of quasi-spouse abuse all the more hilarious. Oh goddamn, we're not even halfway through this fucking thing. The wife busts Dorf's balls some more for leaving the coffee maker on and not feeding their pet bird before they left. Then we segue to a "Discount in Price $hopping Network" skit, which is a pastiche of QVC and HSN and all that shit. I have no idea why the models are wearing George Washington wigs, so don't even ask.

Another computer generated fish eats one of Dorf's weighing scales and an electric filleting knife pokes Dorf's tires out. Now it's time for a parody of an exercise video and ... goddamn, this is bad. It's basically just Dorf raising his hands up and down over and over again while his hairpiece flutters in the wind. We got some more sped-up scenes of Dorf almost getting killed using shoddy fishing equipment, complete with — you guessed it! — more primitive CGI effects. Oh, and at one point, Dorf uses a cartoon radar system to run over people in a pontoon boat and crash into some campers, all the while referring to random people as "krautheads."

We cut back to Dorf and his wife fishin' and complaining to each other. You see, the joke is Dorf can't catch shit with his high tech rod and reel, while his wife can catch a whole bunch of shit using a crappy pole. Man, that is FUNNY.

Now it's time to watch Dorf IN DRAG for a terrible Julia Childs impersonation as we take a look at a fishing cooking show parody. Jesus, this thing cannot end soon enough.

Yep ... the thing goes on for EIGHT MINUTES. This is so bad I can't even make fun of it — it's just painful. This isn't comedy, this is the opposite of comedy.

And our video concludes with Dorf fishing under the moonlight, STILL trying to catch a single fish while his wife bitches at him offscreen. Cue end credits, and mercifully, this one is, thankfully, all over.

Not gonna' lie ... I do kinda want that keychain, for totally inexplicable reasons.

Yeah, that was about as much fun as getting a rectal biopsy, wasn’t it? Needless to say, there’s pretty much no reason for anyone to ever experience this … unless, of course, the intent is to showcase just how misguided en vogue ‘90s nostalgia actually is, sometimes.

According to Wikipedia, Dorf Goes Fishing is just one of EIGHT straight-to-video Dorf specials. Yep, eight, including no less than two that revolve around golfing. There are also Dorf special about auto racing, baseball and the Olympics, if you’re so inclined, and if you are … well, here’s a relevant article you might want to take to heart. VERY much to heart, actually.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me abhor myself for having an “obscure media” obsession. There’s nothing funny, creative, or generally noteworthy about the video, and I genuinely feel miffed about having spent 40 minutes of my life screening it when I could’ve been doing something more productive with my existence. Not even getting the opportunity to eviscerate it in this post after the fact really justifies the upfront investment in this one. I hardly regret doing anything, but by golly, I honestly regret rewatching this rubbish.
Trust me — you’d have more fun watching that floating Dorf keychain sit still on a kitchen table than you will watching this video. And that, my friends, is the undisputed truth.

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"The Middle" by Maren Morris is Secretly About Domestic Violence

Conclusive proof the pop hit of the year is actually a paean to intimate partner abuse and alcoholism ...

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@JimboX

Unless you've been held against your will at a top secret black ops site since January, you've probably heard "The Middle," as an approximate count, 456,437 times over the last five months. 

The song is a top 40 pop staple, still getting regular rotation on most of America's pop stations. And, of course, it's also used as the soundtrack for those omnipresent Target commercials ... indeed, the same way 2012 was the year that gave us Sandy Hook and "Call Me Maybe," it's pretty much a given that we'll ultimately recall 2018 as "the one with the Florida high school shooting and that 'meet me in the middle' song."

It's no doubt a catchy little jingle. The byproduct of ex-country crooner Maren Morris (obviously trying to become the next Tay-Tay, even though she obviously doesn't have the chops/aesthetic appeal to aspire for such lofty heights) Zedd and Grey (I still don't know what those last two do, or even if they're singular or plural artists), I initially thought the track was just another, harmless, radio-friendly ode to how much a woman wants to fuck some dude's brains out (which, by the way, is about 90 percent of the stuff you hear on the radio nowadays ... what's that about the objectifying male gaze again?) Alas, after enough listens of the song, I've discovered two fairly shocking things about "The Middle." 

No. 1 — the song has the EXACT same "ticking clock" sound from "Stay"; and ...

No. 2 — it's not a randy hymn about the female libido whatsoever ... in fact, it's secretly a song about intimate partner violence.

You scoff? Well, popular music (hence, the term "pop music," in case you've ever wondered) has a LONG track record of befuddling people with sugar-coated but subversive messages. For example, people thought "Born in the U.S.A." was a loving homage to America, even though it was actually a song about how poorly Vietnam veterans were treated during the Reagan administration. Same thing with "The Freshman" and "Brick" — at the time, we all though they were heartfelt songs about breakups, when abstractly (and even more shockingly, withing the contextual confines of the lyrics themselves) they were actually about abortions.

The same way some insightful souls deduced "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne was actually about date rape, I've decided to go public with my revelations about the not-so-veiled deeper subtext of "The Middle." Let's cut away the happy, upbeat tempo and dissect the lyrics all by their lonesome, why don't we?

Take a seat

Right over there, sat on the stairs

Stay or leave

The cabinets are bare, and I'm unaware

Of just how we got into this mess, got so aggressive 

I know we meant all good intentions

So right off the bat we know what's really going on here. Obviously, we've got one domestic partner offering an ultimatum to the other one. When Maren says "the cabinets are bare," that allows us to deduce a focal point to their relationship woes. Her man works all day, and it's her job to take care of the house, which apparently, she's been neglecting to the point where she stopped buying groceries for the family. But that also offers a secondary meaning: that the cabinets are bare because they engaged in mutual combat and one of them got slung into the china cabinet, where ceramic plates and perhaps even a box of chocolate Lucky Charms were used as weaponry. The singer literally has no clue how such a minor squabble turned into an act of family violence, hence, the line about "good intentions." But as we will soon see, it's not like the singer is the most reliable of narrators here ... 

So pull me closer

Why don't you pull me close?

Why don't you come on over?

I can't just let you go

Oh baby, why don't you just meet me in the middle? 

I'm losing my mind just a little 

So why don't you just meet me in the middle? 

In the middle 

Baby, why don't you just meet me in the middle? 

I'm losing my mind just a little 

So why don't you just meet me in the middle? 

In the middle 

Now, the first time I heard this song, my thought was the same as yours. "Well, duh, it's another broad singing about how much she wants to fuck somebody." But the more I've listened to the song, I realize the singer isn't trying to seduce somebody, she's trying to bait him into a fucking fist fight. When she says "pull me close" and "meet me in the middle," she's not talking about making up or working out a compromise, she means she wants to throw elbows with some motherfucker. The singer even admits this want of domestic violence is irrational, hence the line "I'm losing my mind just a little." But that leaves a burning question: just why is Miss Morris so psychopathically enraged? Well, let's examine the lyrics a little deeper.

Ohh, take a step

Back for a minute, into the kitchen

Floors are wet

And taps are still running, dishes are broken

How did we get into this mess? Got so aggressive 

I know we meant all good intentions

So, why is the floor wet? Note, she never explicitly states what the floor is wet with, either. Now, we could attribute those broken dishes to the physical altercation from earlier, but why are the water taps still running? Well, it's a bit of a stretch, but here's my hypothesis: the floor is wet from the hard liquor the narrator spilled, who was attempting to clean out the evidence of her furtive alcoholism when her boyfriend/husband showed up and caught her in the act. This is something that's actually strongly implied in the next stanza:

Looking at you, I can't lie

Just pouring out admission

Regardless of my objection, oh, oh

And it's not about my pride

I need you on my skin 

Just come over, pull me in, just 

"Pouring out admission?" "It's not about my pride?" I mean, goddamn, she pretty much makes it textual right there. The singer is an alcoholic bitch whose addiction is ruining the family, and now she wants to engage in drunken fisticuffs with her significant other instead of come to terms with the fact she's a stinkin' drunk, deadbeat mom and piss poor spouse/girlfriend. Which, of course, leads back into one more go-through of the main chorus, which insinuates this kind of violent behavior is cyclical. By the end of the track , there is no resolution, just the recognition that the couple is stuck, perpetually, in the ... ahem ... Middle ... of a violent, alcohol-ravaged co-dependent situation.

Forget it, boys — this is about as far down the rabbit hole we can go with product placement.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to go back to bopping your head and tapping your toes to the rhythm after learning the song is really about an alcoholic domestic abuser, no? What's really amazing to me, though, is how seemingly nobody else has picked up on this, despite the lyrics themselves pretty much making it clear as day.

Which I suppose is just more proof that you can say anything in a song, and just as long as the chorus is catchy and the beat is groovy, nobody will even give a fuck what you're really singing about. I mean, shit, Jethro Tull wrote a song that was explicitly about a pedo creeping on young children at the park, and classic rock stations still play it a good 30 times a day. 

So yeah, I guess if nobody gives a damn about a Stone Temple Pilots song encouraging date rape a good 25 years down the road, I reckon no one will bat an eyelash about 2018's defining pop anthem being a ditty about spouse abuse and alcoholism. 

What a time to be alive — when the most popular track of the year makes both its superficial and contextual meaning about substance abuse and intimate partner violence apparent to anybody with a working hippocampus, but they have to subliminally sneak in a furtive department store ad at the ass-end of the official video.

And to think; there are some people out there who actually argue that ours isn't the greatest epoch in human history ...

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B-Movie Review: 'Stand Alone' (1985)

Quite possibly the greatest vigilante-action movie ever - and I'm not even kidding.

By: JimboX
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I've reviewed quite a few flicks for these "B-Movie Review" installments and the truth is that most of them are pretty forgettable. They're certainly not good movies by any metric, but you can't really say they are transcendentally terrible, either. So while you do periodically wind up with an all time stinker like Going Bananas, for the most part you're stuck with extremely indistinct, below average but not THAT below average stuff like Carnosaur, The Pope Must Diet and Million Dollar Mystery.

Of course, sometimes you luck out and wind up with a movie that was much better than you expected (or, at least so fucked up that it kept you entertained longer than you anticipated), like Mikey or International Guerrillas. And on very, very rare occasions, you sometimes land a bona fide jewel in the dumpster with genre movies that are so good that they ALMOST crossover the threshold of being good exploitation movies into the realm of being legitimately great movies regardless. Here, we're talking stuff like Prayer of the Rollerboys, The Curse and even House II: The Second Story ... all movies that can rightly be considered some of the greatest mini-triumphs of trash cinema ever.

But with Stand Alone, I find myself in uncharted territory. For the first time in six years, I've stumbled across a B-movie that isn't just an outstanding, cheesy, sleazy or trashy genre offering, but one I'd firmly argue DOES cross that aforementioned threshold to become a GENUINELY great movie no matter which fuckin' letter you want to affix to it. Indeed, I'd consider Stand Alone to be an exemplar "vigilante action" movie on par with Dirty Harry and Death Wish - if not even BETTER, considering the budget limitations and the "there's no fuckin' way it should be this good in a movie like this" acting.

Before the movie even starts you know you're in store for something special. Just take a look at this box art. I'm not even joking - next to the box art for StarTropics and this Shasta ad tie-in for Jaws: The Revenge, that's probably the greatest piece of consumer class junk art I've ever seen. One day I'm going to have a home office, and you better believe this film's poster is going to be predominantly displayed.

The opening synth intro is ominous yet patriotic - so yeah, it's the quintessence of the 1980s as a whole. The film begins with a flashback to our main character Louis Thibadeau in the South Pacific back in 1943. He sees some Japs in a cave, whispers "I am death, come with me" and then one of 'em sticks him with a bayonet. Flash forward to 1985, where Louis is now an old, fat dude played by Charles Durning showing his grandson how to work his remote control toy tank. He's built a pretty elaborate toy maze in his backyard and the tank even fires real projectiles and the kid shoots out a nosy neighbor's window but nobody gives a fuck - even the yelling old woman who was barkin' at 'em earlier (eventually, she does come out to confront 'em about the broken window, but Louis says he'll repair it and because he's such a respected pillar of the community, she knows his word is good and that's that.)

Durning walks around the neighborhood and tells his grandson that bayonets are made out of reinforced steel, not ivory. Then he goes to the local cafe to talk to his old war buddy and this young dude walks in and tries to steal a doughnut. Then he REALLY fucks up and calls Louis "fat" when he tells him to put it back. But before Durning can give him the old what-for, these two Meskins walk in with fucking AK-47s and blow him away, and then coolly and casually hop back into their rape wagon and drive off. Apparently, Lou had a heart attack during the ordeal and wakes up in a hospital. These detectives show up and ask him some questions about the shooting, then he goes back home and reads a report about the shooting in the newspaper. His grandson asks him how he feels about the gangs taking over the streets and he tells him he watches too much TV.

And if you think that's slow, the scene is actually sped up by a factor of five.

Back at the police station, Lou flips through a book of mugshots. None of the gunmen are in there. The cops get mad at him for not picking somebody and accuse him of pussing out. Before he leaves the station, though, he runs into Pam Grier (yep, Foxy Brown her damn self) who apparently is an old friend who takes him on a ride in her convertible. By the way, in case you're wondering, the movie takes place in Los Angeles, even though it was obviously filmed in Texas.

Anyhoo, she tells him to be careful if he's going to testify against the gang members, since they have a bad habit of retaliating against witnesses. Then she goes back to the hospital and tries to get some info on Lou's medical visit. Interestingly, she provides two competing hypotheses for her relationship to Lou; first, she tells the nurse that Lou is her uncle, then she says she is his attorney. Hell maybe she's both, not like it really matters, I suppose. Then Lou goes back to the cafe, and he and his old pal shoot the shit some more. Back at the station, the three gangbangers get brought in on car theft charges. Pam (her canonical name is Cathryn, if you were wondering) is apparently a public defender, too. She notices the guy's gold tooth and tattoo as described to her earlier by Lou and gets freaked the fuck out. The guys complain in broken English about "having rights in the USA" and then they start calling her a "puta." She goes back to the detectives and asks them to not bring Lou in because she's afraid of what the "cocaine cowboys" might do to him. Then she dials up the D.A. to dig up more dirt on the three guys from earlier. One guy has no papers and is about to get deported and the other two have Florida driver's license. And since the guy whose car was stolen ain't pressing charges, the two Floridians go free tomorrow. So Pam visits the car theft victim herself and, in broken Spanish, tries to get the victim to press charges but he ain't budging.

So she visits Lou and his grandkid and Lou says if he works hard he can be just as successful as Pam one day and then the little bastard says he doesn't want to be a woman and we all have a hearty chuckle because back then people weren't such stuck-up P.C. pussies. Then Pam - ah, fuck it, I might as well start calling her Cathryn 'cause I'm calling Durning's character Lou - tells him what he saw was a professional hit job - the handiwork of illegal aliens working out of a drug smuggling ring. Cathryn tells him they're dangerous as fuck, but he ain't buying it. "I didn't do anything to them and they're not going to do anything to me," Louis says

So, sure enough, in the very next scene Lou's just driving around in the barrios and he sees the same van from the cafe shooting. He runs to the payphone - and since he's about 300 pounds, this part takes a while - and calls up the detective. Then this Mexican dude starts tapping on the glass booth while he's talking to the cops and makes a "gun" gesture with his hand and then Lou starts running for his goddamn life and it's hilariously pathetic. Of course, a whole bunch of Meskins start chasing after him, too, so he hops in this random woman's car and asks her to get him the hell out of there. Which, I think is technically carjacking, but come on - people in 1985 were a lot more chill about that kinda' shit than we are today. "I know I should've meditated today," Lou's impromptu chauffeur says. The van starts following them and she drops Lou off at an old chemical plant and the Meskins continue their pursuit and they play an extended game of hide and seek with all of these giant metal tanks everywhere. Lou's shirt is sopping wet with fat person sweat, and I know you're prolly thinkin' "why doesn't he just run back to his car?" but remember, the motherfucker parked his car right outside the official MS-13 gin joint, so that shit is just out of the question. So he sneaks through a hole in a wall and conveniently enough, the local cafe is right across the street. So his old war buddy hides him under the counter as the three Meskins case the place. They leave after eyeing the place for a bit, and then Lou stops turtling up and tells his pal to NOT call the police. The next day, he opens up his old combat trunk and pulls out a handgun ... surely, just out of nostalgia, right?

So Lou's daughter goes down to the detective's office and says look, "these guys are going to kill my paw if he testifies" and the police say they'll do everything in their power to protect him. Then the janitor IDs the dude in the clink with the skull tattoo and the detectives start mulling their options. Then the guy whose car was stolen calls up Cathryn and says "alright, I'll talk." Then Lou goes down to the station and is asked to identify the perps in a line-up. Immediately after fingering the Meskins, Cathryn rushes into the office and tells Lou to NOT sign any police paperwork, then he goes to bed and wakes up to his grandkid bugling and oh shit, the Mexican rape van just pulled up! Whoops, it's actually just a roofing van and gramps is being paranoid that a bunch of Latin Kings might be out to murder his family. LOL. So Lou does what any red-blooded American would to soothe his jangled nerves - he pulls out his revolver and starts shooting shit in his garage (which, naturally, draws the ire of that nosy broad next door, who tells him to pipe it down before the property values start declinin'.)

Watch it, Pedro - Archie Bunker here is about to fuck your shit up, royally.

Then the cafe owner walks home at night. He goes to his apartment and SOMEBODY grabs him. That's our cue to quick cut to Lou's place. The seriously injured cafe owner calls Louis, then the Meskins do a drive-by on the Thibideau residence. His daughter and grandson, of course, leave the residence shortly thereafter. Lous stays, though, because this is his home, damn it. His grandson asks him if he's afraid and he says - stoically but awesomely - "I don't think so." Lou visits the cafe owner in the hospital - he's beaten pretty bad, but he's far from dead. " He tells Lou "I'm just goddamn sorry"  for coughing up his name and address to the Meskins. Then Cathryn shows up and says she's going to stay at Lou's place until he leaves, too. Then Lou does a monologue about being given a medal by Douglas MacArthur when he was 19. Then he goes down to the Meskins' hangout place with a pistol tucked in his underwear. Oh, you know what it's time for - it's time to FINALLY clean the fuckin' streets.

This Meskin fella spits on Lou so he responds by sticking his gun under his left nostril and saying "I am death, come with me" just like he did to those Japs at the beginning of the movie, and then he slowly walks backwards out of the pool hall. And then, he goes home and raises Old Glory over his front porch, and waves them colors PROUD. Then he stares in the bathroom mirror, has another flashback to Okinawa, puts on a black sweatshirt and cuts off the electricity to his own house - then he starts building Home Alone-esque guerrilla warfare bobby traps and breaks out his old rifle, and you better believe that old bayonet's getting polished up while he's at it.

Cathryn calls Lou's daughter and she tells her he ain't with her and then she knows what's about to go down. Night falls and sure enough, them pesky Meskins decide to do a little after hours visit to the Thibideau residence (which is contrasted with shots of Lou in the WWII tunnels.) The first dude goes to turn on the breaker and gets his frijoles refried, but the rest of the Meskins avoid the trip wire trap entering the kitchen, and one of them says "despacito" when he hands the wooden-nail trap thingy to the other one and we all chortle. And yes, in case you haven't figured it out, they're trying to contrast the Mexicans here with the Japanese barbarians back in Dub Dub Dos. And they don't give subtitles to either of 'em, because in this movie only English is deemed worthy of on-screen text and that's just the way it ought to be, by golly.

Here comes the Meskins' backup. We've got two more guys showing up and they're armed to the teeth and doing the Colombian sugar booger in the driveway. Lou sneaks up behind the getaway driver while he's snorting disco powder and slits his throat. Cathryn shows up with a handgun en tow and finds the body of that one electrocuted Meskin. She elbows one of the Mexicans unconscious, then Lou blows a hole through the spleen of this other Meskin who's about to shoot Cathryn. And holy shit, HERE COMES THE TOY TANK from earlier. The Meskins just hop over it after it fires a mini-rocket, then Lou gets shot and falls through a window, but he rolls out of harm's way before those quesa-dildos can open fire on him.

So Lou goes back into the house and Cathryn guns down another Meskin. The SWAT team arrives and it's down to Lou and one last Mexican - one with a fucking Uzi. Lou tosses sand into his eyes and hits him with the world's fattest Bill Goldberg tackle, and then the police clear the rest of the house and his daughter and grandson show up. He walks to the ambulance under his own free will and the detective tells him everything's going to be fine and Lou just looks at him like he's full of shit and the end credits roll, as that triumphant - yet somewhat eerie - synth music returns.

There are two things this man wants served - justice and a second helping of appetizers.

Alright, I'm going to have to pace myself before this thing turns into a way overblown thesis, but here's a couple of quick hit points I wanna' get outta' the way early. 

First off, every screenwriter in the WGA ought to see this movie to see how you structure a story in three parts. The first 30 minutes of the movie is dedicated to establishing the characters and the setting, the next 30 minutes skillfully builds up the conflict and the final 30 minutes are dedicated to starting and satisfyingly reaching a resolution. I can't tell you how many fucking movies nowadays either fall apart before they can even reach the third act or the staggering number of films that don't even have a beginning or an ending - essentially, all those Marvel movies are just one long second act that never gets a proper conclusion until the NEXT MCU offering. This movie, however, does the three-act narrative subtly, it does it effortlessly and it does it fucking' perfectly - in fact, it's put together so well, it probably could work as a stage play.

You've really gotta' give writer Roy Carlson all the credit in the world here. At a time when EVERYBODY was doing Chuck Bronson ripoffs, he had the good sense to craft a character who isn't physically imposing, who doesn't initially want to whup anybody's ass and who tries desperately to avoid causing any violence until it's positively a do-or-die, me-or-them scenario. And the addition of Cathryn as the public defender gives the story an additional layer of nuance that most of these subgenre flicks from the era never had. Yes, there's an overarching theme that the public safety bureaucracies are inept and inefficient, but Stand Alone is one of the few Reagan-era "vigilante" movies that tries to get the message across that there ARE some people part of the system who still give a fuck. And the pacing is just superb. In a way, the first hour of the movie is practically an excellent procedural drama, which offramps with naru a bump in the road to its outstanding, paint-the-walls-burrito-brown home invasion grand finale. 

Of course, the movie wouldn't have worked without Charles Durning. The problem with most vigilante action movies is that, from the get-go, you KNOW guys like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood can't wait to blow away the scumbags, but here, you really do feel like Durning is just a sweet, harmless old man who is driven homicidally vengeful by movie's end. It gives it an air of tragedy and sadness that something like, oh say, Exterminator 2 or Invasion U.S.A. never exhibited; and that sense of humanity is what pushes this one over the top into the realm of not just superlative B-movie sleaze, but excellent independent filmmaking, regardless.

Naturally, some of you fucks are going to read into the movie's "subtext" that it's furtively racist or xenophobic or some other nonsense. But Durning's character doesn't raise the American flag before his home is besieged by Mexican drug runners because he don't like Hispanics, but because he's fighting for a specific way of life ... most notably, the kind of life where he doesn't have to worry about his grandson getting shot to death by illegal immigrant gangbangers. It always makes me laugh (that is, until the sadness of the situation sinks in) when people try to say the depiction of Mexicans in movies like this are hurtful. Well fuck, there's decent, honest, clean-living (and presumably illegal immigrant) Mexicans depicted in the same fuckin' movie, and the flick draws a CLEAR line between Hispanic people just trying to make an honest buck and not step on anybody else's toes and the piece of shit kind that lug machine guns into Denny's and try to hack up senior citizens with machetes. I mean, for fuck's sake, it's not like violent illegal Mexican immigrant gangs DON'T exist in America; indeed, you pantywaist liberal "defenders" are the ones choosing to promote an unrealistic vision of existence by pretending that ALL illegal immigrant Mexicans are just plain dandy people who don't hurt nobody. If anything, Stand Alone CLEARLY posits Durning's antipathy of the Meskins as the byproduct of witnessing (and experiencing) their immoral and violent behavior; and last time I checked, there's immoral and violent people of ALL shades and hues of the rainbow, and being afraid of certain individuals who more than fit the police sketch isn't just logical, I'd say it's downright essential to insure existential safety. Besides, the movie paints Pam Grier's character as every bit the laudable hero that Durning is, and she fosters the exact same sense of moral consternation of the violent Hispanics as old Chuck. So does that make Pam Grier a xenophobic, hate-filled bigot or simply a member of a social system that expects civil behavior and abhors criminally antisocial antics? Sorry, libs, but "white rage" or "racism" was never what made this kinds of movies popular - rather, it was the unifying cultural realization that our systems aren't doing shit to protect us from the wolves at the door, and if the government isn't going to do its part to ensure our safety, then by golly we'll have to do it our damn selves.

By the way, the flick was directed by a guy named Alan Beattie, who was nominated for an Oscar for a short film he did back in 1975. This was the last of two feature films he ever directed, and after that he did a lot of TV war documentary production work. Judging from his IMDb resume, he's been retired since 2004. That, or he died - I don't feel like checking the obituaries. But in case he did kick the bucket 15 years ago, at least he went to the grave knowing full well he crafted one of the greatest "taking back the streets and sweeping el garbage-o down the drains" action flicks in the history of the motion picture, and for that, his whole lineage ought to be mighty proud of him. 

So, all that to say Stand Alone is a fuckin' incredible movie and you need to see it. Indeed, it's so good it's inspired me to plan the first ever Charles Durning Film Festival, tentatively set for next spring at the Starlight Six in Atlanta. Of course, this movie's going to open the festivities, but I'm still mulling options for the rest of the line-up. I guess The Sting and Dog Day Afternoon are givens, but do I leave that final slot open for Solarbabies or Meatballs III? Eh - suggestions here would be much appreciated.

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