The Boys Next Door (1985)

“Everything looks like MTV.” Cruising down a main strip in Los Angeles, the two teenage boys – Roy (Maxwell Caulfield, off the box office disappointment of Grease 2) and Bo (Charlie Sheen, pre-Platoon) – take the street scene all in with glee, yelling at the punks and catcalling the ladies. Director Penelope Spheeris, and her cinematographer Arthur Albert, capture the authenticity of the streets in The Boys Next Door (1985), and the night-time LA depicted is accentuated by a sickly green glow of the street lights and the pink-reddish glare of the neon signs. Out-of-towners who have recently graduated from high school, Roy and Bo, seem like a pair of regular guys: jeans and white t-shirts, drinking beers and chasing girls. Their interest in pranks and their snotty vibe have made them toxic to the rest of their high school. Roy, in particular, has some “stuff inside him”, he confides to Bo, and eventually that “stuff” comes out when he beats a petrol station attendant half-to-death. Recent graduates and bound for factory work, their impulsive jaunt to Los Angeles eventually becomes a nihilistic killing spree.

I’ve always been keen to see The Boys Next Door, a halfway point between Spheeris documentary The Decline Of Western Civilization and the comedy hit Wayne’s World, but not being a huge true crime fan (which I assumed it was; it’s not, a fictional story scripted by future X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong), and knowing the darkness of this movie, I was reluctant to seek it out right away. I’m glad I watched it finally. Distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and humming with a soundtrack of LA punk and proto-heavy metal, which often scores the disturbing violence, The Boys Next Door is a descent into meaningless murder and crime, with great lead performances from Caulfield and Sheen (his presence echoes his father’s film, Badlands). Kept tight to a 90 minute running time, and a slow escalation that is intercut with two detectives following the series of crimes (Hank Garrett and Christopher McDonald), it’s an unsettling movie that also captures 1980s L.A. nightlife. With Spheeris’ interest in punk rock and music, there’s a compelling theme where the boys find the punks weird and off-putting, and even a police detective rails against the way that punk girls are dressed, all part of the media panic about that subculture as violent and disturbed, when the real violence here is being perpetuated by a couple of good-looking “ordinary” boys. Available on Tubi. Recommended.

Deadbeat By Dawn (1988)

Deadbeat By Dawn (1988) is a splatter-punk symphony on a beer can budget. Directed, written, and starring Jim Van Bebber, a film school drop-out who put everything into this low-budget action flick, even choreographing the fights and stunts. With gang members in ripped denim and head-bands, sporting switch-blades and nunchaka, this movie has been compared to Streets Of Rage, but rather than an 1980s neon arcade game, there’s something more grimy and grungy here; the synth score is crunchy, the blood is like red paint, and it’s clear that Bebber is putting his body on the line with each hectic stunt. That, and you can just feel that when they drive a car into a river for one scene, they don’t have any back-ups to spare; everything piece of action or violence has a consequence in this shoe-string production. Shot on the streets of Dayton, Ohio, there’s a primal reality to everything, even with it following a familiar exploitation plot. Bebber plays Goose, leader of the Ravens, who are in a gang war with the Spiders, led by the sadistic Danny (Paul Harper). When Goose’s girlfriend Christie (Megan Murphy), who dabbles in mysticism, and physic readings, asks him to leave the gang life behind for the straight-and-narrow, Goose obliges. After tragedy strikes due to Danny’s violent machinations, the scene will be eventually set for a showdown of revenge. Clearly feeding off the scuzzy punk vibes of The Warriors and Death Wish, there’s also a sense that Bebber is carrying off his own Taxi Driver intensity in certain scenes, like when he stays with his heroin-addicted father in a rundown apartment, or when he walks the streets with bloody soaked fists (clearly shooting on the fly to the gawking background passerbys). The violence hits hard and fast, even when the guns look like toys; Bebber gets enough visceral energy from his handling of nunchucks or the gory body blows. A triumph of cheap, passionate genre filmmaking, with energy coursing in the moving camera and editing in of the cityscape, all eventually escalating into a satisfyingly bloody fight across a train station platform. Marc Pitman is also a scene-stealer as the spaced-out nihilist gang member named Bonecrusher (it’s that type of flick!). Available to stream on Tubi. Recommended.

Mutant Hunt (1987)

Some films deserve to be seen in shitty video quality rather than remastered to pristine condition. Not to worry because the copy of Mutant Hunt (1987) on Tubi is basically a VHS rip with that wavy ‘dirty tapehead’ quality over the opening credits. This is low budget cyberpunk trash that I had a blast with, basically a sci-fi rip-off shot in New York with what looks like a $400 budget (most of which was probably spent on the striking poster art which it can never live up to!). This movie is like the one scene in The Terminator where Rick Rossovich wakes up in his underpants to fight the T-800, but expanded to eighty minutes; here, fighting a robot in your white jockeys is actually a winning strategy. And if a sinister corporate villain implanted a bomb into the back of your head, if you asked nicely, they might just remove it after five minutes without question.

A corporation called Inteltrax has developed cyborgs – however the sinister boss, Z, who acts like one of the aliens from Plan 9 From Outer Space is scrambling their circuits with a street drug called Euphorianon (or something like that) to be effective killing machines. These cyborgs all wear dark shades and black clothes, and stumble around like hungover Devo-esque New Wave ravers. The bad guy imprisons the hunky scientist, Dr Haynes, who worked on creating the robots, strapping him to a table, while the scientist’s sister, Darla, escapes to find a soldier of fortune named Matt Riker to help them out. Now this Matt Riker is quite a guy – our hero is basically introduced jumping out of bed in his white underpants and having a ten minute punch up with a cyborg in his apartment. Once our heroes – including Elaine, a brassy exotic dancer/mercenary and Johnny Felix, a tech expert proficient in martial arts – join forces to hunt the escaped cyborgs, their whole plan to defeat these unstoppable machines? More fist fights! They even have a scene where gadgets and tech are handed out – no laser weapons though – and still prefer to go all Streets Of Rage on any hulking robot stomping their way through New York back-streets in the dead of night (when I’m sure there were no worries about cops busting the crew for lack of permits).

This movie also features a rival villain, Domina, a former partner to Z, who is made up a little like Rachel from Blade Runner but talks with a flat Brooklyn accent and sounds like Patti Smith. She also has her own Frankenstein cyborg kept under wraps as she strides across her room plotting to her attentive cyborg. They also keep ripping off the same shot from Blade Runner where the camera pans up to the Tyrell pyramid and you hear the score copycat the Vangelis synth tinkling. There’s also slow loading Escape From New York computer graphics, a grotesquely slimy and melting android puppet, a scene in a cyberpunk new wave bar, and lots of street fighting in deserted New York streets and an abandoned factory with wailing guitars and crusty synth on the soundtrack.

Directed by Tim Kincaid who also made gay porno under another name and this has that quality without the hardcore sex scenes. It’s very goofy, objectively complete dreck, but also a completely tactile, hilarious and fun entry into straight-to-video cyberpunk rip-offs. Recommended (if you dare).

The Decline Of Western Civilization (1981)

I grew up as a Wayne’s World fan and always intended to explore the director Penelop Spheeris pre-Wayne’s World career, especially their trilogy of music documentaries under the banner title, The Decline Of Western Civilization. For the first film, The Decline Of Western Civilization (1981), Spheeris captures a time and place, the punk movement in Los Angeles of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I claim no knowledge about the punk scene at this time, so it was informative on that basis as it cuts together interviews with the bands, fans, promotors, critics and captures live performances from luminaries like Black Flag, Germs, Circle Jerks and X amongst others. What makes this documentary great to me (in contrast to docos now, particularly the type that might be produced by Netflix or HBO) is Spheeris’ approach. She and her crew are filming the gigs and capturing the energy of this scene; it is not a retrospective but is definitely of its moment. What also helps is Spheeris’ interview style, which is to ask questions off camera and keep the focus on her subjects. This helps to provide some critical distance that is helpful in watching it now decades later. As a director, Spheeris is open to the punk movement in a way the mainstream media at the time was not, who were probably viewing it as a public nuisance, a fad or a concern for the health and safety of the youth, so her questions are inquisitive and engaged. Yet Spheeris is not a mindless fan, and also asks some pointed questions, particularly of the aggression and violence within the scene. While an anti-authoritarian movement, the subculture documented is also wrapped up in its own sad problems with all of the sexism, racism, and homophobia on full display here. While a contemporary filmmaker might have explored these tangents further, particularly the presence of Black and Latino punks, musicians and fans, in a sub-culture that at times casually celebrates white power and Nazi paraphernalia. Still, it is a movie that vibrates with energy and power even as it leaves one feeling dejected and sad by what’s captured, despite some of the caustic performances. Definitely made me want to hear more of the Alice Bag Band! Available to stream in remastered quality on Tubi in Australia. Recommended.

Trancers (1984)

Flipping through video store magazines as a kid, I’d come across the occasional straight-to-video sequel advertised in its pages and wonder, “What is this film? There must be fans if they’ve made four or five of these!” It’s like another universe. Trancers (1984), like many a Full Moon production (an outfit I’m not that knowledgable about), has a fair number of sequels. As a low-budget sci-fi movie, it’s basically Blade Runner crossed with The Terminator. A grizzled bounter hunter in 2247, Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson), hunts down “trancers”, which are kind of zombies psychically controlled by a villain, Whistler (Michael Stefani). It’s a bit vague, but this movie clocks in at 77 minutes, so I’m all good with several scenes of exposition being left on the cutting room floor. Deth is tasked with having his consciousness sent back into the body of an ancestor in 1984 to stop Whistler from doing the Back To The Future photograph erasure of the Future Council’s family tree. With the help of a punker department store elf, Leena (Helen Hunt), Deth charges through LA to stop Whistler who is in the body of a plainclothes cop. To many, this might be an average low-budget knock-off sci-fi flick, but I was into its aesthetics, particularly early scenes that feel like recreations of cyberpunk paperback cover art, Deth stalking around in a trench-coat and lighting up a cigarette in the glare of neo-noir neon. In the “present day”, which is where the majority of the film takes place (hey, creating a 2247 futurescape ain’t cheap!), Thomerson and Hunt are both charismatic; Thomerson is tough but also a goofball in his own way, and Hunt is charming enough to make you forget why this person suddenly goes along with this far-fetched plot. They have a good amount of banter, and there’s enough touches of weirdness like a watch that stretches out one second of time to the wearer while everyone’s standing there frozen. Bodies disappear into red zaps of lightning, a Santa Claus becomes an angry zombie, and a sauna turns into a slow death trap. Trancers keeps it moving and I was loving its lo-fi approximation of high scale sci-fi. I don’t know if I’ll catch up with the five or six sequels, but this one is an entertaining rip-off with winning performances. Also, features suitable synth atmospherics by Phil Davies and Mark Ryder. Directed by Charles Band. Available to stream on Tubi. Recommended.