STRIKE BACK (1981)

  Revenge in 80s Germany featuring a Dolph Lundgren-looking fellow named Dave Balko. Scored with some new-wave/punk of the time this one isn't terrible even if it's also not all that engaging of a story. To be fair I've only seen this on a crappy-looking VHS so perhaps it would be somewhat improved if one of these boutique labels got their hands on it and cleaned it up. 

PUNK VACATION (1987)

  Filmed in 1987 but not released(straight to video) until 1990 this one is a sort-of biker flick if the bikers were a bunch of goofy-ass new-wave/punk rockers and valley girls instead of actual tough guys. When I compare this to the greatest goofy-ass punk biker-sploitation flick ever INTEPIDOS PUNKS, the only thing it really resembles, it really pales in comparison. The violence never really gets as over the top as that classic and some of the stereotypical characters here are more grating than anything else. There's a group of ultra-patriotic rednecks, even though this was filmed in the mountains of Santa Monica California, rats kept as pets, cucumbers used to silence a rifle, no nudity but gals in their underwear on display and you're never exactly sure who you're supposed to be rooting for. All in all a mildly-amusing non-essential timewaster.    

 

Snazzy German poster:

TWISTED ISSUES (1988)

  I suppose this shot-on-video horror flick/music video at least serves as an interesting time-capsule showing what the skater-punk scene was like in Gainesville, Florida back in 1988. Besides that it's like pretty much every other experimental shot-on-video thing made in the 80s. It inter-splices news footage and TV junk with homemade gore. There's sort-of a plot about a skater getting whacked and coming back as a killer zombie-monster with his board drilled onto his foot but it seems like mostly just an excuse to feature your friend's band on the soundtrack. Apparently different scenes were shot by various people which would explain the disjointed nonsensical mess that results. Makes for good background noise and visuals if you're a nostalgic garbage-music fan but good luck sitting through it all.

                              Works better as a 3 minute short!:

WILD ZERO (1999)

 Being a fan of the Japanese punk-a-billy band Guitar Wolf I've been wanting to see this movie since it came out but haven't had the chance. So when it got a showing down at the local artsy-fartsy theater over the weekend I couldn't pass it up. It was definitely worth the trip since this one is a great Asian mash-up of insanity where you get a rock 'n' roll band that are basically superheroes who look like the Japanese Ramones taking on zombies who come from flying saucers. There's also some baldie bad guys lead by this one snazzy fellow who wears extra tight hot pants and crazy wigs. There's also a strong pro-tranny message which I wouldn't've thought would be in a movie from '99 but I guess the director(Tetsuro Takeuchi) was a little ahead of the times. This film might not be very serious and there's cgi exploding heads but I still found it to be more entertaining than most American films made in the 90s and it made me love Guitar Wolf even more

STORY OF A JUNKIE (1985)

 If you have an aversion to seeing people shove needles in their arms this might not be the film for you. If, however, you can appreciate a dark look at 1980's New York City junkie subculture then give this one a look. It's mostly a documentary about John Spacely, who was a heroin-addicted punk who lived on the lower east side way before it became a big shopping mall for rich snobs like it is today. He eventually ended up dying of the AIDS in the 1992. There's also some reenactments of criminal activities here and there to liven things up. It's a pretty cool/gritty look at drug abuse and people generally making bad life choices. It does get a little slow in parts but I think this just adds to the artsy quality of the whole thing. This has got to be the most artsy-fartsy thing Troma ever released. AKA GRINGO

TERMINAL USA (1993)

 Back in the 90's pretty much everything made by Hollywood was a waste of time so I became obsessed with the works of underground filmmakers like Nick Zedd, Richard Kern and the whole Cinema of Transgression movement. Back then I did see the name Jon Moritsugu pop up in zines here and there but outside of a couple of shorts I somehow avoided seeing any of his stuff. Thanks to a recent retrospective put on here in New York I was able to catch a couple of his strange, punk-rock fueled masterpieces with a theater full of art-cinema weirdos and other assorted oddballs.
 TERMINAL USA is a bizarre mix of Nick Zedd and John Waters told from the Asian-American perspective with a heavy emphasis on punk-nihilism. It tells the tale of a not-very typical Japanese-American family made up of two sons(both played by Moritsugu himself) one a drug-dealing "Live Fast Die Young", Sid Vicious-wannabe-sorta fella and the other a bookish nerd who masturbates by humping his rocking horse while perusing gay skinhead porn. There's also the slutty-cheerleader daughter who gives head to visitors in the bathroom, impotent dad, crazy mom and comatose grandpa whose life is constantly being threatened. Besides the Asian-stereotypes other stereotypical characters show up and get mocked including skinheads, jocks and a lawyer who runs a kiddie-porn ring. The dialogue is great and hilarious, which it kinda has to be in a film with a very low-budget, it all has that same kinda shock-value comedic effect that the classic John Waters movies have and everything ends in an insane sci-fi twist that you will not see coming.
I'm really glad I got woken up to the West Coast transgression master and will be seeking out whatever else is out there from Mr. Moritsugu. His greatest feat, to me, is that this film was somehow funded by PBS which boggles my mind that it played on Public Television Stations at some point because even in a censored form I can see this rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.

"Live Stupid, Die Dumb!":



 Horsey-humping!:

LA VENGAZA DE LOS PUNKS (1987)

                  "Long Live Death!, Long Live Coke!, Long Live Weed!, Long Live Alcohol!"

 It took a few years but the punk/biker/Satanist gang of miscreants from one of my favorite Mexican movies of all time INTREPIDOS PUNKS return and get their revenge in this crazy-ass sequel. It all starts off with a jailbreak and mass raping and killings which our gang is very good at. They kill a cops whole family but stupidly leave him alive which leads to some more revenge from Mr. Policia. This is where the movie takes a turn into a more sadistic type of film since our vengeful cop, who does look a bit like a Mexican Charles Bronson, doesn't just kill gang members but kidnaps them to take them home and torture them at his leisure. These scenes sorta reminded me of something like THE DEVIL'S REJECTS where they flip our sympathies from the heroes to the villains but I'm not sure if that was actually the intent here. There's some especially nasty bits with the female members which involves some whippings and fun with acid which might be a little upsetting to more sensitive viewers and gives the film an even more misogynistic tone than it already had. While this isn't as fun as the first film it is a pretty decent sequel which goes down a darker path. There's also a bit of a cop-out ending but after the way they set everything up I'm not sure how else they coulda culminated everything without making rape-happy punks the heroes which I don't think your typical Mexican audiences are ready for even today. I guess they coulda just had a slasher movie ending, which come to think of it they kinda do.

"Lord of Hell. Your sons adore you":

INTREPIDOS PUNKS (1988)

                                         "Drinks first, then food, asshole!" 

 INTREPIDOS PUNKS, or INTREPID PUNKS for English-type people, might be one of the greatest movies I've ever seen.  It's also the only Mexican biker movie I've ever seen and not only is it a biker movie but it's a biker movie mixed with punk rockers, a little dash of Lucha Libre/Mexican wrestling and a cop thriller with tons of senseless violence.  If there's a movie that depicts random acts of insane violence and rape in a more fun way than this movie I have no idea what it would be.  Kind of like a Spanish version of an early good Troma movie.  The main characters here are a gang of punk rockers named things like CALIGULA and TITS who ride sweet motorcycles and seem to have been inspired by CHEECH & CHONG'S look in UP IN SMOKE, super hot 80's music video-looking gals and a leader named Tarzan who wears a silver mask and delivers flying dropkicks and pile-drivers to anyone that pisses him off.  There's also a female leader named BEAST played by a very porn-movie star looking lady named Princesa Lea who makes funky music play every time she exposes her boobs, in fact the whole gang is so awesome that they have their own theme song that screams their name whenever they show up.  They also have their own personal rockin' band that comes out and plays while they rape women which leads to the wackiest rape scene I've ever seen and it practically dares you not to laugh while seemingly innocent women are being assaulted.  These are terrible people who chop off hands, set fire to a poor gas station attendant and often get very rape happy but they're so much damn fun to watch and they seem like they're having such a blast that it's hard to root for the good guys here which makes the ending where the cops strike back a bit of a bummer.  I imagine this was probably a really fun movie to make and that comes through while you're watching it.  I also learned from this film that in order to be a cop in Mexico all you need is a sweet 70's porn guy mustache and a barrel chest.  An obscure masterpiece!
 I'm pretty sure this movie only exists on a shitty looking VHS copy since that's the only way I've seen it, even in a theatrical-showing last night they just projected that version which looked very wonky.  They leave the ending open for a sequel which came along in '91 called VENGEANCE OF THE PUNKS which I really need to find immediately.  .

A guy gets run over by a tank and ninja stars fly!:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS (1982)

"Every girl should be given an electric guitar on her 16th birthday."

I recall this movie playing a lot on USA networks Night Flight show back in the 80's. I also remember this film being sited by many of the riot-grrl bands of the 90's as one of their major inspirations and I can see why. It's the story of young girls from a shitty town who play punk rock and become stars for being voices of truth in the stagnant cesspool of male dominated rock n roll in the early 1980's.
The best bits of this film are in the first half. You see the awful environment our heroine(Diane Lane who was about 17 when this movie was shot) is raised in, her and her sister's(Laura Dern who musta been about 15) depressing home life. Living with their stupid alcoholic aunt after their mom dies in a burned out suburbia isn't all it's cracked up to be. From there you get a pretty unbelievable yet captivating tale of their collective escape from a typical boring American existence.
The parts where I thought the movie fell apart come towards the back end of the film where things happen really quickly and any believability that you might have had in the film is thrown out the window. It seems like their was a rush to the end and it shows in some badly edited parts that all the cult film fans seem to overlook in every review I've ever seen of this film. I also felt that the tacked-on MTV video ending(filmed a year after the rest of the movie) seemed totally out of place and was just added to give everything an uplifting finale which I guess your average 80's film-goer would have demanded. All this being said I really don't want to be too negative in my look at this movie since I feel it's totally worth checking out.
You get some catchy tunes, a chance to see a band made up of half of the Sex Pistols(Steve Jones and Paul Cook) along with The Clash's Paul Simonon and great character actor Ray Winstone as a sorta Johnny Rotten-impersonating lead singer. Also members of The Tubes appear as an old washed-up glam band and you get a quick scene with Black Randy And The Metrosquad, which were a really underrated LA band that, as far as I know, there's very little footage of. Under everything there's overt messages of female empowerment, individuality and remaining true to yourself in the face of greedy shitheels.  If this movie is the reason that a bunch of females got off their asses and had fun making some silly punk music I'm glad it exists.

ANOTHER STATE OF MIND (1984)

If your any kind of fan of 80's punk rock/hardcore music this is something you need to check out for a time capsule of a couple of bands in that time period.  The documentary follows the bands Social Distortion and Youth Brigade on a tour of the U.S. on a shitty old bus.  Everything doesn't go as planned, people fight, the bus breaks down and loud music ensues.  Things I learned from this: punk rockers in Canada are extra crazy, you can practice stage diving in a swimming pool and Goth chicks were confused with punkers back in the 80's.  My favorite band in this whole thing are Minor Threat who get their microphones taken away but still go on with the show anyway just shouting the lyrics extra loudly with help from their fans.  That sorta summed up the whole unity idea to me.  Going to any show like this today I can't imagine too many people having as much fun as they did back in these days or even getting into it as much.  It all seems like a stupid retro fashion show nowadays but what the hell do I know?  Everything looks better when you throw some nostalgia on it.  I've never been too much into the idea of group-thinking anyway but I suppose if you have to pick a group to belong to, one that at least espouses the ideal of individuality seems better than some.  Then there's a segment with Christian punks that seemed really baffling to that whole idea and made no sense.  THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION is a better made film in the same genre with much better bands overall but this one's still worth viewing for a quick snapshot of slamdancin' history.

THE FILTH AND THE FURY (2000)

 If you're a fan of The Sex Pistols you've probably seen all this footage before, of course, but director Julian Temple juxtaposes it with relevant stuff and adds some new commentaries by band members to make it an interesting watch. Still haven't seen his Joe Strummer documentary yet but the Pistols have always been so much more interesting and entertaining, to me anyway, than The Clash. Temple was also the director of THE GREAT ROCK 'N' ROLL SWINDLE back in 1980 which was a pretty piss poor fantasized version of this. Would make a sorta schizophrenic double feature though.

PUNK ROCK (1978)

I wanted to like this one more than I did. I mean mixing 70's punk rock with a porn movie seems like a natural, yet I had never seen it done before. Unfortunately the version I have is a soft-core version with all the fucking and sucking cut out. There is more music in this version though. The band THE FAST seem pretty awesome and I will be checking them out if possible. The whole thing doesn't really work as a look at the punk movement of the time since these bands are pretty unknown aside from THE FAST. And besides them these bands all seem pretty lame. The story is also a fairly dumb typical private-eye kinda thing. This is also known under various titles in differing degrees of raunchiness including- TEENAGE RUNAWAYS, ROCK FEVER and its original working title of PUNK ROCK ORGY MADNESS. How do you not go with PUNK ROCK ORGY MADNESS??? I guess that shows the brains behind this. As disappointing as this is it's still better than 98% of the porn made today and I can say that without even seeing the sex scenes. Go to Alpha Blue archives to get the hardcore version as seen above.