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.

THE CARRIER (1988/DVD/Code Red) Review

Jake's a teenager. He's about seventeen or eighteen, I guess, and is, like a lot of people that age, pretty conflicted. He's the kind of guy who'll stare through the window at a church social, yearning for inclusion, only to sulk around the refreshments table for a while and then get thrown out onto his face for starting a fight. He walks around looking tortured with half a liter of Jack Daniels in his shirt pocket and is prone to melodramatic outbursts like, "I can't get near anyone without ruining everything!" Adolescent whining aside, this statement couldn't be more true -- any human or animal tissue he touches dissolves upon immediate contact, and he's carelessly infecting inanimate objects with the same disease. As his hometown of Sleepy Rock suddenly becomes overrun by killer mirrors and bloodthirsty Dr. Seuss books, the population lathers themselves into a paranoid frenzy, wearing plastic tarps, hoarding cats (for object testing) and violently feuding with their neighbors. Jake didn't have many friends before this whole mess started and he sure doesn't have any now. Even if you wanted to be his friend, you'd have quite a set of baggage to unpack to get there.

Lotsa luck, lady

For better or worse, Jake's our main character. It's not necessarily a rule that a main character be likeable, but it helps if they're relatable. I was never quite "a prisoner of my own skin," as he's heard to snivel, but like Jake, I was also a brooding, damp-shirted, greasy teenager for a short time. My hormonal acne may have been a less tragic affliction than causing people's flesh to melt, but both are fairly unsavory. So, I can relate to Jake, but that doesn't mean I would ever wanna hang out with the guy, or, for that matter, myself when I was his age. But my eight-year-old self? I'd babysit that kid. Every Friday night. Overtime. And I wouldn't even charge my parents for it.

Sleepy Rock Humane Society

When I was eight, the existential woes of pubescence were an absolutely unfathomable concept, and even if I could've wrapped my mind around the forthcoming complications of teen romance and skin conditions, I wouldn't have had the time to worry. My free days were a stringent schedule of getting cranked up on Cocoa Puffs in the morning, whipping around town on my cheap Huffy wearing a Batman cape during the afternoon and capping it all off with a sleepover at my friend Marshall's house, where we'd stay up until 4:00am eating pizza and watching "USA Up All Night" (the Caroline Schlitt years). In short -- I ruled. It's hard not to rule when you're eight. Exhibit B: The Carrier's Seth.

A last name would just slow him down

While every other citizen of Sleepy Rock is going bananas in fear of the Jake plague, young Seth keeps his head firmly screwed on; the very definition of bravery in the face of adversity, sanity in the face of madness. When his three-kid team of cat-wranglers runs afoul of an equally-numbered but physically superior group of proto-punks with a feline hijacking in mind, one of his compatriots is killed and he fearlessly serves his duty as their leader by helping the survivor to safety. In doing so, however, he's caught, and confronts certain death at knifepoint by staring into the eyes of his would-be killer and warning him not to miss. For the too-few scenes he occupies in this film, Seth rules. And he's eight. And I would offer to babysit him as well, but I think he could probably manage by himself.

Tougher than leather

I'm not one to condone remakes, and to remake The Carrier would be a slap in the face of its scrappy regional magic (filmed on location in Manchester, Michigan). But if, for some godforsaken reason, someone decides to take on the task, I hope that they do me a personal favor by taking the only acceptable route -- the True Grit route -- by re-telling the story from the point of view of Seth. In return, I'll personally mail them a Davy Crockett cap (one size fits all) and two tickets to the annual Manchester Chicken Broil.