I just found this little ad floating around in an old VHS today. I had no idea these existed, and I was the EXACT TARGET MARKET. Great job Kenner, you lost out on the only sales you could've had for this line of toys.
Here's the entire ad:
Let's look a little closer, shall we?
Some regular characters (House, Motormouth Jones) and a made up villain. Marching on...
Looks like we got another made up (and racist) villain, Tackleberry, Mahoney and - HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE!
It's Stakeout Sweetchuck!!
Also in the set is Zed, possibly the only toys modeled (poorly) on Bobcat Goldthwait. Isn't it enough that his boxers have little hearts? Did they have to make his shorts polka dotted, too?
This is a movie about yankees- it has the mob, boxers, Puerto Ricans, and it's made by Andy Warhol's buddy, Paul Morrisey- all of these things add up to a proto-Jersey Shore cultural portrait. Boxing movies have been around forever, but after the success of Rocky, this kind of movie was more likely to get funded, despite the clear disdain for the Italian boxing culture. This movie helped to form the "faggidaboutit" Italian stereotypes later reinforced by Spike Lee and the Nintendo company:
(this guy's in the movie)
Spike is an Italian boxer that wants to make it up the ladder by getting in good with the local mob boss (Ernest Borgnine), also wanting to slip Borgnine's daughter the Italian sausage. He thinks the boxing world needs another great white hope, but nobody wants to buy in on the dream. Spike keeps getting into mild trouble that threatens to get him booted out of the Bensonhurst neighborhood altogether. He moves into the PuertoRican neighborhood and starts beating on the drug dealers and homos. Borgnine, in one of his 2,000,000 roles, seems to hardly be able to deliver his lines without cracking up.
This movie is loaded with sleazy dialogue that just wouldn't fit in On the Waterfront: "I don't take no orders from no crummy old dyke, or her slut girlfriend," followed immediately with the classic line: "How fuckin dare you talk to your fuckin mother like that." Borgnine blurts this cherry morsel of dialogue: "They were just having a little gang fight with a bunch of Puerto Ricans, what's so screwy about that?" Possibly the best monologue is from a wild eyed junkie who complains to the cops that Spike has been taking their dope, even though they were just "shootin' up, real peaceful like." After the cop asks if she wants to press charges she goes into this: "Man, I ain't got all day to waste with this chickenshit court crap, I gots to make MONEY to get some more DRUGS! You know- this system SUCKS, I mean REALLY SUCKS!" You'll lose interest in this odd movie well before this line shows up , unfortunately.
In an odd turn, the soundtrack was performed by Coati Mundi, member of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. And let's not forget the most important advice from a legendary actor:
Twister's Revenge is a 1987 film about a talking monster truck with an expensive computer installed in it. I found this in one of those cheap Mill Creek 50 movies box sets compiling public domain, low budget turkeys (like Twister's Revenge). The monster truck is named Mr. Twister and the computer installed in the passenger seat is wicked old even in 1987, as a matter of fact, everything about this movie screams early 70s and not 1987. I remember 1987 and it wasn't like this. I initially thought this was filmed in the 70s and released in the late 80s, but I saw a Datsun in one scene that fit the late 80s claim. Here's a photo of a similar computer model:
So three bumbling, Pabst drinking criminals catch wind of how expensive this computer is and decide to steal it (and pawn it). Let's not get into any more details of the plot, you want to hear about the DETAILS. Let's talk about Dutch. He's one of the bumbling criminals (the fat one) and he wears a hat that says "Dixie Devil." During one scene Dutch takes a dump on the side of the road and you get to see his tighty whities (sic?). He's great. Let's talk about the dialogue; my favorite line, spoken to Mr. Twister, is: "Artificial Intelligence my ass! Now listen, lamebrain breath!" Mr. Twister's owner consistently condescends to him like that during the whole movie; Mr. Twister's just trying to help him out, man! Now we need to talk about the band in the biker bar. Lord. They were a girl group that feature some home grown Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. When I saw home grown, I mean too shitty to make it on the show at all. The lead singer looks like Queen Kong, with more spandex.
Mr. Twister, satisfyingly, gets to run over a bunch of shit, like cars, an outhouse, a shack, a clothesline, an above ground pool and more cars and houses. There's a sped-up chase scene with zany piano music, bad overdubbing, a tank on the loose, a parade, an Erskine Caldwell-style hillbilly woman that talks to her chickens, a Hardee's, loads of fake-looking wigs and, in one crowd scene, a 10 year old boy with a feathered mullet smoking a cig. My wife spotted that last one.
Beach Balls misrepresents itself as a beach movie, where in reality it fits closer with low budget rock and roll movies like Rock and Roll High School. This is a Corman production and it has some of the humor you might expect from one of his films (he probably didn't even know he was making it, though, so let's not give him too much credit). This film takes a few potshots at phoney televangelists, heavy metal goons, the young Republican movement of the 80s, lifeguards, and parole officers, but there aren't too many hearty yuks. Some of the highlights are the band Severed Heads in a Bag, who I assume were made up just for the movie, and the surprise appearance of Steven Tash who uses the phrase "harshing my mellow." Steven Tash, to save you a Google search, was that nerd that got shocked by Bill Murray at the beginning of Ghostbusters ( "I'm getting a little tired of this!" remember?). Beach Balls has the feel of one of those 80s LA punk rock movies, like Repo Man, or another Corman production, Suburbia; the wandering youth headed to clubs, the stabs at dark comedy and the low budget give it a grittier feel than expected. This movie is far too silly, however, and by the numbers to have wound up with the status of either of those films, plus these are lame metal/ beach kids, not superkool punk rockers.
I think Lee Ving would have kicked sand in all of their faces:
Oh, yeah. The uptight sister in this one gets topless.
Robert Carradine is back in the NEW (2012) movie Bikini Spring Break from Asylum, the people who make those low budget rip offs of big budget films (ie. Transformers = Transmorphers, Thor = Almighty Thor, etc). Just in time for, well, SUMMER break, Bikini Spring Break is, naturally, the low budget rip off of this movie, relying on what Fred Olen Ray would call the "cheapest special effect," bare-assed ladies.
The plot has a group of marching band musicians on the way to "nationals," but they break down in some town where they have Jello wrestling events in the middle of the day. With the advent of free hardcore internet pornography, the topless, plotless spring break film has become a rarity. This movie keeps the bottoms on and the expectations low. Robert Carradine, as it turns out, is pretty believable as a surly, old alcoholic, probably thanks to Sam Fuller (a surly, old alcoholic). The four leads are all charming and able to make the characters distinct from one another.
Let's not beat around the bush, though. Bikini Spring Break has no budget; stadium crowd scenes feature, like, 20 people, the town is supposed to be bustling with spring break craziness, but the girls run into the same three characters over and over again. Whatever, you know what you're getting into. They don't try to have spaceships or battle scenes or anything too demanding.
Crown International Pictures started up in the early 60s (late 50s?) and were a lower rent AIP; they had no graduates like Scorcese, Coppola or Jack Nicholson, but they had Robert Carradine! Pom Pom Girls and Malibu Beach are two examples of rambling 70s T&A comedies that cram a bunch of gags into a scant 80 minutes. POM POM GIRLS PLOT: There's a couple of high school goofballs trying to make it with as many hot girls as possible while a prank war rages, a bully is jealous of Robert Carradine. MALIBU BEACH PLOT: There's a couple of high school goofballs trying to make it with as many hot girls as possible at Malibu Beach, a bully is jealous of an actor who is not Robert Carradine. There's quite a bit of overlap as you can well imagine, for instance, the casts feature a number of the same actors and both films feature a game of chicken and car wrecks. Malibu Beach features a fake shark with gas and a dog that snatches bikini tops, Pom Pom Girls features a 70s make-out van, a food fight and the girls locker room. We found these in a 10-pack of Crown International movies, highly recommended.
