VENUS FLYTRAP (1988/VHS/Legacy Home Video) Review

"But you're the only guy in town who's got Moby Grape!"

Rich people had it pretty good in the 1980s, what with Reaganomics keeping their bank accounts blacker than Gordon Gekko's soul. But what about kicks? For some, Wednesday night airings of Dynasty and attempts at seducing the poolboy were all the thrill they needed, but for members of the haut monde looking for something more daring, gleefully splattering everything in sight all over their pricey rattan coffee tables was the only way to scratch the itch, and not even the toughest, most tweaked dudes were safe.

Sir Turk The Tweaked

Only minutes after closing time at Poo-Bah Records, a tie-dyed t-shirt filled with hippie is counting the loudest paper currency America's ever produced and the sound has attracted a morally nihilistic post-weightlifting Willie Aames lookalike named Turk, his raccoon-eyed sorta-girlfriend B.B. and his right-hand whipping boy Wimp, who's pretty good at 5's dance from A Charlie Brown Christmas. They're punks and their kicks for tonight are small-time robbery. Just as Turk has taken the clerk into the backroom to empty the safe, enter also Danny (shamefully milquetoasty) and Ginger (Bill S. Preston's medieval babe), who wander in through a carelessly unlocked front door. They're yuppies and their kicks for tonight are evidently going to be letting the punks crash their house party, at the potty-mouthed insistence of Turk. Turk fully expects this party to be fuckin' jammin', and if it's not, Turk will fuckin' see to it that it fuckin' is.

Whore d'oeuvres

With the addition of Rod (a stodgy Aryan Christopher Reeve) and Arlene (the queen W.A.S.P.), it's now four against three, preppies outnumbering punks. Turk wants to "get TWEAKED" -- the best they can offer is champagne. Turk wants to play "jam the camel" with Arlene -- they want to play darts. Losing interest, Turk excuses himself to go raid the house for any manner of pill, powder or injectable liquid with which he can unsober himself. Coming up dry, he returns to the living room to find his sidekick Wimp entirely nude, having been trounced in a game of strip darts. Smelling a fix and enraged at the humiliation of his toady, Turk kicks off a few new games -- Russian Roulette, assault & battery on Rod and trying to force Wimp to rape Ginger (by holding on to the waistband of his jeans and pumping him up and down on top of her like an oil derrick). Now this party is jammin' on Turk's turf! Or is it? Suddenly B.B. is sympathizing with Rod, Wimp is feeling sorry for Ginger and Turk's still getting shut down by Arlene. Where did he go wrong? And furthermore, why hadn't he noticed all the cameras hidden around the house before?

Most non-NON-heinous

Turk, Turk, TURK -- what are we gonna do with you, buddy? I am slightly ashamed to say I liked Turk a lot, at least in the context of Venus Flytrap's fairly reprehensible storyline, which infamously takes its cues from Ruggero Deodato's House On The Edge Of The Park, making Turk our dollar-store David Hess. But while Hess' Alex was motivated by a sadistic, unhinged menace shared in real life only by the psychotically ill, Turk is merely a lunkheaded asshole; all bark and no bite. He carries a studded glove that only gets used for the threat of facial deconstruction rather than actually administering it. His mouth is a veritable Petri dish that produces only f-words, s-words, homosexual epithets and sexist derision, but the tough guy effect is downplayed greatly by a countenance that can only relay either priggish self-importance or frustrated confusion. He's more schoolyard bully than heartless killer, making his eventual fate almost sympathetic. (Almost.)

Roulette's syndrome

Venus Flytrap reaches for filmed socio-political morality play but only delivers goofy shot-on-video filth. Fine by me -- I find the latter much more entertaining. But if there is indeed a lesson to be taken away, it is this: When your record store is closed, it should stay closed, even if you really are the only guy in town who's got Moby Grape. A punk's life may depend on it.

TRASH NITE presents PIZZA PARTY!

If you're within driving distance of Lawrence, KS and you love pizza, there's no legitimate excuse we will accept for you not to attend PIZZA PARTY, a Trash Nite special presentation! It's two hours of pizza-related film things, featuring condensed versions of the films Hollywood In Trouble (1986) and Delivery Boys (1985) and put together in the style of a mid-80s local TV broadcast, complete with commercial breaks. All ages are admitted and, most importantly, it's completely FREE!

WHERE: The Bottleneck, 737 New Hampshire, Lawrence, KS
WHEN: 9:00pm to 11:00pm (doors open at 8:00)
RSVP: facebook.com/events/249576631823156/

FURIOUS (1984/DVD/LA Entertainment) Review

Amongst the thousands of physical copies of films I've accumulated and will likely be buried underneath, I have a short but steadily growing list that I set aside just for the purpose of eventually watching for this site. The criteria for inclusion is admittedly pretty loose, but one of the more recent guidelines I've tried to adhere to is this: the fewer references I can find to a film on the internet or in books, the higher up the list it goes. It did cross my mind that maybe the reason no one's written about certain movies is because they're so impenetrable, so beyond rational explanation as to exist in a place where they cannot be touched by words. I also knew that, eventually, I would come face to face with and be challenged by one of those movies. The day has come. Furious is calling me out.

Howdeedooit

At first, all I could remember were fur and rocks and, for some reason, I couldn't get the theme to SCTV's "Great White North" out of my head, so I wrote it down. Then it was spinning tusks and mysterious boxes, so I wrote that down too. Then, nunchuck deaths and killer chefs, sudden chickens and doggie kickin', beach dismission and pork exposition, skeleton flames and astral planes -- I wrote everything down. Out of six attempted viewings, I had successfully seen the entire thing once, written twenty paragraphs over four and a half pages and I'd fallen asleep five times. That's not just math; that's Furious math.

Jan and Dean and Simon and Tennille

Lest there be any misconception that I was bored to sleep by Furious, this was not the case -- it's just that trying to mentally organize this much nonsense is exhausting and emergency shutdown was the only option my brain gave me. I may never know how to accurately describe this film, but because we're friends, I'll take a stab at a plot synopsis: Mourning the death of his sister at the hands of a white Mongol who's as much a fan of Bob & Doug McKenzie as he is of killing ladies, Simon (played by Simon Rhee) and his red sweatshirt (raglan cut, tucked into the pants) are summoned to an office building populated by screwfaced martial arts students and new wave security guards, where he's given a gift shop medallion and a very esoteric set of instructions by his elderly, estranged tae kwon do teacher (Simon Rhee's younger brother Phillip). Seeking retribution, he soon finds himself beating the will to live out of dudes in exotic locales such as the middle of a field, the top of a cliff and a restaurant with a floor show that features a man spinning swords within five feet of a baby's face to a sparse audience of old ladies messily eating baked chicken. Occasionally aided by Hawaiian shirt aficionados with butt-cuts, a troop of scrappy karate kids and a gossipy Buddha statue, Simon eventually gets his revenge on his sister's murderer, but to defeat the true source of ultimate evil, he's gonna have to get FUURRRIIIOOUS! Or something like that.

Easy spirit

If it wasn't clear enough already, this is not your standard martial arts revenge flick, something that's immediately signified by the closeups of flubbed sleight-of-hand card tricks in the opening credits, accompanied by the exasperated sighs of the performer. So is it a farce? We've got death incurred by a butt-ful of throwing stars, an Eastern European sorcerer who shoots chickens out of his fingers and a Devo-esque synth trio breaking up band practice to go join a fight, but as to whether or not this is intentional comedy or just willful weirdness, the movie's keeping its mouth zipped shut. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum throughout, with the first spoken line ("All riiiight!") arriving at the twelve-and-a-half minute mark. In fact, only two characters in the film have significant speaking parts; neither are Simon Rhee, but one is a dying pig. Fight sequences are underscored by too-quiet background music seemingly lifted from Republic Pictures serials with sound effects provided by firecrackers and drum machines and are directed with such laconic detachment that they almost don't qualify as action scenes.

Whitey Cleanshoes and the Milktones

I can't remember when I've been so stymied by a film, and, in keeping in tradition with everything else I don't understand about Furious, I really liked it, even though I couldn't begin to tell you why. That said, I'm still not sure if it was a real film or a particularly screwy feature-length sizzle reel for Simon Rhee's kickfighting prowess. It's also entirely possible that I just dreamed the whole thing. I hope so. Maybe if I go back to sleep right now, there'll be a sequel.