Alright, guys, this review is a little bit different and is gonna be kinda short. Different because this particular VHS isn’t a narrative film, but an educational film on sex and aimed at teenagers. It’s gonna be short because, well, I’m not gonna rip on this at all and believe me, I bought this thing fully prepared to tear it apart. The problem with How Can I Tell If I’m Really In Love? is that it’s pretty damned good. Hosted by Justine Bateman and featuring her bro Jason, the film answers the questions that pretty much anyone has when they’re a kid and never panders. If I were a parent or a teacher I would definitely show this tape to my kids. I expected the info to be dated but, really, the only things that’s dated in it are the clothes the kids are wearing. Everyone is from some special high school in Los Angeles, so everyone just looks vaguely douchey in that L.A. preppy kinda way. Not that I mind as I am guilty of rocking that look from time to time. 

Anyway, the scenes of Justine and Jason talking about their own personal experiences and the questions they had growing up are interspersed with scenes of one Dr. Sol Morton lecturing the students of the aforementioned high school. This guy is awesome. He’s funny, and animated, and just a really lively old dude who doesn’t want to bullshit kids. That’s something that’s respectable.

This whole video was actually based on a comic book Dr. Gordon wrote, which sold copy after copy after copy at Syracuse University where it was published, and which was deemed pornographic by many uptight parents. I looked into this guy and it seems he did a lot to help educate kids on matters concerning sex and intimacy, and many other issues kids are concerned about. He primarily worked in the comic book medium, trying to reach the many kids who seemed to be averse to reading. If you get a chance look this dude up. There’s not a Wikipedia entry on him, but you’ll be able to find a little information, and his writings are still widely available.

Now, full disclosure, I didn’t buy this because I desperately needed answers on sex, no, when it comes to sex I, naturally, have all the answers. I bought this after my mom saw a picture of it somewhere online and pointed it out to me since it features my man Jason Bateman. I’m huge Bateman fan. Immediately, I hopped on Ebay and saw there was only two copies listed. Luckily, I was able to snag one for about five bucks. In addition to it being of educational value and featuring Jason Bateman, it also features Mr. Ted Danson(??) Of course, you should buy it for that WTF factor. I guess Ted was supposed to represent, maybe, the parent’s point of view since he was middle aged at the time. Or maybe, at the time, teens were really down with Cheers. I don’t know. But I do know that I was a little upset that they left one question unanswered. What the fuck is wrong with Ted Danson’s face?

Seriously, take another look.

Look, if anyone has any information to whether or not Danson suffers from any sort of real deformity please let me know.

Oh, shit. My bad guys. That’s a picture of Easter Island. Well, I guess that’s it’s for this installment of What The Fuck Is Tracking? Be sure to check back sometime in the future for my next review.

brendenjones:

Shout out to the dudes over at VHShitfest. Received my copy of Hell Roller in the mail earlier today. Stoked to watch it later on tonight. Good job, guys.

Sorry this thing is off to sort of a slow start, but I am working on a new review for this week and I’ll try to update as much as I can. I’d like to maybe get it to one post a week. That doesn’t seem too bad and I should be able to do it even though I constantly work. Anyway, thanks for follow and thanks for reading this shit!

In 1990’s Repo Jake we have motherfucking Grizzly Adams himself Dan Haggerty as the titular Jake, a good natured guy new to L.A. and eager to start his new job as a repo man, picking up cars from owners who are behind on the payments. When we’re introduced to Jake he’s fresh off the bus, walking down the street, duffle bag and portable TV in hand, when he witnesses a mugger attempting to rob a pretty, young woman. Not one to stand around and let this kinda shit go down, Dan, of course, proceeds to fend the mugger off. He beats the guys ass and even throws the guy through the window of a pizza shop. The proprietor of the pizza place doesn’t even care though. In fact, he looks down right bemused. But, hey, it’s LA, crime is so rampant that it would leave anyone, even your local pizza guy, with a sense of disaffection.

Anyway, after the whole action packed fight scene has ended Jenny, the young woman Jake has helped, asks if there’s any way she can repay him. Well, it turns out Jake has moved to the city without any place to stay and as luck would have it, there’s one available room in Jenny’s building. This is about as much of the story as I can really understand. The cover of this movie is beautiful and you would think with that guy pushing that girl up against that Mercedes in the background, Dan standing there with that shot gun, and that tag line—Some people play for money. Some people play for keeps—that Repo Jake is some kind of sexy or sultry action/thriller type deal. It’s not. It’s really just a collection of loosely connected scenes that attempt to constitute action, but every time some sort of action kinda happens the pacing just feels wacky, and I swear that the film is sped up, probably to try to enhance the laziness of the actors when they were filming. It doesn’t make the fighting look anymore intense, it just sort of reminds me of the way people would move around in some slapstick silent film. A lot of the time, with the tone and pacing of a lot of scenes, I was starting to view this movie as a sort of precursor to Walker: Texas Ranger.

Jake’s first assignment as Repo Man extraordinaire is to repossess a helicopter because, as the boss, Bullfrog, points out, Jake was once in the Marines. What Jake did in the Marines isn’t really specified, but surely he can pilot the chopper because no matter what infantry you’re in they teach you that kinda thing. Next we’re introduced to the Slam Track, a race track where all the repo guys go to hang out because one of them, Blondie, has a race car. If you think Nascar is fucking boring and just a bunch of cars going around in a circle then you’ll fucking love the Slam Track scenes. I think the race scenes were just some stock footage they had and so they pulled an Ed Wood and threw it into the script. Whenever they would cut back to the group of guys from the racing it didn’t seem like they were in the same location. After this first eventful day at work we’re treated to some scenes of Jake and Jenny together once again, trying to form the basis of some romance, I guess. I mean they’re having dinner together and talking but share absolutely no chemistry. And Jake does seem old enough to be her father. The scenes with Jenny are where we get some back story on Jake though. We find out he moved from Minnesota (Where the Vikings are from, he tells Jenny(I was glad he cleared this up. I watch football, but for some reason was always unsure as to where that team was from) where he had some sort of shop that he is danger of losing if he doesn’t come up with 60,000 dollars. Jake is worried and seems almost dumbfounded by city living. Jenny has him all figured out: He grew in overalls, fishing and spearing frogs in the pond, hunting, that kind of shit. But, nope. Jake corrects her. He actually grew up in NYC, so really, he should understand the city quite well. I guess the guy is just a crazy old fart.

When Jake gets back to work Blondie has a perfect plan to get the 60,000 dollars involving a race down at the Slam Track. It involves everyone throwing in money and then winning some race and then giving someone else money and getting more money and having money left over for Jake. To be honest I don’t really know what the fuck the plan was even though it seemed like it took five minutes to explain his genius. Jake doesn’t really seemed too stoked on the plan anyway. He even laughs in the Blondie’s face. But it might not have been a mean laugh. Just a hardy, nice guy/grandpa type laugh. Between this time and the day of the big race Jake has his work cut out for him. He has to repossess that beautiful Mercedes that’s featured on the cover. Problem is that the Mercedes belongs to this dude King who’s a second-in-command in some crime syndicate. Why the fuck does a crime boss have car payments?? Anyway, everyone has been trying to repossess this thing forever, and of course, Jake proves that he’s the only one who can repossess the unrepossessable (yeah, I know that’s not a word, fuck you). King is pissed to no end when his Mercedes is taken away and decides that the Slam Track is to be his top priority even though his boss told him, “Fuck that noise. There’s no money in shitty race cars driven by dumbass repo men! The money’s in coke and whores!”, or something to that effect. (Full disclosure: I agree with the boss. Speaking from personal experience, I would say that doing massive amounts of blow and getting one’s dick wet is helluva lot more fun than driving some car around.) King also has his hands tied in what is described on the back of the box as a “sadistic porno ring”, but I really saw nothing sadistic about it unless you consider a director who wants the sex in a porno to be less romantic (gasp) a sadist. When we see the porno actually being filmed it seems like the screenwriter got the idea of a porn set confused with the set of a regular Hollywood movie. Porno isn’t usually shot on a sound stage.

In between all of this supposed action and plot development, if we can call it that, we get some gratuitous shots of titties. A lady is about to get her trailer repossessed when she pulls the old, “I don’t have any money, but are you sure there isn’t anything I could do?” schtick. This was probably just to ensure that the film would rise above a PG rating. Let’s go ahead and insert a gratuitous titty shot in here, if only to ensure this review is a NSFW review.

Finally the day comes and Jake goes along with Blondie’s plan, but Jake decides to drive the car he throws the fucking race to teach Blondie some kind of lesson! What the fuck?! I have no idea what the lesson was and why he would do this shit when he so desperately needed the 60,000 dollars! That’s pretty much the end. He walks off with Jenny who, I guess, for whatever dumb ass reason, has fallen in Love with Jake. Look, for as weird and as oddly paced and as dull as it is some spots, it’s all of that combined with all the unanswered questions like the one I’ve just posed that actually make this worth recommending. So go ahead and check it out if you got time. I got my copy off Ebay for only a few bucks from some guy who owns a video rental store and is finally, in the year 2011, getting rid of all his VHS. From what I’ve read online Repo Jake was shown at some film school (as an example of a poorly made film, I’m sure) in England and is now gaining some cult status over there. It’s even been released on DVD in good old England. It doesn’t look like there will ever be a DVD release here though. Oh, and if anyone has seen this thing and wants to let me know why Jake threw the race (did I miss a piece of dialogue?) please send me a message.

(A note about purchasing the stellar Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to Repo Jake: While incredibly rare and, actually, probably never even released because what would be the point? There is a way to recreate the music. Dust off that old Casiotone you owned as a kid and hit play one of the rock or pop presets and then hire a session musician to come to your house and play slide guitar over it. Boom. The Repo Jake score.)

“I am an invisible kid,” so begins Ralph Ellison’s novelization of the 1988 film The Invisible Kid, a teen comedy featuring Jay Underwood as high school student Grover Dunn. In the film Grover has been spending most of his time desperately trying to continue his deceased father’s work even though he’s not sure what exactly his father’s work was—he has notes that lead to a formula, only the formula is missing one key ingredient. I’m not even going to try to explain the science stuff because I didn’t really get what they were using or if it was even really explained, but when Grover and his best friend Milton McClane (Wally Ward) find whatever it was that was missing it’s revealed that the formula was for an invisibility serum. Or so they think. There is joke to what the stuff was really for but I won’t ruin that for you. I’ll the trailer do that.

Now, the tagline for this movie—“This kid’s motives are totally transparent!”—and the description on the back of the box would have you believe that all Grover wants to use his new power for is getting laid. That isn’t the case. Grover is a well meaning young man who just wants to go to the national science conference, or some shit. Milton, however, is the one with those intentions in mind. Right from the start Milton is an asshole and for no real reason. I kept asking myself why Grover was even friends with him. It’s not even like things changed and shit got real, causing Milton to lose sight of who he really is. No, the guy is just a fucking asshole. He convinces Grover to have some fun and go into the girls locker room to scope out some tits, and there were a lot of tits considering this is a PG movie, and after that, to pretend he cares about Grover, he sabotages Donny, Grover’s bully during the school basketball game. Everything’s going great, but then, oh shit, I forgot to mention that the invisibility wears off after thirty minutes. Well, you can guess one happens. They don’t make it back to the boys locker room in time to get their clothes and everyone sees them naked in the hall! Hilarity! (The invisibility serum doesn’t make your clothes disappear, do I need to mention this? I kinda thought something like that would go without saying. I’m putting in this aside anyway.) After the basketball game is where shit gets extra retarded. Grover and Milton had made Donny lose the game and now the principal is super pissed. It turns out Principal Baxter has been making deals with the mob and instructing Donny on when to win and when to throw the game and that particular game was supposed to be won. During the scene where Baxter chides Donny for not winning you don’t even see the mob goons and the tone is so weird that I actually thought the principal was about to proposition sex. But, I don’t know. I think a lot of things are gay. Maybe it’s just some repressed homosexuality seeping out.

Anyway, the plot just gets dumber and more convoluted and most of it has to do with the basketball games being fixed. Eventually Principal Baxter finds out about the invisibility and steals the serum, getting the mob to agree on investing the winnings from the next fixed basketball game on it’s mass production. What the fuck mob wants with an invisibility serum I don’t know. But they’re evil, right? I guess they want to do some dastardly shit with it. Outside of that Donny can’t come to terms with losing, Grover and Milton argue over what to do with the serum, and Donny’s girlfriend, Cindy, played by Chynna Phillips (who is a total fucking babe in this movie) doesn’t want to fuck him. She does eventually want to fuck Grover though, because a movie like this has to end with the pretty girl leaving the jock and getting with the more deserving nerd. That’s basically it. Oh, and Grover’s mom, played by Karen Black, is really fucking neurotic. She’s the comic relief in what is supposed to be a comedy. 

The thing with this movie is that I didn’t really get if it was supposed to be for younger kids or for teenagers. At times it seemed like it was for younger kids because not one character had any depth, like they were all just cartoons, but then I would think it was for teenagers because I would see tits or hear a small flurry of cuss words. In the end I felt confused several times and bored. Probably the longest ninety minutes of my life. Not even the performances could save this especially not Jay Underwood. That guy sucks. Straight up. His acting style pretty much consists of cracking his voice and widening his eyes and generally looking panicky. Most of the time he comes off like a poor man’s Marty McFly. I will say that some of the dialogue made me laugh though. The conversations on the topic of sex and trying to have it resonated with me because desperately trying to find someone willing to have sex with me is a weight I’ve carried well into adulthood. Sadly, that isn’t enough to make me say I enjoyed this movie. This probably could have been a good little film, with a title serving a double meaning, had it been about alienation and being a nerd or social outcast, but, no, it had to be about high school basketball games being fixed. For whatever fucking reason. If you ever come across a VHS copy of this just toss it out, it’s no wonder it’s never been released on DVD. Go and watch Zapped! instead. That’s a much better film concerning science, teens, mischief, and trying to get laid.

Patti Rocks is a 1988 film directed by David Burton Morris and co-written by Morris and the film’s three stars—Chris Mulkey, John Jenkins, and Karen Landry. I had never heard of this film before finding it in a Goodwill one day and finding this movie is something I couldn’t be happier about. Whenever you look through the VHS tapes at a thrift store you hardly find anything that unusual, mostly just typical Hollywood/Mainstream type stuff that everyone gave away because they bought all those movies again when DVD took over as the standard format. But every now and then something like this catches your eye—something that looks weird and offbeat and you just think, “What the hell is this?” That’s exactly how it was when I picked up this copy of Patti Rocks. I wasn’t really expecting too much. From the picture on the cover I was thinking it was just some wacky 80s comedy. I mean, come on, dude in boxers, snow boots, and jacket, holding a beer? Why wear a jacket and snow boots if you’re in boxers?? What sense does that make, bro? Fucking wacky! It was because of this picture that there wasn’t an iota of doubt about shelling out a couple bucks for this video.

When I got home and popped this baby in it didn’t take long to realize that what I had bought was the cinematic equivalent of Dirty Realism, the literary movement of the 1980s. This is a movie about sad working class people who, while trying to figure a lot of things out, are trying to figure their relationships out above all else. This is movie where people talk. That’s nearly all it is. If you don’t like movies that are almost completely reliant on dialogue then you won’t like this movie. That’s for sure. If you happen to revel in watching painful (and just because something’s painful doesn’t mean it isn’t funny) human interaction then this is Heaven.

Billy (Mulkey) calls Eddie (Jenkins) up out of the blue one day. They were friends at some point but have been estranged for nearly a year. They get together at a bar where they drink beer and play pool and talk. Billy’s call isn’t just an attempt to reconnect with old friend though. There’s an ulterior motive and Eddie has been suspicious of it the whole time. You see it seems that Billy has gotten someone pregnant—the titular Patti Rocks (Landry)—which shouldn’t be a problem except that he is married and already has children with his wife. He enjoys banging Patti but isn’t willing to break up his family for her. So Billy’s plan is to take a road trip out to see Patti and convince her to have an abortion. Eddie, having been such a close friend, is needed to come along and help do the talking. It takes some convincing but soon the two of them are on their way.

Most of the action, if you want to call it that, takes place in the car. Billy and Eddie continue their drinking and begin to let all of their opinions on life and love and women, no matter how offensive or downright asinine, spew out. Billy is the worse of the two—a completely macho, chauvinistic asshole. You almost want to say that he’s sort of a cartoon or a stereotype but the sad truth is that I’ve heard a lot of men talk like Billy. Here’s where you can call me a cynic because the shittier people are in films, the more realistic I find the film to be. And Billy is very realistic. Eddie is the better of the two but that isn’t really saying much. Anyone who hangs around Billy because he’s “pretty entertaining” is an asshole in his own right. Take Billy’s tirade about gays and transsexuals for instance. It is beyond ridiculous. How anyone could hear someone say something like that and then remain friends with the person I do not know. Eddie is just an asshole in more of a subtle way I suppose. He has the nicer clothes and car and job but is really no more of a man than Billy is, even though he feels that he holds some sort of weird superiority. He may be a dick but not so much that he would get his mistress pregnant and then try to talk her into an abortion.

The final act takes place at Patti’s apartment where more drinking and more talking ensues. Almost immediately upon meeting Patti it becomes abundantly clear that, of the three, she has the best head on her shoulders. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this is in huge contrast to all the information we’ve heard about her from Billy. The idea of the powerful, self-assured, assertive woman of the 80s is often talked about, but without Patti Rocks can it be given serious consideration? I don’t know. But I like to think not because to me Patti seems to be the most self-assured woman in all of 80s cinema.

This is a fantastic film which I guess came and went pretty fast upon it’s release despite some good reviews. Apparently it had a bit of a second life a few years ago when IFC began airing it, but the number of people who actually know about this film is still pretty small, it seems, and I’m just glad to be able to count myself among the group. When I initially looked Patti Rocks up on the internet after buying it I found hardly any information. That’s the fucking killer—when you’re absolutely obsessing over something but can’t find anything about it, which only makes you obsess more. I did learn that it’s a follow up to another movie—Loose Ends. That was Morris’ first film which is even harder to find. But unlike Patti Rocks, which is a comedic drama, Loose Ends is all drama and is more about the general sadness of being a working class schmo than it is about relationships. While grateful for at least having this movie I am still dying to see Loose Ends.

There’s been some internet hearsay that DVDs of Patti Rocks are available through David Burton Morris himself if you contact him on his Facebook page. If true this is probably a print on demand/CD-R type of deal. I am tempted to write to him. I’m just waiting to get my thoughts right and to be able to express to him eloquently how much I love his fucking movie. Maybe he’ll be so touched he’ll even hook me up with Loose Ends. Maybe not. I just want more people to know about this movie. It’s so great and deserves a wide release. 

In the end Patti Rocks is definitely a movie that reminds you to never throw out your VCR and always—ALWAYS— keep your eyes peeled on the VHS shelves of your local thrift stores. You never know what you’ll find.

[Note: Yes, the box for this tape is a former rental and is cut. I know this is something that collectors don’t like. In future posts I will address such things and focus on the collecting aspect of VHS. That’s of course more with the weird horror/exploitation stuff. This however is a genuinely good film that I cannot understand not having an official DVD release. I chose to have this be the first post because it’s a movie that got me seriously thinking about VHS again. So what I’m saying is that this blog will fluctuate between the collector type posts and the personal narrative-film review type stuff. I am even considering writing VHS history type posts. I hope, dear reader, that this is all okay with you and that you will be able to enjoy all this blog has to offer.]