Today, Steven Paul is best known (if at all) as the guy who keeps Jon Voight working in such modern crapsterpieces as Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Karate Dog and Bratz, but back in 1986, he was busy trying to live down the failure of his infamous 1982 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation, Slapstick (of Another Kind), which likely will go down in history as the worst movie ever made based on a book by a modern literary master.

Apparently, Hollywood decided four years was long enough to leave him dangling before allowing him to co-write and produce Never Too Young to Die, a strange attempt to create a new action franchise that tried to fuse the retro campiness of ’60s secret agent movies with the gender-bending campiness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Future Full House icon John Stamos plays Lance Stargrove the (teenage?) son of American secret agent Drew Stargrove (George Lazenby, who presumably got the part because Roger Moore read it and told Paul and company to go fuck themselves), who’s killed attempting to stop an evil scheme to turn the nation’s drinking water into radioactive sludge by a hermaphroditic maniac named Velvet Von Ragner (Gene Simmons, summoning the collective spirits of John LaZar and Tim Curry). Lance is aided in his mission to avenge his father’s death by his glamorous partner Danja Deering (ex-Prince associate and Tanya’s Island star Vanity, who isn’t quite hot enough to make up for the fact that she’s one of the worst actresses of all time) and his (boarding school/college?) roommate Cliff (Peter Kwong), an Asian gadget genius.

Directed by TV vet Gil Bettman, Never Too Young to Die clearly was meant to stand out from the ’80s action crowd, but its overt attempts at over-the-top campiness only serve to highlight how boring and generally crappy the rest of the film is. Simmons obviously had a fun time playing his version of an Adam West Batman villain, but his giddiness only serves to prove how bland Stamos and Vanity are in comparison. Because of this, the implied sequels never happened and the chances of Stamos ever appearing in an Expendables entry turned to naught. Somehow, however, Paul managed to keep on working, if only to give his friend, Voight — who gets a songwriting credit (!) in this flick — a much-needed paycheck every now and then. —Allan Mott

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