So, did you hear the one about the Macho Toy who scanned a hot plastic Frau in season, ready for action? He got cold pissed when he found she was an effin Plugot!!! That’s waggos, yo!
Um...well, anyways... I guess you had to be there.
“900 years after the Great Nuke.
The world Man created, he destroyed.
Out of the darkness and ignorance of the radioactive rubble emerges a new order...”
In yet another post-post-apocalyptic wasteland film from the Reagan Age, the world as we knew it is now headlong into gender political chaos and tragic long division. In this corner, we have Plugots [male]: inferior, homeless savages made up of Machos (hard laborers), Toys (castrated, mute man-pets), and Seeders (baby-makers). And on the dominant side of this desert bed is the female of the species, the Fraus. Single and not looking. Hobbies: enslaving Plugots for fun and target practice; meeting random, hooded strangers at abandoned gas stations in hopes of eventually popping out a baby girl or two; furry boots. In their downtime, they like to volunteer for training the younger warrior-princesses-in waiting by throwing them into a cage with Aargh the Awful, a seven foot tall mutant wendigo-type with a $2 smile who manhandles skulls like ossified basketballs!
Two boy slaves, Gruss and Korvis (Chuck Wagner, TV’s AUTOMAN), escape from the Frau camp, and after finding a “Learn to Read” book of ABCs in an antique suitcase they decide that being somebody else’s bitch may have been cool for their parents, but not for them. Fast forward a few years later, they’ve started their own tribe of like-minded brothers from other mothers safe within the confines of a forbidden Radioactive Zone. Led by the motivated Korvis, their one desire is gender liberation; to be simply FREE MEN.
After an initial scrimmage against the Fraus, a left-for-dead Korvis stumbles upon a US underground nuclear war bunker just as it was 900 years ago...except for the rotten corpses. Touring the facility, he’s more impressed with the laser guns, grenades, and GIGANTIC BOOMBOX (with batteries that still work), than with the infinitely more awesome President’s quarters completely tricked out with a Galaga arcade unit and a Medusa pinball machine. Korvis studies the accompanying pamphlet on how to use a laser gun (!), gears up with one of the gold lame' radiation suits (!!) and heads out on horseback with his new boombox at full volume (!!!).
Soon enough, he’s mistaken for the mythological “Prezzi-dent”, who (it is written) will come and issue a new world order of peace and understanding, and manages to get a special conference with Vena, the leader of the local Fraus. They make sweet post-apocalyptic love back in the Prez’s bunker bed, and Vena agrees to a truce.
Meanwhile, there’s been a mutiny within the Fraus, and they’ve gone ahead and attacked the Plugots, resulting in an all-out massacre of explosions, crossbows, and spinning roundhouses.
Can Vena and Korvis band-aid the situation for a better tomorrow? Can both sides lay down their arms and come to terms? Will the movie end with a freeze-framed shot of Aargh jumping in mid-air clutching that coveted vintage boombox?
Yes, my friends. YES.
Brought to colorful life by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the same production team responsible for such marginal cinema classics as MISSING IN ACTION, COBRA, DEATH WISH II, BREAKIN’, and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, this film is curiously labeled as an action comedy, but everything is played too straight and without a sense of irony to be truly comical. However, the action sequences were so much better than I was expecting, especially the martial arts action, which was coordinated by Ernie Reyes who also choreographed the wonderfully cultish THE LAST DRAGON and SURF NINJAS. Plus, the fact that one of the bitchin’ amazon babes is played by a former Grand Champion of the US Open Karate Championship, Blackbelt Hall of Fame inductee Karen Lee Sheperd, didn’t hurt, either.
If AMERICA 3000 could wear shoes, it would be proud to walk down any street in the middle of the day holding hands with YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE and not give two fucks what you or anyone else thought about it.
Effin hot.
Mark Lester is mighty impressive as a bad seed boy who's more than a little preoccupied with his dad's new wife (Britt Ekland). He plots and pranks his devious way in between pop and stepmom in an effort to destroy the more perfect union, playing one side against the other per his own twisted reasoning. Psychologically tight with more perversions than a Chris Hansen hidden camera surprise party, Ekland really goes out on a limb to deliver the discomfort so convincingly.
And yeah, I'd wash with hot water if I were you.
Everything Leroy Fisk learned about life, he learned from the stormy side of the street, and he takes that hard knuckle knowledge to work for him in an illegal street fighting racket where he becomes a big fish real quick. Convinced he's ahead of the game, he doesn't exactly bow down gracefully when a real smart-ass shithead of a cop (Dabney Coleman) informs Fisk that he can keep himself out of jail in exchange for a cut of the action. Blindly defiant, Leroy soars as a black bird of screaming revenge after his wife and unborn child are blown the fuck away by a car bomb intended for him, and he's taking absolutely no prisoners on the way down. Cheap, gritty, and focused, this is blaxploitation at its most intense, with scene-stealing screen time from Coleman and Philip Michael Thomas who plays two roles: a black junkie, and a Hispanic pusherman / explosives expert!
Every film genre has it's share of scattered gems which are basically forgotten, left on the verge of extinction (for various legal and financial reasons) and ignored by most or all modern formats of home entertainment. From what I can tell, with every cast member so too-good-to-be-true perfect for their respective parts, The Wild Life definitely qualifies.
The second of Cameron Crowe's scripts to be set in motion, it revisits the familiar landscape of high school that he painted so brilliantly in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but with a slightly darker, somewhat sinister, and altogether serious tone this time around, while still leaving plenty of room for sex, drugs, rock, and rolling stoned.
In a world just one week away from the first day of a new school year, where cops give orgasms to underage girls in public places, businessmen who want to give orgasms to underage girls in public places, Apocalypse Now is almost a fetish, and a Vietnam vet suffers better living through chemical dependency, two young stars burn the biggest holes through the grimy pubescent fog: Chris Penn is fucking fantastic. Not only physically perfect for the part of a horny, party-hungry jock, but also every nuance of movement and facial register is enough to make you think he really behaved like that in everyday life, and had been doing so for years.
As a 15 year old playing a 15 year old, Ilan Mitchell-Smith practically owns this movie. A loner, rebellious and recklessly confident, he was the teenager so many of us who lived during the early/mid-'80s can identify with. And the camo pants and bedroom nunchaku practice while listening to heavy metal on cassette brings it all the way home.
The strip club/stag party scene was a pleasant surprise as it featured both Ashley St. Jon and Kitten Natividad!
To top everything off, Eddie Van Halen performs the majority of the film's score. Van Halen fans will easily recognize pieces of music that would eventually turn into tracks on 5150 ("Good Enough"), OU812 ("A.F.U.") and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge ("Right Now"). One of the pieces, "Ripley" has been reworked as a new song for the VH album A Different Kind of Truth featuring David Lee Roth back at home on vocals.
Other neat surprises include Chris Penn's real dad playing his character's alcoholic father, a sensitive yet smart Sherilyn Fenn getting groped in a closet but making it out intact, and Crowe's future wife, Nancy Wilson from the band Heart, showing up for a few seconds (as she did in Fast Times...), but the most bizarre cameo involves Ron Wood storming into someone else's kitchen during a party scene and taking a ham out of the fridge so everyone can rip the poor thing to pieces.
VHS rips and scans from a personal movie collection nearly 20 years tall, with all the analog hiccups and tan lines you can press your play buttons at. Caring less than zero for rarity and market value, my VHS investment is much more for the love of the format and all its character flaws and arcane beauty.