All posts by Louis Fowler

Comedy

Vibes (1988)

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Originally intended by Hollywood to star Cyndi Lauper and Dan Aykroyd, the feature film Vibes instead stars Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Goldblum. While both Aykroyd and Goldblum are the quintessential movie nerds, each would have played the character of Nick Deezy very differently, with Goldblum’s being the perfect blend of lost and delirious that the movie needed.

Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with The Couch Trip instead.

After meeting in a New York University study on parapsychology — I think — psychics Nick and Sylvia (Lauper) become engrossed in the seemingly drunk Harry (Peter Falk) and his tall tales of mental riches in South America. But with Nick’s memory of objects and Sylvia’s ghost-whispering, they find out it’s just some get-rich-quick scheme, all the while somehow falling in love. Somehow.

Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with The Great Outdoors instead.

Once Nick and Sylvia, along with Harry, make it to Ecuador, so does a weird, chubby German guy with a real name made out of baby words I will not type here. As he tries various ways to assassinate them, including a strange sexual imposition from seductress Elizabeth Peña, it turns out to be a plot by an NYU professor (Julian Sands).

Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with Caddyshack II instead.

Directed with a heavy hand and a birdbrain toward the weird by Ken Kwapis as his follow-up to Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, this film is most famous as Lauper’s bid for silver-screen stardom crashed and burned; maybe a better film would be how being in such a mediocre movie would trap her on an Trivial Pursuit: Totally 80s card.

Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with My Stepmother Is an Alien instead. —Louis Fowler

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Action

Guns Akimbo (2019)

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While I probably would have enjoyed Guns Akimbo 20 — hell, maybe even 10 — years ago, now it seems like the kind of film I just want to end and, as sick as it is, very slowly and mostly painfully. Having seen movies like this with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Austin and, yes, even Jim Carrey, there should be a self-imposed ban on all camera-ready setups, starting with this one starring the former Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe.

Here, Radcliffe is Miles, a typical video-game nerd who, like most video-game nerds, spends most of his time shit-posting instead of, you know, playing. When he makes the all-too-easy mistake of commenting on the Skizm — ugh — boards, the guys behind this multimillion dollar site break into his house and strap guns to his hands.

Before he can say “ouch,” the No. 1 killer in the game, Nix (Samara Weaving), is heading to his apartment to blast him all to hell. Meanwhile, frequent viewers of the game sit around, stay fat and wish for the goriest of deaths upon him.

And that’s all well and good, I suppose, but, like I said, we’ve seen this trope so many times by now — many with a trademarked supposed satirical bent — what exactly is it Guns Akimbo is trying to say?

And what about the guy trying to say it, New Zealand director Jason Lei Howden? I enjoyed his previous flick, the metal-obsessed comedy Deathgasm, but here it seems as if he’s fallen into the perilous pit of a sophomore slump, the worst kind: a pointless killer fiasco that will probably cost Radcliffe more than a few jobs, all of which he’s lucky to get anyway. —Louis Fowler

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Tremors (1990)

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Living in Perfection, Nevada, is a daily reminder that the world has passed you by. With a population of only 17 people and one general store, it’s a place that reminds me of the Texas towns I lived around — sometimes with even less than that — so I can truly see why the people in Tremors dream of leaving it.

But when best buds Valentine (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) come across very large — and very ugly — worms out in the desert, it makes leaving a whole helluvalot easier.

These are two dudes out in the sands putting up posts just to get by, when they manage to mess with a whole mess of these creatures — nicknamed “graboids” — making them the unlikely heroes of the story. With a seismologist named Rhonda (Finn Carter), as well as all the townspeople, they team up to fight the below-earth monsters, which seem to operate on the vibrations in the ground (although one of its six sequels might have changed that; I haven’t seen them all) and represent a species that science is quite late in discovering.

Although Bacon had many bombs at the time — many films I dug, mind you — this video-store hit was seemingly everything he needed to get back into Hollywood’s good graces. That same year, he was also part of the ensemble cast of Flatliners, which recently had a terrible remake; until 2018, this film only had sequels, all made for video.

Featuring an additionally somewhat-name cast that includes Victor Wong, Oklahoma country star Reba McEntire and Family Ties alum Michael Gross — who’s gone on to star in all those sequels — I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Tremors inspired me to always be on the lookout for cryptids in my own backyard, one of the half-dozen or so that saw this flick in the theater upon its original release.

Of course, I never found any … but I haven’t stopped looking. —Louis Fowler

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Documentary

Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana (2018)

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I was smack dab in the middle of the so-called zine revolution, writing and publishing my work on an irregular basis. As a contributor to the scene, I was clinically obsessed with the trade publication of the amateur industry, Factsheet 5. It was there where I first learned about Mike Diana, the publisher of Boiled Angel, a badly drawn comic featuring some of the most socially deviant acts of satanic sex.

At the time, I thought he was an attention-seeking sociopath who, like many zinesters, was looking for that big break into the mainstream. And, after viewing this documentary, it looks as though, for the most part, I was right and he definitely got it.

Helmed by Basket Case auteur Frank Henenlotter, Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana tells the tale of a man and his zine, a grotty little manifesto that got him in trouble with Florida law, mostly for his cartoons of rotten cannibalism, hardcore sex and other acts of salacious storytelling.

While I would have (should have?) purchased it at the time and just forgotten about it, instead the trashiest state in the union decided to punish him for the immoral zine, causing him to become a hero in the eyes of those who independently published even lesser material. And I’ll admit it: I was one of them. While Diana is very much a troubled soul who should have been left by the wayside the way most zine publishers were, I guess the movement needed a hero and he was, whether he wanted to be, it.

Judging on what he was publishing, I guess it was somewhat worth it, although I don’t think he was mentally prepared for it. If I’m being honest, neither were any of the zinesters at the time, with most of us finally knowing the true story of Diana and Boiled Angel thanks to this documentary; as they say, knowing is half the battle. So while I can’t say Diana is a personal hero, to those of us doing zines, he was definitely on the far right — or is it left? — of the heroic scale. —Louis Fowler

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Comedy

The Heavenly Kid (1985)

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I saw more flicks on cable in the ’80s than anywhere else, especially on HBO. One of those movies happened to be The Heavenly Kid, a twice-a-day film, typically catching it both in the late morning and early evening. I was that way with a lot of movies, mind you, but this one was, for the most part, different.

Sure, it had the sex and drugs and all that, but it also had an early-’60s juvenile delinquent named Bobby (Lewis Smith) who, after a dragstrip race gone bad, comes back to earth to help a kid named Lenny (Jason Gedrick) become a world-class chick-scorer; he’s doing this all in the name of getting to “Uptown,” by the way.

But while Lenny is becoming the teen king — or, at least, the teen prince — of cool, Bobby learns that not only is Lenny his son, but Bobby has to grow up and, figuratively, become a man so his son will live to fight another day. When I was a kid myself, I thought that that was a neat little riff, but all grown up now, I can kind of see what director and writer Cary Medoway was trying to say.

I mean, sure, it was in a teen sex comedy, but there’s a lesson about maturity somewhere in there, I promise.

At the time of release, right after he appeared in the anachronistic sci-fi flick Buckaroo Banzai, Smith was poised to be a big name, only to star in the TV-movie version of David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth before fading into semi-obscurity. It’s kind of a shame, really, because he could’ve been a big star. At least I think so.

Instead, Gedrick, Jane Kaczmarek, Richard Mulligan and future starlet Nancy Valen — whom you may remember in infomercials for the Thigh Roller, Thin ’n Sexy Body Wrap and Kevin Trudeau’s Debt Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About — seemed to have any career. But, in the ’80s, this heavenly kid thought Smith was as cool as cool got, with this movie being an absolute revelation. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.