Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders (1989)

Directed by Howard Ziehm
Starring Vince Murdocco, Robyn Kelly, Morgan Fox, Melissa Mounds.
Rated NC-17
USA
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"There's something in the air that makes it impossible to pop a boner. There, I've said it."

Howard Ziehm was an evil hippy-slash-stoner rock musician who dropped out of the West Coast drug-fuzz underground to become a grimy-yet-groovy pornographer, hooking up in 1969 with Bill Osco - black sheep of the Osco drug store empire - to form Graffiti Productions, a low-rent X house responsible for a host of loops, shorts and features in the early 70's, everything from psychedelic blowjob epic Mona: The Virgin Nymph (1970) to gutbucket rape-trash like The Incredible Body Snatchers (1972). Osco split when his partner started to develop artistic inclinations (Osco went on to great heights in low-ball cinema: he produced Blood Diner, Night Patrol, and Cheerleaders Wild Weekend), but Ziehm finally hit paydirt with '74's Flesh Gordon, a right-on mélange of comic book zaniness and soft-X flesh peddling that enjoyed a blip of midnight movie fervor and then settled into a fairly consistent cult movie must-see ever since. It seems like a sequel would be a fairly obvious idea, but churning out endless variations on a theme was not yet in vogue at the time, so Ziehm went on to other things, i.e. directing hardcore porn under various pseudonyms (Sexteen, 1975; Hot Cookies, 1977; Star Virgin, 1979) and occasionally shooting a gnarly non-sex film, like 73's woozy Cop Killers. Ziehm had been out of the industry for nearly a decade when the mood hit him to return to scuzz-cinema, and what better title than his one and only smash-hit, Flesh Gordon, to capitalize on?

And so, out of seemingly nowhere, this mouthful of a movie. FGMTCC (I can't keep spelling it out, we'll be here all night) is not what you'd call a well-loved film, and I can see why people might find it a tad overbearing. It does, after all, lean quite heavily on scatological humor. The first five minutes of the film, for example, which features Flesh on the set of his very own biopic, is stuffed to the gills with fart, shit, and snot jokes. No one beyond the age of, say, 12 or 13 really equates sex with excrement, so this obsessive toilet humor gets tiresome very quickly, especially when you're in this for the boners, but ladies and gentlemen, I implore you: stick with it. Yes, it's hopelessly juvenile, but the sets and the special effects are consistently jaw-dropping, and there's a veritable feast of melon-sized mams to ogle, as well. And anyway, what else you got to do?

The story. Well, as mentioned, Flesh (Kickboxing champ Vince Murdocco) is being honored for all his interstellar heroism with a back-patting auto-biographical film, but after refusing to kiss his co-star/girlfriend Dale Ardor (Robyn Kelly) because "She's got something in her nose", the director fires him. He storms out of the studio and gets run over by an old-timey car, and before he can recover, he's nabbed by three chicks in mini-skirted space-suits. They pour out the back of an ambulance, tie a weird contraption to his head and whisk him off in a penis-shaped rocket ship to god-knows-where while Dale looks on, mouthing, "Why, why, why?"

Good question. To find her answer, she visits Dr Flexi Jerkoff, Titty Scientist (Tony Travis, Recruits), who has a booby-shaped doorbell. Listen, I told you it was juvenile. Dale explains what happened. The doctor surmises that the space girls have taken Flesh to the Strange Planet (that's the actual name of the planet) for some nefarious reason, and since some mafia guy is trying to kill him for deflating a gangster moll's overstuffed balloons (whatever), he agrees to take Dale to Flesh in the ramshackle spaceship he's got in his backyard. The spaceship may or may not run on chicken semen. There's a chicken coop in it, at any rate. Also, Dale and the doctor have to suck on rubber tits to "absorb the shock of lift-off". So that's going on.

Also, there's a report on the radio that 'King Dong' escaped from the set of the Flesh Gordon movie, and they pass by him as he's pissing off the roof of the Empire State Building. He, of course, splashes them with his giant ape urine, and then mugs for the camera.

Meanwhile, on Strange Planet, Flesh finds out why he's been abducted. Seems a mysterious figure named the Evil Presence showed up during an intergalactic Codball game (it's like baseball, I guess, only with dudes using their giant dicks to hit the balls), and shot the Strange Planet team with an impotence ray. Now they can't get it up, not even for the Cosmic Cheerleaders. Obviously, a planet without boners cannot stand.

Flesh's potency is known throughout the galaxy, so head cheerleader (cough) Robunda Hooters (Playboy playmate Morgan Fox) ordered his kidnapping, figuring he'd bang her and whoever else needed it. This is all explained via a topless musical number, by the way.

Ok, here's the last bit of plot. Plot might be overstating it. Anyway, on some other planet, one covered in ice (or, more accurately, an overworked smoke machine), the Evil Presence (William Dennis Hurt), the portly Queen Frigid (Maureen Webb), and a frizzy-haired mad scientist, Master Bator (Bruce Scott), sit around plotting sinister deeds. Bator finds out Flesh is on the Strange Planet, and tells EP that if they capture him, he can suck out Flesh's virility somehow and use it to make a more powerful impotence ray, once so awesome in strength that it will render the entire universe, except for these two numbskulls, impotent. Evil Presence, naturally, thinks this is a good idea.

Everybody ends up together on Strange Planet. When Dale gets there, Flesh is giving three of the cheerleaders head. Simultaneously. I should mention the three cheerleaders while we're here: there's Babs (Stevie-Lyn Ray), Candy Love (Sharon Rowley) and Sushi (Blaire Kashino). One's blonde, one's black, one's Asian. They're all wearing ugly, garish make-up and dayglo punk cheerleaders outfits, and they look exactly like one of Max Hardcore's pornstars/victims. I am not exactly sure why Mr. Ziehm chose to make the three girls who are naked most in the movie look repulsive. Perhaps it's a statement of some kind. I'll have to ask him. Robunda's kinda hot though, in a streetwalker/Pia Zadora sort of way.

Anyway, Dale's pissed, so she decides to break Robunda's face, but she's suddenly turned into a block of ice and sucked up into the Evil Presence's ship. Dunno why. Flesh and the titty scientist take chase, but first Flesh has to fuck a chicken. The chicken smokes a cigarette afterwards.

While Dale is thawed and tortured by Master Bator, Flesh and the doc have a bunch of wacky adventures, including an epic battle with a claymation penis and a trip to a bar inside a giant vagina where grown babies drink milk right from the, um, source (former Russ Meyer paramour Melissa Mounds offers her overflowing taps to Flexi). Flesh runs into Robunda there, and I was too distracted by how icky the whole scene was to catch why, but at one point she said:
"I don't wear panties, but I will, if you agree to help."
He agrees.

Back on Mr. Evil's ship, Dale, now dressed in a tutu, gets turned into a dog. She still looks like Dale, just now she crawls around on all fours and pants. She calls Evil P a "Nazi republican", so she's a talking dog. Flesh runs into some turd people in a dark cave, and they have a party.

Then Dale gets tongue-raped by an octopus. The whole film starts to resemble a sleep deprivation experiment at this point. We should just fast forward a bit.

Evil loses and everybody gets their boners back. They use them to fuck the partners of their choice, and life goes merrily on.

Incredibly, Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders only clocks in at 100 minutes. There's clearly enough ridiculous set-pieces and loony ideas for a three-hour epic, and I am positive Ziehm has an ass-numbing director's cut in a vault somewhere. The sticking point with this movie is that it's too gross to be sexy and too breast-obsessed to fit in any cult sci-fi sorta niche. The original had the advantage of 70's grooviness, but the sequel looks a lot like any new-wave inspired porn flick from the mid 80's, like, well New Wave Hookers, for example, only with all sorts of troubling animated creatures tossed in the mix. Ultimately, the film is still too far ahead of its time; we're still too uptight a society to appreciate softcore humping and grotesque shit-people in the same movie. Ziehm has created a masterpiece, surely, but it will not be regarded as such until some time in the future. 2069, let's say. Until then, expect a night of high weirdness, a queasy joyride into a garbage-psychedelic world of fat tits, slimy octo-rapists, ugly cheerleaders, robo Fu Manhus, and chicken fuckers from outer space.

Good Lord, what next?
Notably, most of the cast were one-timers, folks who dabbled in acting for one hair-raising film and then vanished. As such, it is anybody's guess where the lovely Morgan Fox is today, or the not-so lovely cheerleaders, or Master Bator, or even Dale. Flesh/Vince is still around, doing small-ish bits on TV and b-flicks. Howard Ziehm has, so far, not made another film. He showed up as a talking head on a Brit-produced 2002 porn-doc, The History of Hardcore, so he's not dead. He's just waiting. Waiting for us to really 'get' his genius before he hits us with Part 3.

I'm working on it, sir.

By the way, I find it pretty depressing that we're living in a world without frequent visits from Melissa Mounds. So please come back soon. I don't even care if you're 60. You don't have to whip 'em out. Just come by and hang for awhile.

PS: This makes a pretty obvious companion piece to Bimbo Cheerleaders from Outer Space.

Availability: Flesh Gordon and the Cosmic Cheerleaders is available on DVD(In April, 2009).

Clip: the painfully catchy Flesh Gordon 2 theme!

-Ken McIntyre

Recruits (1986)

Directed by Rafal Zielinski
Starring Lolita Davidovich, Jon Mikl Thor, Annie McAuley
Rated R
Canada
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"I'm not a weirdo."
"Hey buddy, I don't talk to fish."

In the bustling metropolis of Clam Cove, they come up with some stupid fucking ideas. Like instituting a civilian police squad to control city traffic. Mayor Bagley (Jason Logan), speaking at an outdoor ceremony punctuated with a lobster having sex with his doe-eyed blonde daughter (woops!), he spells out the program. Seems the governor (of what state? Where the hell are we? Clam Cove is supposed to be an American city, but everyone pronounces 'out' in that curiously Canuck way: 'oot') wants to give Clam Cove money for a new freeway, if only they improve traffic conditions. And what better way to do that than to hire loons like Canadian rock-warrior Thor to police the streets?

You know you're dealing with a high concept when you get a five-minute, exposition-stuffed monologue second scene in, and since it would take just as long to boil down, here is Clam Cove's scheming police captain Magruder (the ever-awesome Mike McDonald, Oddballs, Loose Screws), explaining his sinister plan to take over the city to his toadies, comb-over king Sargeant Stonewall (Tony Travis) and hot-but-stern Germanic bad-ass Sargeant Shicklegruber (Colleen Passard, Meatballs III):

"Listen carefully, both of you. When the governor comes to present the mayor with a big fat check for the highway, suppose something would happen to him, like an assassination attempt. An attempt, no harm would come to him, but if these civilian recruits that are supposed to be defending him are complete screwups, they'll make a mess of defending him, right? And who would be blamed if the mayor's own personal squad screwed up? That's right, the mayor. And then he'll have to resign, and someone will have to take his place. And that someone will be me. That's why we have to find the stupidest, most inept bozos in town and recruit them on to the force."

So, there you go. There's your plot. On to the mayhem.

It appears that Clam Cove is so full of misfits and freaks that finding a suitable band of bunglers and screw-ups takes about an hour. The very busy line-up includes, but is not limited to:
Steve (Stephen Osmond), the kid in lobster suit. Town mascot gone bad.
Mike (Doug Annear) and Winston (John Terrell), ice cream salesmen/cocksmen, nabbed for impersonating ambulance drivers to disrobe women on the beach.

Howie (off-putting Alan Deveau, Loose Screws), a creepy barnacle scraper, picked up for accidentally ogling a pair of pokeys while falling down a hatch.
Brazil (Tracey Tanner), a teenage hooker.
Clint (Mark Blutman, Meatballs III), a squinty-eyed weirdo who dresses, well, like Clint Eastwood.
Susan (Lolita Davidovich) who, erm...has large breasts. "Sign them up," says Magruder, when she shows up to apply for duty.
Tanya (Annie McCauley), the mayor's promiscuous daughter, and of course, Thunderhead (Thor). Self-explanatory.


Mixed in with the expected Police Academy rip-off gags (they shoot each other during target practice, haha) are some pretty inventive set-pieces. Mike and the Tanya sneak off to have sex in an empty police car. As they get into it, they accidentally switch on the intercom and put the car intro neutral, causing it to roll down a hill and cruise slowly through town, where they inadvertently thwart crimes by confusing would-be criminals with their sex-talk, i.e. "Take your pants off! Put on those handcuffs!" etc. There's also some impressive, Knievel-esque motorcycle stunts during their training sessions.

Eventually, the goofy recruits get to go on (supervised) patrol for the first time. It's sorta shaky, at first:
"Steve, you can't kill a jaywalker."
"I wasn't trying to kill him, I was just trying to shoot some warning shots into his legs."

Miraculously, they manage to get through the day without murdering anyone, so they're given a night off as a reward. It's a pretty eventful night. Shicklegruber strips down to lingerie and fucks the creepy kid, who shoots off his gun during sex, nearly killing them both. Mike and Winston go to a cowboy bar, where Winston attempts to replicate Eddie Murphy's 'Black Russian' bit from 48 Hours. Not surprisingly, they both get beat to a pulp. Steve and Susan try to have a romantic evening together, but get kidnapped by a biker gang, who drag them to a diner and talk about what they plan on doing with them:
"Boss, you said we could cut off their arms and drag them through a pit of tarantulas!"
Luckily Clint shows up at the last minute, wearing a High Plains Drifter poncho, and shoots the assholes.

By the way, I just want to mention that Lolita Davidovich in a bra trumps most women topless. I'm not sure how she ended up in her bra for this scene, but I am quite glad that it happened.

Anyway, Magruder correctly accesses that the recruits are dangers to themselves and others, so he sends them out on unsupervised patrol. They proceed to destroy half of Clam Cove. Sargeant Stonewall is, as expected, appalled.
"I hope you all get diseases," he tells them.
But the plan must continue, so they're all given guns and instructions on escorting the governor into Clam Cove the following day.

Steve and Susan's job is to pick up the governor at the airport, but his flight is delayed, so they spend the extra hour fucking in the back seat. When he shows up, they have no time to get dressed, so they drive him in naked, affording us the opportunity to ogle Davidovich's Canadian hams in all their perky glory. Meanwhile Stonewall and Magruder are on some roof somewhere with a cannon. They blow up the podium, sending the crowd into a panic. The citizens of Clam Cover run amuck, screaming and carrying on.

And the governor's wife (dramatically named Penthouse Pet Dominique St. Croix) loses her shirt.

His evil plan has come to fruition, so the next day, Magruder fires the recruits. And then he has a beach party with the entire police force. I can't believe they managed to crowbar a beach party into this. Turns out the lobsters they gobble up around the bonfire are contaminated, and all the cops in town end up in the hospital. As a result, the city has fallen into chaos. Looters, marauders and maniac bikers run wild in the streets. Only one thing to do...hire the recruits back. Can this ragtag gang of numbskulls successfully police Clam Cove and dig up enough evidence to put away Magruder while they're at it?

I imagine they'll give it their best shot.

Released just after Police Academy mania swept the nation, Recruits is actually funnier than the film it's clearly aping. The cast and crew represent the cream of the Canadian T&A crop, and the inclusion of amiable strongman Thor adds a fittingly surreal edge to the proceedings. It's also extremely generous in the toplessness department, and Lolita Davidovich is clearly one of the best looking women to ever grace this dumb genre. Guaranteed to put a big, dopey grin on your face, this dusty little gem is bit hard to find, but well worth the digging.

Availability: Recruits is available on VHS.

-Ken McIntyre

CB Hustlers (1978)

AKA Secrets of the Lady Truckers
Directed by Stu Segall
Starring Uschi Digard, Richard Kennedy, John F Goff
Rated R
USA
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"I'm gonna go kick the frosting off his cake."

I dunno about what life is like where you are, but here in the States, we haven't had a good nationwide craze for years. The culture's become too fractured; people have their own thing, and even if they share that obsession with millions, there's still vast segments of the populace that have no idea what they're talking about. Even if you're reasonably hip, it's impossible to keep up on everything. I mean, I am aware that World of Warcraft, Gym Class Heroes, Hentai porn, and Parkour all exist, but I don't know anything about them. I'd have to Wiki like mad just to bullshit about that stuff. Ultimately, we're all better off this way, since latter-day fads have all been pretty lame - beanie babies, anyone? - but back in the 70's, holy smokes. There were some seriously loony fads back then, and everyone - mom, dad, grandpa, the kids, everybody - fell under their twisted spells. Like what, you ask? Like disco, like leisure suits and pet rocks, like Abba, Rubik's Cubes, pinball, halter tops, 8 tracks, jogging suits, fondue, shag carpets, KISS, English Leather, and Sea Monkeys.


One of the most pervasive 70's obsessions, at least for a couple years, was CB radios. Originally used quite specifically by truckers and dispatchers to relay road information to one another, in the 1970's their usage spread to ordinary citizens ("CB" does stand for 'Citizen's Band', after all), who installed them in their cars or garages to communicate semi-anonymously - everyone had a 'Handle', you know, like The Bandit - in a nationwide social experiment that operated not unlike a primitive version of the internet. Trucker slang was adopted and mutated, and CB party lines were formed. My crazy uncle Peter (I say 'crazy' because blew his own head off with a 357 Magnum a few years back) had one in his Jeep. I forget what his 'handle' was, but he decided mine was "Magoo", because I was a clumsy kid. He'd make me ask truckers if "Smokey" was "Blowing their doors off", or whatever. Traffic information, basically, which seemed pretty stupid when we were sitting in his driveway. We had no use whatsoever for CB radios, and yet we used them. That was life in the 70's. We ate Twinkies and used CB radios and listened to Tiny Tim. It was a very weird time.

As with any money-gobbling trend, Hollywood eventually starts churning out exploitation films based on them, and so a flurry of CB movies hit theaters in the mid to late 70's: Truck Stop Women (1974) Cannonball, Gumball Rally (both 1976) Breaker Breaker, Handle with Care, Smokey and the Bandit (all 1977) Convoy, High Ballin' (1978), etc. The trend died down by the late 70's, when the first wave of video games hit the market. These days, with the advent of PCs and mobile phones, CBs have essentially ceased to exist. But the vapor trails linger on. Most Americans over 35 still let loose with a "10-4, Good buddy" or a "Put the pedal to the metal", or possibly even a "What's your twenty?" every now and then, and just about everyone's seen their share of Smokey and the Bandit movies.

Clearly, CB Hustlers was meant to ride Bandit-fever, trading in Burt Reynolds' glorious 70's 'tache with Uschi Digard's equally majestic 70's mams, but while most of the CB movies were comfortably-budgeted affairs produced by major studios, CB Hustlers is bargain-basement, regional, gutbucket exploitation from the same production company that graced the world with Drive In Massacre (1977). It was directed by a hands-on grime-cinema expert (Saddle Tramp Women, Young Students, Teeny Buns, Spirit of Seventy Sex), and starred a Swedish Russ Meyer sexploitation queen (Digard), and a host of nutjob drive-in character actors, including John F Goff (Gas Pump Girls, Summer Camp, Party Plane, Party Favors), Richard Kennedy (Six Pack Annie, Invasion of the Blood Farmers, Ilsa She Wolf of the SS), John Alderman (Erotic Adventures of Zorro, Video Vixens, Delinquent School Girls), and Bruce Kimball (Chain Gang Women, Malibu Beach, Pink Angels). It is pure, grubby, grade Z 70's scuzz, a holy relic from the grindhouse gutter, and we have that idiotic CB craze to thank.

CB Hustlers is only 85 minutes long (and my copy clocks in at 74), and yet it doesn't even bother to start, really, until the half-hour mark. Up until that point, its strictly raincoat-ready softcore with crackly mid 70's country-rock on the soundtrack. The camera bobs and weaves like a punch-drunk boxer as we are treated to a series of dark, grainy, van-floor encounters between Uschi and her fellow truckstop hookers and the hairy, pasty rig-haulers who hire them for cheap quickies.

There's not a whole of exposition, but you sorta get the concept - a sleazy-mustachioed pimp named Billy Bob Turner (John Alderman) and his psychedelic headband-ed wife, Laura May (Val Desta) cruise down the Californian desert highway in a two-van whore-convoy (Uschi, as Dee Dee, drives the other van), stopping at truck stops to service the fellas and then hauling ass outta there. Truckers use their CBs to request the girls.

Every now and then the fat, sweaty sheriff (Kimball) shows up to break up the party, but he is easily swayed by Uschi's 12-gallon milk-jugs, and so he lets the sex circus roll on. After a good 15 or so minutes of that, you are treated to at least ten minutes' worth of a customized van rally, shot from across a field, with dubbed-in narration. Seriously, it's just drunken hippies playing Frisbee while Richard Kennedy rants over the top. If you're not paying close attention to your surroundings, you may think that you've lost your mind.

The story, such as it is, kicks in when we finally meet Goff and Kennedy. They portray Boots Clayborn and Mountain Dean, respectively, the sole owners and reporters for a small-town newspaper, the Clarion Weekly. After sitting around the office listening to the CB radio, they decide to investigate all this strange chatter they're hearing about "Lemons" and "Tunnel Action". Mountain Dean manages to snag an interview with Turner, pretending to be doing a generic CB radio story, while Goff, disguised as an aw-shucks cowboy, conducts a more (cough) penetrating investigation with one of the girls, Silky.

This scene goes on forever, by the way. Not surprisingly, Goff wrote the screenplay. You can just hear him, right?
"Listen, little lady, I'm sorry, but we've gotta keep fucking for another twenty minutes. See, it's in the script!"
Halfway through his session, Laura-May busts in on them, pretending to be Silky's mom. Acting horrified, she tells Boots that her 'daughter' is only sixteen, and sends him scurrying off.

Having sorta muddied the waters on that trip, Boots would like to just drop the investigation, but back at the office, Dean goes bananas.
"That's the difference between you and me, " he screams, "it's the difference between dog licenses and détente, between church socials and Watergate, between the local PTA's annual journalism award and the Pulitzer Prize!"
I don't know what the fuck he's talking about, but he sure does sell it. By the way, I could be wrong, but Kennedy looks like he's got black shoe polish on his eyebrows.

Mountain Dean figures out where Turner's van is going to be next, so he drags Boots with him to get to the bottom of whatever-it-is that's going on.

When they trundle up to Turner's van, he greets them warmly and invites them in for a chat. At this point, the more attentive viewers may be scratching their heads, because these two idiots met Turner and his wife at the van rally 20 minutes ago, yet Dean doesn't recognize them. Boots does, however, and chooses to keep his mouth shut while Turner rambles on about his imaginary mobile CB radio sales business. He agrees to meet the two reporters at a CB convention down the road the following day and shoos them away.

Later on, Boots gets a call from his van-nookie Silky, who tells him that she knows their plan, and if he reveals their tawdry little business in the paper, she'll go public about their illicit tryst.

Meanwhile, Turner announces to his harem that he's going legit. He's socked up enough dough to buy a farmhouse somewhere and give up the pimp game completely. When Dean barges in on him the next morning, finally clued in to what's going on, Turner offers to give him the business. $2500 a week, plus free pussy. Who could resist? One problem, though. The sheriff knows what's up too, and is on his way to arrest Turner. Can Mountain Dean thwart the sheriff, become the new CB Hustler pimp, and bang Ushi Digard in every available orifice? Or, will he regain his senses, scoff at Turner's tempting offer, and bring down this operation, scoring the scoop of the year in the process?

Well, it's one or the other, I'll tell you that much.

CB Hustlers is one of the most slapdash films I think I've ever seen. It's fuck-everybody guerrilla filmmaking that cuts corners every chance it gets. There's only one set in the entire movie, all the truckers are actual truckers the filmmakers met on the road, and the camerawork (courtesy the usually top-notch Ken Gibbs, who shot almost every movie in this book) is so choppy and/or dark that there's no way there was more than one take for any given scene. Its an eyeball-abusing mess, a laughless, actionless travesty that features a lot less nudity than you think it does (Uschi's crazy Swedish fuck-goddess body is so over-the-top it makes you think you've seen much more than you have). Goff and Kennedy gorge on the scenery like starving men, the jarring Poco-esque music is headache-making, and the CB Hustlers (Janice Jordan, Elke Vann, Catherine Barkley) are only in the movie for about three minutes, tops.


Obviously, I give it a big thumbs-up. How could I not?
The 70's were so fucking awesome, man.

Availability: CB Hustlers is available on DVD.

-Ken McIntyre

The Wild Life (1984)

Directed by Art Linson
Starring Eric Stolz, Chris Penn, Lea Thompson, Jenny Wright
Rated R
USA
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"Fuckin' muscle heads. They grow up to be cops."

Although largely forgotten today (and mostly ignored during it's theatrical release, as well), The Wild Life boasts perhaps the most accomplished cast and crew of the teen sex comedy genre. Written by Cameron Crowe on the heels of his runaway success, 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and directed by that film's producer, The Wild Life was top-heavy with up and coming talent, including the brother of Fast Times' star Sean Penn, and packed with comedy-vet cameos by Rick Moranis, Randy Quaid, Kitten Natividad, and more. It is, for all intents and purposes, a Fast Times redux, minus the dramatic teenage issues. Fast Times had a message. The Wild Life just wants to party, dude.

Less plot-driven than it's predecessor, The Wild Life is more of a quirky character study. During the course of an apparently endless afternoon/night, we meet the principal players: Chris Penn (RIP) plays high school senior Tommy Drake, a short-haired Jeff Spicolli doppelganger who carries his weed in his jock strap and has his very own obnoxious catchphrase: "It's casual." With his bottle-blonde 'do, rolled-up sleeves, and popped-collar strut, Tommy is a greaser-throwback, an innately cool cat at odds with the dayglo 80's. He even has a retro-fitted job - he works at a bowling alley with his uptight best bud Bill Conrad (Eric Stolz), a flame-haired, nit-picking nerd.

Anita (Lea Thompson, looking impossibly cute) works at an all-night donut shop. Not surprisingly, she dates a sleazy mustache cop. She used to go out with our man Bill, but dumped him for being a drag.


Her best friend Eileen (Jenny Wright, Near Dark), is a new wave fashionista who works at the mall. Rick Moranis plays her leering, mealy-mouth boss, Harry.

Also roaming around is Bill's slightly psychotic younger brother Jim (Llan Mitchell Smith, instantly recognizable from his role as Wyatt in Weird Science), a Vietnam-obsessed loner who spends most of his time chain-smoking and blasting heavy metal on his boombox.

Those are our heroes and zeroes. Bill, being the conservative type, has scrimped and saved enough for his first apartment. Tommy, being reckless and wild, sneaks into Eileen's bedroom window while she's changing (boob-flash, yes; but since you can't see Jenny Wright's face, it may be a body double), and after a decisive verbal drubbing, decides he wants to marry her.
"Absolutely not," she tells him, with ice-water running through her veins.

Bloodied but unbowed, Tommy convinces Bill to let him move in to his new apartment. He brings a hookah and a conga drum and promises that they'll 'party every night', starting with his non-engagement party at a local strip club, Les Girls.

At Les Girls, we are treated to a suitably erotic striptease from Ashley St Jon (Takin' It Off, Weekend Pass), and a rather hysterical boob-walloping from Kitten Natividad ("Holy shit, they're bigger than my apartment!" says Tommy's wrestling team pal) that ends in a club-wide punch-up. Later on, Tommy invites Fear frontman Lee Ving over to watch wrestling and eat all of Bill's food. So that's not going too well.

And so on. Bill finds out that Anita's donut shop cop is married, and so he goes to war with the adulterous lawman. Jim takes his buddy to visit shell-shocked 'Nam vet Randy Quaid, who smokes dope, offers the 15 year olds beer, and then goes into the bathroom to shoot up. As they leave, Jim's friend says, "Everything about that guy is cool."

Anita agrees to give Bill another try after he convinces her about the bitchin' properties of his new apartment, and he takes her home so that they can 'be alone'. Of course when he gets there, a gonzo, Tommy-induced party, complete with stewardesses, strippers, punk rockers, Rod Stewart type dudes (including Ron Wood), and a Michael Jackson impersonator (or possibly Michael himself, dunno) is underway. One of the doofuses on the wrestling team puts a poodle in a microwave, while Tommy attempts, unsuccessfully, to seduce a young Sherilyn Fenn.

Later on, when the guests complain they don't have enough room to dance, Tommy and his wrestling team buddies knock down the wall to the apartment next door, obviously startling the track-suited squares that live there. It all ends the only way it can, really, with pizza and a blow-up fuck doll floating in the pool. The landlord drops in, says one word - "Lawsuit" - and then splits.

Seems sorta bleak, but what the fuck, really. They're young. And they just threw a legendary party.

Aimless and pointless, The Wild Life never really gets where it's ostensibly going, and that's probably why it's been lost in the shuffle over the years. But despite a fuzzy script, almost no nudity, and Jenny Wright's horrific hair and outfits, the film does manage to zing along at a rapid-fire pace and stay consistently entertaining.

It's also got a memorably pounding soundtrack (most of the film was scored by Eddie Van Halen), a host of cool cameos (Ben Stein, Nancy Wilson, Repo Man's Dick Rude, Cramps drummer Nicky Beat, etc), and two very appealing leads. Penn, in particular, owns the character of Tommy Drake, and although it's obviously derivative of his brother's immortal surf-punk, Drake is a more forceful, willfully destructive character, a classic rock n' roll asshole. Not an essential title in the teen sex comedy by any stretch, but worth it to see so many well-known actors in the caterpillar stage of their careers.

The Mild Life?
Art Linson's been busy ever since, mostly producing. He's had his fingers in all sorts of interesting stuff over the years, from grunge-com Singles (1992) to recent cable biker-drama Sons of Anarchy. At the time of this writing, he's mid-production on The Runaways bio-pic. Cameron Crowe directed Almost Famous. Lea Thompson was in Howard the Duck and had a sitcom. Although she showed no skin whatsoever here, she was naked in All the Right Moves (1983), which is some bullshit sports movie with Tom Cruise. Since it's got Tom Cruise and is about sports, I have never seen it. Anyway, we love Lea Thompson and support her in all her endeavors, be they nude or otherwise.

Jenny Wright had a world-class pout and was amazing in Near Dark (1987). She hasn't acted in ten years, but hope springs eternal for a comeback.

Stolz is all over the place. You can't miss that guy. Chris Penn was Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs (1992). He died of an enlarged heart in 2006. He had charisma, that dude. We miss him.

Availability: The Wild Life is available on VHS.

-Ken McIntyre