Never Too Young To Die

John Stamos IS Stargrove.

Before he became Uncle Jesse on "Full House" (and in my heart), John Stamos tried to become a sort of James Bond Jr. as Lance Stargrove in 1986's "Never Too Young To Die" - or "N2Y2D," as I'll be calling it from here on out. He was a gymnast in the movie:


The writers and director didn't do much of anything I was familiar with beyond "The Double-O Kid," which I've been dying to see and believe has the same basic plot as "N2Y2D." It DOES feature some familiar faces, though, like Lorenzo Lamas's buddy from "Renegade" as a biker tough, a James Bond as Stargrove's super-spy dad, Freddy Krueger as a dweeby assistant to the main villain, and Peter Kwong, the dude who plays Rain in "Big Trouble in Little China," as Stargrove's nerdy inventor roommate at school. Serial, check it out:


Otherwise, Prince's protege Vanity appears pre-"Action Jackson" and post-"Tanya's Island" as a love interest for Stargrove. The big mindboggler in the cast is Gene Simmons as Ragner, the hermaphrodite terrorist who, with his army of "Mad Max"-esque punker followers, plans to poison the city's water supply if he can get back a disc with codes on it, which Lance has in his possession following Lance's dad's death. Guh.

Check out the trailer:



I first heard about this movie while flipping through Starlog #96, which I bought at a comic shop sometime in the last couple years.


Simmons's Ragner is inexplicably undercover on the side of the good guys for most of the movie while also running her/his bad guy operation. I spotted the likeness right away, so all his spy enemies in the movie should've been fired, cause they're awful. I mean, LOOK at how similar they looked:


But he/she finally reveals themself on a helicopter in the most radical display of goofball acting ever:



Ragner also performs a transvestite rock opera song at a biker bar where shitheads ride around inside on their motorcycles (motorcycles are for outside, dudes) and order beers and cans of oil, and you have to stop what you're doing right now and watch this clip between 2:50 and 5:35:



The outfit Ragner wears is the same outfit Lynda Carter wore during a performance with KISS back in the '70s. Bonkers.



By the end, some stuff blows up and dozens of punkers get shot in the chest and Stamos and Vanity flirt so hard during one scene that I went through puberty again and Iren Koster made a dope song for the credits and everybody has a great time. That includes this one burly monster of a punker who shows up throughout the movie -- I call him Tron, and here he is:

(CLICK FOR LARGER)

Here are some more fun pictures, which you should click to see larger:

Gene tries kissing John in one scene.

Ragner kept laughing so hard his eyes went back in his head. This happened three times.

At one point, Lance is kidnapped by two punkers and one of them squishes a tomato into the side of Lance's mouth for no reason at all.

Gene and Robert Englund in their lair

Stamos Buttfest '86

Some of the punkers

The movie isn't available on DVD, but you can find it on VHS in places, and I'm certain you can get a bootleg SOMEWHERE.

Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers

"Summer job prospects looked pretty grim - people were just DYING for work."

The director of "Terminator 3" and "U-571" came up with the story for (and directed) "Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers," a sort of "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures" set in a funeral home. Two surfer bros have to work for the summer at a mortuary for their mob- connected uncle where The Riddler also works/has created a serum to bring the dead back to life. They reanimate a mafia Don and things get nuts.

Here's the trailer!



I love the look on the dumb surfer's face when he yells, "Awesome!" at the :56 mark. His expression somehow encapsulates the attitude with which I want to live life.

The box art is great! Boxes with the cast painted all bursting out of a vehicle are tops.

(click to enlarge)

Jocks

"I wanna show you somethin' I'm REAL...proud of..."

In 1986, the director of "Lone Wolf McQuade" produced a college sports film in response to "Revenge of the Nerds" called "Jocks." Here is the awful trailer:



The film stars a dude named Scott Strader, and as best as I can tell, this was his last movie. One of my idols, Perry Lang of "Spring Break," also appears alongside Ogre from "Revenge of the Nerds," that guy who played Frog in "Colors," Richard Roundtree, a dude you'd recognize from "Angels in the Outfield," a young Mariska Hargitay, and fucking Christopher Lee as a Dean at the college. DRACULA, you guys...

Plus, check this out: Future mega-director - and Weird Al look-alike - Tom Shadyac ("Ace Ventura," "Liar Liar," "Bruce Almighty") plays a shithead jerk-prep in the movie, which focuses on a team of tennis players, who are the only successful sports team on a campus where Dean Count Dracula desperately wants a win. So he sends Roundtree and his tennis players to the tennis nationals in Las Vegas, and the boys get in trouble cause they drink beer and like wearing sweaters cut off above their bellybuttons and totes dig ladies.

It's stupid fun, has a scene set in a lesbian bar filled with aggressive biker women who get sprayed with a fire extinguisher, and barely makes any sense -- like you taped over your older brother's copy of "Porky's" and spliced in footage of college students faking being drunk by a lake and playing ping-pong in 1985. Worth it all for the great scenes focusing on Ogre.

And there's a DOPE song called Power Play in it by Jimmy Osmond. PLEASE listen to it here:



Here's the super-sessy movie poster (NO ONE in this poster is in the movie):


And the original VHS box front:


And the VHS box back:


The film was released on DVD a while back and has gone out of print, thus it has become way more pricey than it deserves to be. Save your cash and pick up the delightful "Too Cool for School" DVD package, which includes "Jocks" and a BUNCH of other great, goofy films from that era. I'll get around to talking about them all here. Check out the set's box art:


And buy it here.

Oh, and the film has the most tame wet t-shirt contest in the history of drunk teens, which features ZERO wet t-shirts and ZERO nudity and a LOT of unapproving head-shaking and frowning. Just say no to wet t-shirts.

Death Wish 4: The Crackdown!

"They made FOUR of these fucking things?!"
-My girlfriend after she woke up to find me watching this this morning

Part four of a franchise that lasted five films in total, "Death Wish 4: The Crackdown" was directed by long-time Charles Bronson director J. Lee Thompson and came out in 1987. Thompson and Bronson did 9 movies together, including one of my favorite Bronson movies, "10 To Midnight," which I saw, for some reason, a LOT as a kid. I think it was one of the few tapes we had.

Anyway, the movie follows Bronson (whose character is clearly hated by God because everybody he loves gets murdered or beaten at the start of these movies) after the death of his girlfriend's daughter. Then he gets recruited to murder some drug dealers, which he does with FULL FORCE (he was 65 when he filmed this, by the way), before he's double-crossed and then some other stuff happens and then it ends. But not before Bronson VAPORIZES an old dude bad guy by using a rocket launcher on his gold-chain-wearing ass from about 20 feet away. Check it:



"Death Wish 4" has some cool '80s sets like an arcade, a roller rink, and a VHS rental store! It also has cameos by that bald guy who was Mulder's boss on "The X-Files," the girl who played Audrey in the very first "Vacation" movie, the guy who played a black Vulcan on Star Trek: Voyager, that tall bro who was in charge of the odd street gang in Return of the Living Dead 3, and Danny Trejo. Trejo gets blown up by a bomb hidden in a wine bottle. It's nuts.

Here's the trailer:



And here's a clip of JUST the murders that Bronson has a hand in:



My copy of the VHS tape has a lot of wear, but the cassette played just fine. I picked it up at a used section in our local Barnes & Noble, which is an odd thing for a Barnes & Noble to have, I think. It was originally $3, then became $1.50, and then I bought it at $.60! Here's the box:


I'm really itching to watch the other 4 now. I remember catching a bit of part one waaaaay back and it scared the living pee out of me.

C.H.U.D. Poster?

I ran across this poster for C.H.U.D.




Panik indeed. I've never seen this version, only the classic sewer grate cover. It was probably for the German release, hence the German. Can anyone identity the logo in the lower left hand corner? It's possibly the video distributor, a topic I'd like to post about in the future. Either way it's super rad! LEGS!

Ernest Goes to Splash Mountain - TV Special

If you're like me, you've got a special place in your heart for Ernest P. Worrell, the goodhearted goofball played by genius comic actor Jim Varney in films like "Ernest Goes to Camp" and "Ernest Scared Stupid."


Ernest was a character developed by a marketing firm in Tennessee called Carden & Cherry Advertising, and he was used to make hundreds of down-to-Earth commercials for specific markets across the country where he sold everything from local sodas to milk to auto dealerships.




In 1987, John Cherry, one of the men who helped create the Ernest character, directed "Ernest Goes to Camp" for Disney's Touchstone Pictures, and, holy shit, I could go on and on about that movie. It's one of my favorites and it brought Ernest to the attention of households everywhere.

Anywho, this put the Ernest character in business with Disney, where he appeared in a lot of Disney promotional video stuff, and in 1989, when "Ernest Goes to Camp" aired on TV for "The Wonderful World of Disney," it was preceded by a special about the opening of the Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland called...



I can't handle how excited I would've been to have a pizza night back in 1989 and watch both "Ernest Goes To Camp" AND a brand-new TV special!

In the TV special, Ernest has been tapped as the first HUMAN to test the ride, so a news station follows him around to see how he trains for the duty. We also get some history about the development of Splash Mountain (I had no idea the ride was based on the controversial "Song of the South" film) and other stuffs. It was never released on DVD or VHS as far as I can tell, which is a bummer, cause it'd be a dope special extra if they ever put out a boss anniversary edition of "Ernest Goes to Camp." That means you'll have to settle for these 3 clips I found of the special online, which cover the entire program.

Lost Ernest footage! Ugh, I'm so happy the internet exists.

Enjoy!

Part One:

(My favorite bit comes at 5:45)




Part Two:




Part Three:

(The nightmare sequence at :52 MUST be burned into some fans' memories)




Look for more Ernest content down the line. It's a shame Varney passed away when he did. He had a lot of great roles and ideas ahead of him, and it's too bad to think he missed out on all the cool stuff he had heading his way. Of all my childhood icons, he's one of the few who never got tangled up in crazy controversies or compromised himself - he just tried to entertain and stayed humble.

The Majorettes!

You just can't take your eyes off them - and that's enough to get them KILLED.

Not familiar with "The Majorettes"? Neither was I.

John Russo, co-creator of the "Night of the Living Dead" franchise, wrote the book this 1986 film about a murderer targeting a high school dance team was based on - and also did the screenplay! The dance team at my high school was called "The Kangarettes" cause our mascot was the kangaroo.

>fart noise<

Not really any known actors or actresses here, but it WAS directed by S. William Hinzman, the man who played the "Cemetery Zombie" in "Night of the Living Dead." He smashed the window out of the car. He's this bro:


Anywho, the box art on the VHS is rad. Here's the front of one version:


And the front of another version I also like:


That one mirrors the paperback cover, which you can see here. Here's the VHS box back:


Here's the trailer:



There's a DVD available, but the box art is really goober-y. Go check it out here.

Lastly, the movie features this homeboy:


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