Camp Nowhere

Camp Nowhere (1994) 

Dir. by Jonathan Prince

Starring Jonathan Jackson, Melody Kay, Andrew Keegan and Christopher Lloyd

[content warning: child endangerment]

Plot:

Tired of being sent to boring summer camps by their parents, three teenagers blackmail a former drama teacher into helping them convince their parents into sending them to a fake camp that he will “run,” while they use their parents’ money to have fun all summer.  Soon, half of the school is in on the con, and Camp Nowhere is born.  However, they have to scramble to pull off an even bigger con when the parents demand to have a day to visit – and each of them expects to see a different type of camp.

Nostalgia:

I saw this in theaters when it first came out.  I was 12 years old at the time, the perfect age for the movie.  I don’t remember if we had it on video or not.  I’m leaning towards not, because while I have a fair bit of recollection of it it’s not one of those movies that I remember chapter and verse.

Review:

The year before this movie came out, I crossed over from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts.  That gave me my first opportunity to attend a Boy Scout summer camp.  I’d been to day camps before, and a couple of weekend long camping trips, but this was the first time that I spent an entire week away from my parents.   It was a rocky first experience (there was some staff-on-camper bullying involved), but it was the start of a long string of regular summer camping for me that lasted until I went away to college.

I think that’s why this movie resonated so much with me at the time.  I was really into Scouts and camping for a long time, and quite a few of my favorite kid-oriented comedies from this time period (Heavyweights, Bushwhacked, etc.) involved camping in some way.  None of these movies did particularly well at the box office, and have mostly been forgotten, but I was pretty much the exact target audience for them.

Of course, looking back at them as an adult, it’s clear to me exactly why they didn’t succeed with audiences or critics.  For most of its run time, Camp Nowhere is pretty much just scene after scene of teenagers goofing off. There’s also some mildly uncomfortable cringe humor thrown in as the main character Mud and the teacher (played by Christopher Lloyd in full Christopher Lloyd mode) attempt to con various authority figures into believing that there’s nothing going on at the camp.  I’ll admit that scenes like the dinner sequence, where Mud and Lloyd are improvising a fake father-son relationship while Lloyd has a dinner date with the doctor that treated Mud’s injured arm earlier in the film, are mildly triggering to me now, and I had to mute that particular scene until it was over.  One too many bad experiences being put on the spot by teachers in high school, I guess.

And, of course, there’s the matter of the reckless endangerment of children.  The aforementioned injured arm occurred due to an accident involving unsupervised use of fireworks.  The kids are walking around with chainsaws, riding dune buggies, and doing who knows what else with all of the money that their parents paid to send them to camp.  This was all super fun to see when I was a kid myself, of course, but now I’ve been through multiple Youth Protection training classes as an adult Scout leader, and live in a house with two young children.  I don’t really find much of the antics in the movie funny anymore.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I totally hated this rewatch.  There was actually at least one extended sequence that I did enjoy quite a lot: the Parent’s Day con at the end.  It was what I remembered most about the movie before I watched it, and is where the movie stops being a series of episodic happenings and actually comes together into something with a definitive plot.  The parents variously believe that their children are attending weight loss, computer, drama or military camps, and the kids have to quick-change the camp into each version as the parents arrive and leave, leaving little room for error or the entire game is up.  It’s a very Home Alone-esque series of Rube Goldberg gags to transform the camp each time, and I wish more of the movie had gone this way.

Alas, it did not, and despite enjoying the final 15 minutes or so I can’t really recommend the movie.  I really liked the movie when I was younger, but now I find myself much more on the side of the parents than the kids.  Maybe not to the point of sending my nieces to “Camp Microchip,” but I’ve seen medical billing now, and know just how much putting your eye out with a BB gun actually costs.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C-

Stray Thoughts: 

-One of the parents is played by Kate Mulgrew, something that I had absolutely no recollection of (and probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway, considering I didn’t watch any Star Trek at all until I was in college)

-This is supposedly Jessica Alba’s first screen role, but even knowing that going in I failed to notice her at all throughout the movie.

Demolition Man

Demolition Man (1993)
Dir. by Marco Brambilla

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock and Nigel Hawthorne

[content warning: political satire, actual murder]

Plot:

When LAPD Sergeant John “the Demolition Man” Spartan is framed for the murder of civilians while taking down crime kingpin Simon Phoenix, both he and Phoenix become some of the first inmates in the new cryogenic prison being tested.  Thirty years later, Phoenix escapes during a parole hearing, and begins to terrorize a future Los Angeles that is no longer used to violence of any kind.  The police, now only experienced in apprehending suspects who break curfew and tell dirty jokes, thaw Spartan out of cryo and reinstate him in an attempt to recapture the dangerous fugitive.

Nostalgia:

My first memories of this movie are actually of the aggressive marketing push for the movie conducted by Taco Bell, due to its prominent feature in the film.  I was only 11 at the time, and there was no way my parents were actually going to let me watch the movie itself.  I think I first saw it sometime in high school, and by the time I headed off to college it was one of my favorite action movies.  I don’t watch it quite as much anymore, but I still give it a spin in the DVD player every year or so.

Review:

This is a very bizarre film.  It’s one-half violent 90s sci-fi action movie, and one-half social satire dystopian comedy.  While the two halves don’t really fit all that well together on paper, I enjoy both of them equally, and the movie itself quite a bit.

While the movie isn’t a deliberate comedy (at least, no one in the movie is playing it like a comedy), the borderline-surreal environment that the reawakened Spartan finds himself in is more than sufficient for the film to have plenty of laughs to go with its action.  Most of these come from Spartan’s interplay with his new partner on the force, Sandra Bullock’s extremely enthusiastic Lenina Huxley.  A 20^th-century pop culture fanatic, she gloms on to Spartan like her own private Stan Lee, eager to show off her (frequently wrong) knowledge of 90s slang and action hero tropes. There’s also a lot of fish-out-of-water humor involving Spartan’s reactions to “modern” technology, most notably an extended reoccurring gag with a machine that dispenses fines for swearing, and the lack of toilet paper in the restrooms – two gags that naturally dovetail together in one of the movie’s more memorable scenes.

While Bullock and Stallone are both good in their roles, special attention has to be paid to Wesley Snipes as the villain.  When we first meet him, he’s a ruthless, self-assured drug kingpin, who takes pleasure in taunting Spartan before he gets captured.  Due to the machinations of the outwardly affable Dr. Cocteau, he emerges from cryo freeze as an over-the-top, almost cartoonish terrorist.  While Stallone mostly goes around with this bemused, “I can’t believe this shit” expression, Snipes’s Simon Phoenix is openly disdainful and sarcastic about the future, making his interactions with just about every part of this ridiculous dystopia a joy to watch.  It’s not quite to the level of Alan Rickman in Robin Hood, but he does begin to approach that level of scenery-chewing, which is just perfect for a movie with this satirical tone.

Phoenix's wardrobe is sponsored by Goodyear

Speaking of the dystopia, the movie takes multiple potshots at PC culture and over-regulation.  Pretty much everything that makes life enjoyable seems to have been regulated out of existence, leading to a famous, epic libertarian Denis Leary rant late in the film.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the movie went into production shortly after Bill Clinton took office.  However, even if the movie’s politics aren’t really modern any more, it has several points that still resonate today, especially when it comes to the government trying to decide what people can do with their bodies (both sex and pregnancy without a permit having been made illegal).  And the Taco Bell scene is still amazing.

I’m not sure what it says about the movie that what it’s probably most known for now is an extended product placement.  According to Huxley, all of the major franchises competed themselves into oblivion, leaving Taco Bell as the only restaurant in existence.  As a reward for saving his life, Dr. Cocteau invites Spartan to an upscale, fancy Taco Bell, with a valet and live music.  It’s such a memorable scene that Taco Bell actually recreated the restaurant from the movie as a pop-up at this year’s San Diego Comic Con to celebrate the movie’s 25^th anniversary.

I haven’t talked much about the action itself in the movie, and that’s because the action movie side of the film is mostly standard early-90s fair.  It’s well shot, for the most part, and decently choreographed, but there’s nothing truly inventive about any of it.  This movie doesn’t live on its violence, as much as it does the reactions of everyone else to the fights, from Huxley’s gleeful enthusiasm to a random cop who has to use a Youtube tutorial to figure out how to arrest Phoenix.

Even if I don’t really agree with all of the movie’s satirical targets, I find that there’s more than enough for me to still enjoy it, even in 2018.  It’s definitely a relic of its time, but that’s actually part of the point: Spartan is an 80s/90s era action hero in a modern world that’s moved beyond him.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-Seriously, I’ve seen multiple breakdowns and infographics trying to explain how the three seashells thing is supposed to work.  And I get it in theory.  My question is, what does the next person to come into the restroom do? Use the same seashells?

-Jack Black has a blink-and-you-miss-him role as one of the Scraps in the sewers, something I never caught in all of my times watching it until I had it pointed out to me.

-This movie accurately called Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career, a decade before he became Governor of California.  In fact, the movie has him becoming president due to a new Constitutional amendment being passed – an amendment which was actually proposed right after Schwarzenegger was elected.

-In a slightly creepier coincidence, the inmate immediately before Simon Phoenix on the parole hearing docket is listed as a “Peterson, Scott.” Many years after the movie’s release, a man named Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife, in a media circus trial that made the news nightly.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Robert Picardo and John Glover

[content warning: potential transphobia, sexual assault]

Plot:

Several years, after the original Gremlins movie, Gizmo the Mogwai’s elderly caretaker dies and his shop is bulldozed to make way for a fancy commercial center. Taken to Clamp Tower in Manhattan by a research scientist, he is freed by his friend Daniel Peltzer, who is now working as an artist in the building. When an accident causes a new group of gremlins to be created, Daniel must try to convince his skeptical bosses that a horde of chaotic creatures is about to descend upon the highly automated “smart building.”

Nostalgia:

This is yet another of my family’s seemingly endless collection of movies taped off of basic cable during the early 90s. We only had this one, not the original, so I never ended up seeing it until much after this one, and was positively shocked at its very different tone. I do really like the original, and appreciate its status as a classic horror-comedy, but if pressed I’d have to say that I actually enjoy this one more.

Review:

This…is a very weird movie. Now, I’ve watched some weird movies for this blog so far. I’ve seen giant worms with tentacle tongues, 3000-year-old Chinese sorcerers, suburban serial killers and kung fu disco dancing street thugs. But this might be the most deliberately strange movie I’ve seen in a long time. And I still kind of love it for that.

The original Gremlins was a horror/comedy which expertly balanced both sides of the equation, and still has some genuinely frightening scenes. This movie, on the other hand, seems almost intended as a rickroll of the audiences who went into it expecting something like the first film (and in fact, it kinda was. More on that later). About 45 minutes into the movie, it takes an abrupt left turn and abandons all pretenses at being a horror film. Instead, it becomes, essentially, a live action cartoon, getting more and more ridiculous and over-the-top with every passing minute. While in the original the gremlins were actually quite dangerous, and were a threat to the lives of everyone in the town, here they instead seem to be displaced residents of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Toontown. If left to their own devices, they’d cause just as much havoc against each other as they would against any of the humans. This feeling is reinforced by the opening of the film, where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck interrupt the credits to argue about who gets to sit on top of the 60th anniversary Warner Bros. logo. It sets the tone for the sheer wackiness that is about to ensue over the course of the film. 

Most of the chaos in the film can be laid at the feet of Christopher Lee’s character, a genetic researcher whose lab seems to be a subdivision of Acme Enterprises. Here, the gremlins go through a series of transformations that ups their variety a hundredfold over the first film, where there was little to differentiate the various individuals. Thanks to the lab’s experiments, we end up with gremlins that are bat-hybrids, part vegetable, made of electricity and, most memorably, one who is intelligent and erudite, like Marvel’s Beast, with the voice of Tony Randall. Even the new version of the original film’s villain, Spike, goes through a transformation, becoming what is essentially a D&D drider in the only real scary scene in the movie.

Once the movie passes the halfway point, many of the human characters disappear for long stretches of time, as the narrative stops to just allow the gremlins to run amok. Nowhere is this more evident than the famous fourth-wall breaking sequence. When originally projected in theaters (on film, of course – this was way before the era of digital projection), the movie suddenly stopped, as if the film had become jammed, and then tore visually on-screen. Before any audience member would have time to get up and complain, however, the shadows of two gremlins in the projection booth appeared, making increasingly elaborate shadow puppets in the light of the projector. The movie then moves to the lobby of the theater itself, where a parent is complaining to the manager about the film’s content. He sends an usher into the theater, who gets Hulk Hogan to stand up from the audience and intimidate the gremlins into restarting the movie. It’s up there with Ferris Bueller’s monologues for me in terms of fourth-wall-breaking stunts, and is the ultimate distillation of what Joe Dante was trying to do with the movie.

That being, of course, fucking with both the audience and studio’s expectations. He had initially been extremely resistant to the idea of doing a sequel to the original Gremlins, as he thought that it had a satisfying ending that didn’t justify a sequel. After trying and failing to get it up and running on their own, the studio went back to Dante and offered him triple the budget of the first film and complete creative control over the direction of the project. Still not wanting to make a sequel, but also not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, Dante instead decided to make a satire of the original movie, and of overblown Hollywood sequels in general. While I personally believe that he succeeded wildly, critics and audiences were much more split over the movie, and it ultimately lost money. 

This is an incredibly silly, over-the-top movie, even more so than I remember it being. However, it’s also a very refreshing departure from most Hollywood sequels, and I really enjoyed it.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-The movie was originally intended to have a much more villainous Ronald Clamp, which is why he’s portrayed as a combination of Ted Turner and Donald Trump. However, they found that John Glover’s performance was just so likeable that they rewrote the script to turn him into a more sympathetic character.

-When the movie was released on VHS, they replaced the fourth-wall breaking with a different scene involving the gremlins turning off the VCR and channel surfing until John Wayne scares them off. This was the version that I grew up watching, and I didn’t see the Hulk Hogan version until it was finally released on DVD. I now prefer the original, though.

-One of the transformations that I didn’t mention above is where one of the gremlins drinks a formula that makes them explicitly female, with long hair, pouty lips and noticeable breasts. While it’s never clear if the gremlins had any sexual dimorphism prior to this (they reproduce through parthenogenesis, after all), what is clear is that this trans gremlin seems to be uninterested in participating in any of the anarchy. She’s more interested in a romantic pursuit of Robert Picardo’s character, and becomes the only gremlin to survive the movie because of it. While the character is ultimately played for laughs, the laughs never come at the expense of the transition itself. Once she’s female, the movie just accepts that fact, and the humor seems to be more focused on Picardo’s character’s reactions to being romanced by a two-foot-tall lizard creature. While I don’t feel the need to knock the movie for trans representation in this instance, I do have to fault it for its use of sexual assault (specifically Gremlin-on-human) for humor. Yes, Picardo decides to go along with it in the end, but I detected a lot of overtones of Stockholm Syndrome involved.

-I now understand the gremlin repeating “Is it safe?” while he has Danny strapped to a dentist chair, a joke that always eluded me when I watched this in the 90s.

If Looks Could Kill

If Looks Could Kill (1991)
Dir. by William Dear

Starring Richard Grieco, Roger Rees and Gabrielle Anwar

[content warning: sexism, transphobia]

Plot:

Teenage slacker Michael Corbin is given a surprise on graduation day when his diploma is withheld due to an incomplete grade in French. In order to get the credit he needs to graduate, he has to accompany his French teacher on a summer trip to France. Unfortunately, he is mistaken at the airport for an American secret agent traveling under the same name, and is co-opted by MI6 into assisting with a dangerous mission. At first he goes along with it, enamored of the fast cars and spy gadgets, until he learns that being a spy might actually have real-life stakes.

Nostalgia:

I have literally zero memory of when I first saw this. I’m pretty sure it had to be a VHS rental, though we’d eventually own a copy ourselves. I grew up watching the James Bond movies, so a James Bond parody starring a teenager definitely appealed to teenage me. I actually wasn’t able to track down a DVD copy of the movie, so I eventually resorted to pulling out that old pan-and-scan VHS tape from a box in the basement and watched it on my parents’ VCR.

Review:

This film is basically White Cishet Power Trip Fantasy: The Movie. It starts with a premise that’s essentially someone’s fanfiction come to life: a teenager is mistaken for a secret agent and given access to all of the cool spy gadgets from the Bond films. And for about two thirds of the running time, Corbin behaves exactly how you’d expect a horny, straight Hollywood teenager to act in such a situation. He goofs around, acts like he knows what he’s doing, fails to take anything seriously, and survives mainly on sheer luck.

For example, Corbin engages in an action movie car chase without ever once realizing that he’s being pursued. He’s trying to lower the windshield so he can hit on the woman in a convertible driving next to him, and starts flipping switches randomly. These switches deploy the Bond car defenses, eventually blowing up the car that’s been chasing him – something he only notices once the explosion occurs. Even after that, he seems to be more upset that he blew out his tires and let the girl get away than at any property destruction or death he may have just caused. 

Now, this is a problem that I could most certainly ignore while watching the movie as a teenager. But looking back at it as an adult, I was pretty constantly annoyed by Corbin’s attitude about pretty much everything for over an hour of the movie. It’s only when the movie actually finally gets to the villain’s chateau, and he faces up to the seriousness of his situation, that I found myself enjoying the character at all. The movie stops trying to be a frat house comedy with spy trappings at this point, and actually turns into a decent Bond movie pastiche, complete with one-liners, great set piece fights, and gadget-induced escapes. Unfortunately, the movie is only 88 minutes long, so you have to wade through almost two thirds of the film before getting to any of the good stuff.

In addition to my problems with the Corbin character and the way he’s written, there’s also a whole lot of fairly crass sex humor. For example, there’s an extended joke about Corbin being seduced by the evil femme fatale agent (named Areola Canasta!), who’s attempting to kill him with a scorpion in bed. He doesn’t want to have sex without a condom, and spends what feels like five minutes trying to open a heavily-fortified tube of “Combat Condoms” in the bathroom. Meanwhile, the agent is stung by her own scorpion, and is writhing around on the bed moaning – sounds that Corbin mistakes for an orgasm. There’s also a fairly glaring transphobic joke involving a pair of X-ray glasses that I definitely don’t remember from the last time I watched this. 

Fortunately, the movie gets redeemed somewhat by its villains. Roger Rees, whom I mostly remember from playing the Sheriff in Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood parody, is much more serious here as Augustus Steranko, the Bond villain whose plan basically amounts to…creating the Euro. But he lends a much needed gravitas to the movie, as an antidote to Corbin’s attitude. And Linda Hunt is just delightful as the henchwoman who wears a gold whip around her neck like a choker, and really really likes killing people for Steranko. I also found myself enjoying Robin Barlett’s performance as the French teacher, whose main defining characteristics at the start of the movie are hating Corbin and having unfortunate taste in headwear. She gets mistaken for a Cold War mercenary by both MI6 and the CIA (really, neither organization comes off as competent in the least), and embraces the persona by the end of the film, packing an Uzi and wearing ripped clothing as a headband, Rambo-style.

So yeah, this was nowhere near as good as I remember it being. If only the rest of the movie had been like the final 20 minutes, I might have enjoyed the rewatch a lot more. It probably deserves to be as obscure and hard to find as it is now.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C

Stray Thoughts:

-The British agent who gets killed in the movie’s version of the Bond cold open is Roger Daltrey, lead singer for The Who. I guess he really needed the extra paycheck that year.

-Corbin is supposed to be from Detroit. I’m pretty sure that every student on that class trip to France was white (or at least, I don’t remember seeing any students of color). I’ve lived in the Detroit area for almost 30 years, and unless his school was in Grosse Pointe that casting is flat-out wrong.

-This movie’s so obscure now that I couldn’t even find any good screenshots to include.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
Dir. by Steve Barron

Starring Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas and Josh Pais

[content warning: Yellow Peril, sexism]

Plot:

While investigating a series of mysterious crimes, TV news reporter April O’Neil is saved from a mugging by the Ninja Turtles, a group of four anthropomorphic reptiles trained in ninjitsu by their rat master, Splinter. When Splinter is kidnapped by the forces of the Foot clan of ninjas, who are behind the crime wave, the Turtles take refuge with O’Neil. The five of them, plus masked vigilante Casey Jones, must locate the Foot’s secret hideout, rescue Splinter, and put an end to the criminal empire.

Nostalgia:

I was a huge fan of the animated Ninja Turtles series (and the arcade game – the less said about the original NES game, the better), so of course I saw this in theaters as soon as my parents would take me. It ended up being the last movie I saw in America before we moved to the U.K., about two weeks later. I had one of those storybooks with the cassette tape that came with it, and I would listen to it on repeat while going to bed for like the first six months we were in England.

Review:

If you didn’t grow up in the United States in the late 1980s, you might not realize what a huge deal the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were. The characters had been created as a parody of Frank Miller’s dark and gritty take on Daredevil in the mid-80s, but hadn’t really taken off until a syndicated Saturday morning cartoon debuted in 1987. It toned down a lot of the comic’s rough edges to be more kid-friendly, and was one of the biggest hits of its time, running for 10 seasons and almost 200 episodes. It also, of course, sold many an action figure, lunchbox, breakfast cereal and video game.

It was a foregone conclusion that they’d attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the franchise with a movie release. However, they made the odd (in retrospect) decisions to A) do a movie about anthropomorphic animals in live-action, in the pre-CG era, and B ) to make it an adaptation of the original comic books, ignoring most of what had made the cartoon so popular in the first place. In fact, the first of these proved to be so problematic that virtually no movie studio wanted to touch it with a ten-foot-pole, even with the guaranteed fanbase from the cartoon. Eventually, the Henson Company stepped in, with Jim Henson seeing it as a personal challenge to create something that would look good on-screen. He not only succeeded, but ended up creating the foundation upon which all future animatronic characters would be based. 

So we have a low-budget movie that ignored most of what made its content popular, with untested and experimental special effects, being released by an independent studio (New Line) that was known mostly for art house movies and cheap B-horror. Why, then, was it such a massive hit, and is still a beloved nostalgia film for so many people?

For me, I think it’s the very fact that it wasn’t the cartoon version of the Turtles. I don’t think the Turtles as portrayed on the show would have worked in live-action. The show is really silly, and very much operates on cartoon logic They kept some of the more distinctive elements of the show (Mikey’s immaturity, the colored headbands, “Cowabunga”) but otherwise tried to ground as much of the movie in reality as six-foot-tall turtles named after Renaissance artists would allow. No aliens, no mutating goons, no mad scientists, no Turtle battle wagons. Just a modern-day Fagin who takes in angry young men (I don’t think we see any female Foot members, though I may be wrong) and turns them into a personal army. Twenty-five years later and Shredder would have had a Youtube channel and a Twitter account.

Since when have five anthro animals been living in my apartment?
I need to clean more.

The fights in the movie are also very appropriate for the ages of both the protagonists and their Foot clan opponents, all of whom would be in their teens or early twenties. The movie begins with the Turtles’ first real mission, so they’re all still quite new at the hero thing and haven’t ever really been in a live fight with people who intend to hurt them before. And the Foot “ninjas” can’t have had more than a year or two of training themselves, given their age and the recency of the crime wave. It helps to make the awkward fighting of the Turtles (whose actors had limited movement and sight because of the costumes) more sensible, and also explains away a lot of the sillier bits of the fights (the dunking in a fish tank, the nunchuck contest, etc): they’re ALL immature and trying to show off. 

Now, one thing I don’t really buy as an adult is the relationship between April and Casey Jones. He’s kind of an asshole to her for most of the movie, breaking her firing to her in maybe the worst way possible, and running off a whole string of potential condescending and sexist nicknames for her, asking her to choose one. Sure, he saves her life, and helps her and the Turtles out when they’re hiding at her farm. But I can’t see how they go from screaming at each other and slamming doors (one of the Turtles even compares it to Moonlighting) to kissing by the end of the film.

There’s also a current of Yellow Peril inherent to a lot of the scenes involving Shredder and his second-in-command, Tatsu. They’re the only actual Japanese people in the movie (Splinter, despite being a Japanese rat, is voiced by, of all people, Kevin Clash), and neither have any redeeming features at all. Tatsu nearly beats one of his own students to death (and does kill him in the script) for letting the Turtles escape, and Shredder is literally covered in knives. April O’Neil even makes a fairly racist joke when first encountering the Foot ninjas, asking whether they were sent by Sony to collect on late TV payments. However, it’s not a huge focal point of the movie (both Shredder and Tatsu probably have a grand total of fifteen minutes of screen time between the two), and it definitely wasn’t a deal-breaker for me. But it’s certainly something I noticed a lot more now than I did back then. 

TMNT is definitely a flawed film. It doesn’t actually have that much to do with the franchise that people were expecting; the animatronics, though groundbreaking, definitely didn’t help the staging of the action at all; and there’s some dubious romance and racial aspects that distract from the whole. However, it’s probably the best movie possible given the budget and the state of Hollywood special effects at the time. It’s quite telling that Michael Bay-produced reboot, for all of the might of 2010s CG and blockbuster budget, couldn’t actually improve on the Turtles from 1990. I don’t know if the movie would hold any appeal at all for someone who didn’t grow up with it, but for those who did it’s a nice nostalgia bomb to revisit from time to time.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-The Foot clan member who shows the new recruit Danny around their very-late-80s hangout, with video games, skateboard ramps, and bootleg cigarettes, is none other than Sam Rockwell! I had absolutely no idea he was in this, but managed to recognize him immediately this time around.

-The joke about Casey Jones using a signed Jose Canseco baseball bat as a weapon plays a lot differently now than did back then, given his association with the steroids scandal.

Maverick

Maverick (1994)
Dir. by Richard Donner

Starring Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Alfred Molina and James Garner

[content warning: Wild West tropes involving Native Americans, racial stereotyping, sexism and Mel Gibson]

Plot:

Bret Maverick, a professional gambler in the late 1800s, finds himself $3000 short of the entrance fee for an elite poker tournament with a $500,000 cash prize (about $12 million in today’s dollars). To obtain it, he engages in a series of comic misadventures, accompanied by a female con artist and an exasperated lawman.

Nostalgia:

Unlike a lot of Baby Boomer-aged American parents, my father was never particularly into Westerns while I was growing up. I never saw most of the classics of the genre, and had to seek them out on VHS and DVD when I was older. This was one of the few exceptions to that. I don’t recall seeing it in theaters, but it was one that we’d bring along on trips on VHS (we used to haul around a small tube TV in the minivan for road trips).

Review:

I was very interested to see how this particular one would hold up, as I haven’t seen it since before Mel Gibson’s infamous drunk driving arrest. It’s also a Wild West comedy from twenty years ago, which opens it up to all sorts of potential tropes that have not aged particularly well in the intervening decades. Fortunately, other than a couple of quibbles I found that I really didn’t have all that much to complain about.

It helps that the movie clearly doesn’t take itself all that seriously. The television show that it was based on had comedic overtones from the start, but here they wisely turned the movie remake into a full-blown comedy. A lot of clichéd Western tropes get repeatedly upended and subverted, from Maverick paying off a gang in advance to throw a fistfight to make him look better, to the Native American war band that speaks fluent English but makes a big threatening show (with Maverick’s help) just to troll his traveling companions. 

It was actually this last group that I was most worried about, as Westerns involving Native Americans have aged probably the worst out of all of them. It turns out that this might actually be the smartest part of the movie. Chief Joseph’s tribe is portrayed very positively, while avoiding a lot of the “noble savage” or “mystical Native American” tropes common at the time (see: Dances With Wolves). No, all of the war paint and drums are explicitly because they are being paid by a wealthy European to provide an “authentic” Western experience based on dime novels. Joseph is actually quite cynical about the whole thing, but is willing to take the Duke’s money anyway as it will benefit the tribe. He and Maverick eventually use the Duke’s desire for clichéd tropes against him to secure Maverick’s entrance fee, conning him into a fake “Injun hunt” so that he can fulfill his cowboy fantasies, and then blackmailing him with threatened jail time over the “murder.” It acknowledges the existence of these tropes, while simultaneously turning them back on those who would insist on them.

Now, as I said earlier, I did indeed have some problems. Most of them have to do with two characters: Jodie Foster’s Annabelle and Alfred Molina’s villain Angel. Or, rather, the way Maverick treats both of those characters. Through her actions, Annabelle is shown to be both an exceptional con artist and an expert gambler. She gets the better of Maverick on multiple occasions, is cool under pressure, and seems to be quite taken with him. Maverick, however, spends a good half of the movie mocking her skills and trolling her at every opportunity, and I couldn’t help but think of Mel Gibson’s off-screen behavior while watching it. He even asks her to clean his clothes for him, because “surely you must know how.” Likewise, the character of Angel, who is identified as a Spaniard in dialogue but is coded as Mexican throughout the movie, is introduced as smelling of “refried beans.” He is portrayed in the worst light of any of the characters in the movie – even more so than his boss, Commodore Duvall, the actual main villain of the movie.

Overall, I did end up enjoying the movie quite a bit on this rewatch, way more than I had been expecting to. I found it to be a generally entertaining comedy, with a lot of con artist movie elements thrown in for good measure. If you can stomach Mel Gibson (and I know there are some who can’t), it might be worth a spin or two.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-At least this movie manages to avoid any noticeable brownface. Chief Joseph is played by actual Canadian First Nations actor Graham Greene, and although Alfred Molina is British he is the son of a Spanish immigrant, which matches the character’s stated nationality from the movie.

-There are also a LOT of cameos in this movie. Most notably, Danny Glover robs the bank where Maverick is attempting to get a loan repaid to him. Gibson seems to recognize him, and the Lethal Weapon music plays as he leaves the bank.

-I remember the climactic poker tournament as being the finale of the movie, maybe the last 15 minutes or so. I was quite surprised to find that it actually starts just over halfway through, and takes up a good third of the film.

The 'Burbs

The ‘Burbs (1989)
Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher and Bruce Dern

[content warning: immigrant peril, paranoia, serial killers, and a rapidly-moving gif]

Plot:

When an elderly resident of his neighborhood disappears overnight, mild-mannered suburbanite Ray Peterson becomes convinced that his eccentric new neighbors are actually serial killers, and will stop at nothing to prove his suspicions.

Nostalgia:

This one is yet another cable and video store rarity that I watched quite a bit when I was in middle school. Like many of the movies that I’ve done for this project, we never actually owned a copy on either VHS or DVD, and I haven’t had a chance to watch it since the 1990s.

Review:

Man, I watched a lot of really dark movies when I was younger, didn’t I? This one might be even darker of a movie than Cloak & Dagger, despite being billed as a comedy. Heck, it even has a dream sequence that involves Satan worship and human sacrifice – in a PG movie!

That the movie was directed by Joe Dante, of Gremlins fame, isn’t very surprising in retrospect. It has that movie’s same blend of over-the-top slapstick humor and borderline-nihilistic commentary on suburban life. Unlike in Gremlins, which was a horror-comedy, this movie was clearly envisaged as a comedy first and foremost, and the darkness sits uneasily besides the laughs. And don’t get me wrong: I still found good portions of the movie to be funny, even alongside the darkness. But the two are much less expertly blended than in Dante’s previous works, and the movie suffers tonally as a result. There are wildly slapstick moments, such as when the camera zooms in and out rapidly in the style of a cartoon on Hanks’s Peterson and his neighbor/co-conspirator as they find what they assume is a human femur, juxtaposed with scenes detailing the disintegration of Peterson’s marriage as he becomes more and more obsessed.

There’s also a very lengthy scene which descends into some really awkward cringe comedy, a style that I barely tolerate at the best of times and has actively made me leave the theater for a few minutes out of discomfort in the past. Basically, the wives of the conspiracy theorists convince their husbands to knock on the creepy neighbors’ door with cookies and invite themselves in for a chat. What follows is five minutes of uncomfortable silence and awkward questions, culumating in Bruce Dern’s character Rumsfield flat-out accusing the Klopeks of murder to their face. I didn’t end up muting the movie or fast-forwarding, but it was a close thing.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy this rewatch. I actually found a lot of the humor to be still quite funny, and managed to catch several jokes now that I’d never understood in the 90s (most notably an extended homage to the cinematography of the climactic gunfight in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, only with a poodle as one of the combatants). But I did see the seams much more on this rewatch than I ever had before.

Nowhere was this more notable than the ending of the movie, which has a major problem that undercuts the movie’s own message, which has only gotten worse with today’s current political and social climate involving immigrants. Though the narrative never actually identifies them as such, the Klopeks’ names and accents codes them as Eastern European immigrants, on a street otherwise comprised entirely of stereotypical white Midwesterners. The movie is very quick to Other them, with their unkempt yard, odd behavior and unwillingness to engage with their fellow suburbanites. Even before the elderly neighbor disappears, Peterson and his friends are clearly scared and suspicious of them.

At the end of the movie, after Peterson’s meddling has resulted in the destruct of the Klopeks’ house from a gas main explosion, it is revealed that Dr. Klopek is a well-known, respected pathologist, and that the elderly neighbor was taken to the hospital during the middle of the night by his family and is in fact still alive. Peterson has a very public crisis of conscious, berating all of his neighbors for letting their suspicion and mistrust of somebody different run wild, before attacking his own former best friend and being taken away in an ambulance.

If the movie had ended there, it would have had a perfectly fine resolution in my opinion. However, the movie has to add one final twist to the proceedings: sure, Peterson was wrong about the murder of his neighbor, but he was right about the Klopeks being serial killers. Dr. Klopek assumes that Peterson had found the evidence before the house blew up, and attempts to murder him on the way to the hospital. Peterson manages to fight him off as his gurney goes careening down the middle of the street, and the Klopeks are arrested when the trunk of their car is revealed to contain dozens of skeletons.

This has the effect of completely undercutting and undoing everything about Peterson’s earlier speech. As the movie ends, it appears that not only were all of his suspicions and paranoia justified, but that he’s going to get away with multiple counts of trespassing, breaking and entering and property destruction without any consequences to himself or his co-conspirators. I remembered the ending from the last time I’d watched it, of course, but I hadn’t remembered Peterson’s big speech. The thing is, everything he says is completely right. The movie just discards it for a shock and an action climax.

So yes, this movie was still fairly funny, but has some significant problems, especially with the ending, that have just gotten more apparent in the last twenty years. I didn’t find it flat-out offensive, but I was definitely giving it the side-eye quite a bit.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C+/B-, depending on how generous I’m feeling about the ending.

Stray Thoughts:

-Originally, the ending was actually going to be even darker. Apparently, Dr. Klopek was originally supposed to kill Peterson in the ambulance and get away with it.

-The street used for this movie would later become the Wisteria Lane neighborhood in Desperate Housewives.

-I managed to go the entire movie without ever once thinking about Rear Window, which is I guess a credit to the screenwriter. “Rear Window, but as a comedy” is actually a pretty good elevator pitch for this movie.

Spaceballs

Spaceballs (1987)
Dir. by Mel Brooks

Starring Bill Pullman, John Candy, Daphe Zuniga and Rick Moranis

[content warning: description of racist/transphobic jokes] 

Plot:

Down-on-his-luck space captain Lone Starr and his co-pilot Barf, in need of quick cash to pay off a debt to the gangster Pizza the Hutt, take a job to rescue Princess Vespa of Druidia from the ridiculous forces of the Spaceballs, who plan to steal all of the air from the planet to replenish their own depleted natural resources (Everybody got that?).

Nostalgia:

This was the first Mel Brooks movie I ever saw. I was obsessed with Star Wars from an early age, watching our VHS tape so much that it wore out and had to be replaced. So of course I’d watch any movie related to it, even a parody. It’s still the Brooks movie that I’ve seen the most times, even if I acknowledge that it’s “lesser” Brooks.

Review:

I find that comedy, moreso than any other genre, is dependent on your age when you first see it. There’s a ton of comedies that I grew up watching and still have soft spots for to this day, that I freely recognize are terrible movies objectively. I still enjoy rewatching them anyway, even though I can easily see the flaws now as an adult. Now, that doesn’t mean that I think Spaceballs is a terrible movie. In fact, I think it’s the best movie that Mel Brooks made post-1974. But I think that the sweet spot for this movie is right around the early teens, which is probably around the time that I saw it for the first time.

Brooks’s movies have a reputation for being crass and vulgar parodies, a reputation that largely stems from his earlier 70s output and the reactions that it prompted from audiences and critics. Spaceballs, while it still contains many similar sorts of jokes, benefits a bit from ten years of societal progression in terms of what was permissible to be shown onscreen. Granted, that door does swing both way, as there’s several jokes that wouldn’t fly in the 2010s, particularly some sexist ones and one particularly notable gag involving a pre-fame Dave Chappelle literally “combing” the desert with an afro pick.

Questionable jokes aside (and really, what Mel Brooks movie doesn’t have questionable jokes, dating back to “Springtime for Hitler”?), there are a couple really good, inventive comedy sequences here. Foremost among these is a sequence where the villains can’t locate Lone Starr, and decide to cheat by renting the video of Spaceballs and fast-forwarding to see the next scene. You end up with an incredibly confused Dark Helmut and Colonel Sandurz staring at a TV screen that is exactly synced up to their own point in the movie, as the images on-screen perfectly mirror their actions.

This movie breaks the fourth wall so hard it practically lives on the couch next to you. In addition to the aforementioned gag, there’s also multiple references to the movie’s merchandising, from Dark Helmut’s action figures of the cast to Yogurt’s assurances that he’ll be back in the sequel. There’s also another wonderful gag in which, immediately following a big action stunt, the Spaceballs accidentally capture the cast’s stunt doubles instead of the real heroes. (However, the stunt doubles in question feature a cigar-smoking, Hitler-mustache-wearing male stunt double wearing Princess Vespa’s dress. While I read the joke as more of a commentary on Hollywood’s use of stunt doubles that look nothing like the actor they’re doubling, the joke does come off as slightly transphobic these days.) And in the final climactic “lightsaber” duel, Dark Helmut accidentally kills one of the sound technicians recording the audio, blaming it on Lone Starr (Mel Brooks must have loved this gag, as he reused it in Robin Hood: Men in Tights).

So yeah, while I can acknowledge that nothing in Spaceballs ever reaches the heights of Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, I can’t really be super objective about the movie either. It was my first Mel Brooks movie, and it will always have a special place in my heart.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-Ironically, for a movie that was so focused on mining Star Wars’s ubiquitous marketing for jokes, Spaceballs had no actual merchandising of its own. It was a condition that George Lucas stipulated in return for allowing Brooks to make a parody of the trilogy.

-I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this. Dozens, at least. But it wasn’t until recently, maybe 1-2 years ago, that I finally realized that the Spaceball officer that arrests the stunt doubles is ubiquitous “Hey, it’s that guy!” character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, of Groundhog Day fame, in one of his first screen roles.

The Blues Brothers

Boring poster, awesome movie

The Blues Brothers (1980)

Dir. by John Landis

Starring John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Cab Calloway and Carrie Fisher

[content warning: Nazis, car crashes]

Plot:

R&B singer and career criminal Jake Blues is released from prison after serving three years for armed robbery.  Upon learning that the orphanage where he was raised will be foreclosed unless it can raise $5000, he and his brother Elwood decide to put their old band back together for a fundraiser concert.  Along the way, they manage to attract the attentions of the police, Neo-Nazis, a vengeful country band and a mysterious woman with a vendetta against Jake.

Nostalgia:

As with many of these movies, I have no recollection of the exact time and place where I first watched Blues Brothers.  We never had it on VHS until I was old enough to be able to buy VHS tapes myself, but it was one that I’d always scour the weekly TV listings in the Sunday paper for.  If you’d asked me to list my favorite comedies or musicals at any point in high school, Blues Brothers almost certainly would have topped both lists.

Review:

This is the best car chase musical ever made.  I’d say it was the only one ever made but for last year’s Baby Driver.  It’s also arguably the greatest movie ever set in Chicago, with only the possible exception of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 

According to my movie log, it’s been seven years since I’ve seen The Blues Brothers, and I’m glad to say that I still enjoyed it just as much this time around as I did back in high school.  Both Belushi and Aykroyd were at the top of their games, and they are surrounded by possibly the best lineup of musical guest stars ever assembled for a movie: Cab Calloway, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and John Lee Hooker all have songs, and the Blues Brothers band itself is a who’s-who of classic soul and blues musicians. 

While the soundtrack is absolutely tremendous, and would be reason enough to see the movie just on its own, Landis and Aykroyd double down by making the movie one of the most over-the-top chase movies of all time.  The highlight is the twenty-minute, hundred-mile-long race from the concert venue in Wisconsin to downtown Chicago, with seemingly every single police officer in the state, as well as the National Guard and the Neo-Nazis, in hot pursuit.  The chase is a paean to ridiculousness, with the Bluesmobile performing feats that no car would ever be able to accomplish – it helps to be on a “mission from God.”  No wonder the car literally disintegrates once they reach their final destination.  However, for my money the most entertaining chase actually occurs over an hour earlier, when Elwood attempts to evade arrest at a traffic stop by driving through a busy indoor mall.  It was filmed at an actual closed mall outside Chicago, and represents a level of gleeful property destruction that modern-day superhero films would envy.

It set a record for most cars wrecked in a single movie

There is one plot element that gives me slightly more pause than it did twenty years ago, however: the aforementioned Neo-Nazis.  They are first introduced while marching after a successful court case, with a horde of counter-protestors screaming at them while being held back by the police.  Into this arrive the Blues Brothers, who decide to cut through the traffic jam by ramming the Nazis with their car, forcing them to all jump off a bridge or get hit.  This is all played for laughs, and while I can admire any movie that spends time kicking the ass of American white supremacists, in a post-Charlottesville world this particular scene is a little too real for comfort.  Especially its use of attempted vehicular manslaughter for a cheap laugh. 

Ultimately, the Nazis really serve no narrative purpose in the film.  They’re just another faction out to get the Blues brothers, and could easily be excised from the movie without changing much at all.  That makes me wonder why they were there in the first place.  I know that the original version of the script was infamously bloated out of control.  Dan Aykroyd had never written a screenplay before, and turned in a 300+ page behemoth that he jokingly wrapped in a phone book cover.  Maybe they originally had more of a point, which never made it onto the screen.

I’m glad I finally got around to catching up with this one again, as it was just as good as I remember it being.  I’m docking it just a little for the plot threads (i.e. Nazis) that don’t really go anywhere, but otherwise it’s a real winning movie, and one I need to see if I can pick up on Blu-Ray.

Nostalgia: A

Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-This was the first movie to be based on an SNL sketch, and while there would be many more to come, only perhaps Wayne’s World would ever manage to equal this first one.

-When my brother was in college, he and his roommate were the exact same height and weight as Belushi and Aykroyd were.   So of course they went as Jake and Elwood for Halloween.  They actually extended this act to Detroit’s scifi convention circuit, performing the entire song-and-dance number from the end of the movie in-character at ConFusion’s masquerade one year.  They even snuck out the side of the room when they were done, and then ran back in the main door and barricaded it before heading back to the stage for the awards.

My brother's the one playing Jake

-In addition to all of the musical performances, this movie also has a whole lot of famous cameos that I gradually recognized over the years.  Frank Oz is a prison clerk that gives Jake his clothes back, Stephen Spielberg plays the Cook County clerk at the end, Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman) is a maître d’, and the band’s booking agent is played by 50s pop vocalist Steve Lawrence in a non-singing role.

Tremors

Tremors (1990)

Dir. by Ron Underwood

Starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter and Michael Gross

Plot:

The residents of the isolated desert town of Perfection, Nevada, including two handymen, a geologist grad student, and a survivalist couple, come under attack by giant worm creatures that hunt them through vibrations in the ground.

Nostalgia:

I honestly can’t recall the first time I saw this.  It must have been on TV, as we didn’t have it on VHS until I was in high school (I taped it off of cable).  It’s just one of those movie’s that always been there in my life.  I know I watched it while I was in college, but I don’t think I’ve seen it since then.

Review:

I’ve never been a huge horror movie watcher.  I’ve always been interested in the genre, dating back to when I used to go into the video store as a kid (remember when they had those?) and look at all of the gloriously 80s box art in the section I wasn’t allowed to rent from.  But as for actually watching the movies, I’ve always seemed to prefer to read about them, and watch clips on Youtube, rather than actually sit through them in theaters.  The one big exception has always been monster movies.  From werewolves to Cthulhu, I’ve always enjoyed a good creature feature (except for zombies.  Never been a big zombie fan).

The Graboids in Tremors certainly weren’t the first monsters I ever encountered in movies.  There were a lot of monsters in the fantasy movies I grew up with, after all, from the two-headed dragon in Willow to the Ceti eels in Wrath of Khan (which gave me nightmares when I was eight).  But they were probably the most memorable one of my childhood, as they were really unlike anything else I’d ever seen before*.  Giant eyeless worm things with mouths full of tentacles, which had their own mouths – not something you encounter every day.  They were doubly impressive this time around as I realized that not only were they done entirely practically, but very frequently at full-size.  There’s just something about having an actual thirty foot long monster on-screen, a tactile presence that’s so often lacking in modern monster movies.

Now THAT's a monster

I also forgot just how much this movie is a horror comedy.  In my mind, it’s always been a horror film first and foremost, sharing the same headspace as things like Anaconda, where the humor was entirely unintentional.  Instead, it’s closer to something like Arachnophobia.  I guess the very fact that the monsters are given the name “Graboids” should have clued me in to the movie not taking itself too seriously.  Sure, a lot of people get eaten in this movie.  But it also has an endless stream of banter between the handymen Earl and Val, as well as one of the few actually enjoyable right-wing NRA enthusiasts that I can name off-hand. It’s not a coincidence that Michael Gross’s gun-toting Burt Gummer would become the star of the long-running direct-to-DVD sequel series, as he frequently manages to steal the movie from Kevin Bacon, which is no easy feat.

About the only situation where I can get behind one of these guys nowadays

Speaking of Kevin Bacon, this is probably the first encounter with the legendary Earth hero.  Either this, or The Air Up There, which I barely remember and probably won’t cover here because I’d just be yelling about cultural imperialism the whole review.  Anyway, he’s in fine form here, as a guy who’s already sick of his dead-end job in the middle of nowhere even before giant worms start eating the place.  In addition to the aforementioned Michael Gross, Reba McEntire is also actually a pleasant surprise as Burt’s wife and fellow survivalist, in what I believe was her first acting role.  She’s presented as being Burt’s equal, and the script allows her to give her husband gun advice and to open fire on the Graboids with double pistols, and never comments once on her gender. 

Bacon’s love interest, the geologist Rhonda, is also given a lot of agency.  She uses her scientific expertise to come up with a lot of the info that they use to evade and defeat the monsters, and she’s the one who comes up with the pole-vaulting technique to get them off the rock that they’re trapped on early in the film.  It’s just refreshing to see a monster movie in which none of the female characters are ever portrayed as damsels in distress, even when they are in distress.

Tremors wasn’t hugely successful at the box office despite good critical reviews, but it went on to be a huge cult classic on cable and home video, and spawned five direct-to-DVD sequels and a short-lived TV series, of varying quality.  As with many horror franchises, however, the original entry is still definitely the best one, and it held up for me just as much as it did when I was growing up.  I’m actually a little sad that I went almost fifteen years without seeing it, as it could easily slip into my regular DVD watching rotation.

Nostalgia: A-

Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

*Yes, I’m familiar with Dune’s sandworms, and Beetlejuice’s as well.  But I didn’t read Dune until college and still haven’t seen the movie, and Beetlejuice’s monsters were very cartoony stop motion animation, and really aren’t comparable at all to the Graboids.

-If “Graboids” wasn’t enough to clue you in that this is a horror comedy, the sequels have “Ass-Blasters.”  Just try saying that out loud with a straight face.