Cine-Trash Field Report

by William Ham
Illustration by Michael Corcoran

Further and further. It gets darker with every step I take into the miasma and yet I soldier on – even though I know all too well what awaits. Of course I do – I’m grafting this ill-fitting literary conceit onto my expedition to a Caribbean island which was mostly spent watching satellite TV months after the fact. Bear with me, though – if I can make this bleakly heroic enough, my accountant might be able to help me deduct it.

So where was I? Ah, yes, I’d pulled my feet out of the Teen-Comedy swamp that John Hughes added to the landscape – an inescapable quagmire, that – only to stumble over a dangling vine and fall face-first into a heap of Patrick Dempsey. He’s been caged up in the Direct to Video internment camp for a few years now, but there was a time (the late ’80s – if you don’t recall it, trust me, you missed nothing) when he pissed off teenage boys across the country by constantly and inexplicably getting cast in movies where, in spite of his general obnoxiousness, unpleasant mug, and a lethal aura of petulance and annoyance (which, however accurate a composite of adolescence it may have been, was still deeply painful to have to watch on screen), he got to boff numerous women who strangely found him irresistible. Some Girls (cough), In the Mood (choke), Loverboy (gak)… all titles that still send the digestive magma racing up my throat, but for sheer unrestrained nausea and homicidal inspiration, nothing surpasses Can’t Buy Me Love. You remember – that’s the one where Dempsey pays the most popular girl in school $1000 to pretend to go out with him for a month, then acts like an irredeemable asshole the whole time but ends up winning her over anyway. As an indictment of our capitalist system and a piece of worthy propaganda for the extermination of all screenwriters with a lingering sense of high-school social estrangement that only writing moronic teen comedies can satiate, it has few equals. (Let me add, however, that not only has Dempsey gotten less excruciating as an actor as he’s grown up, but some of his recent roles have taken on a tinge of near-poetic justice – in Robert Downey, Sr.’s indescribably weird [but bizarrely charming] 1996 film Hugo Pool, he plays a guy afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s Disease – not only does he not speak a word of dialogue, but he has sex exactly once in the film, then dies immediately afterwards. Vengeance is sweet, sayeth me.)

With a surfeit of bravery and a touch of queasiness, I picked myself up, noticing that an even more Cimmerian stretch of young-adult cinemuck lay before me. Stealthily, I performed a swift feint to the west – and found myself in even scarier climes. A region where all the beasts have buck teeth and badly-shorn coats and the cry of “HEY LA-DEEES!” chills the tropical air. Not sure which area I mean? Would it help if I mention that the French love it? That’s right, fellow explorers – I found myself in Jerry Lewis country. Some patches of this zone are truly strange, and the one I landed in was no different – a land that time either forgot or just neglected out of disgust. Which Way to the Front? takes place in a territory that even Kurt Vonnegut (who provided the inspiration for the utterly unwatchable alien Lewis vehicle, Slapstick of Another Kind) would have scoffed at – a place where World War II was evidently still going on in 1967, and, like the aliens’ foreheads in This Island Earth, nobody seems to notice. Lewis plays a self-made millionaire who dearly wants to be drafted, but is turned down, so he gathers a group of ragtag 4-Fsters and starts his own bozo battalion. I actually held out some hopes at the beginning, as he doesn’t go into any spazileptic fits for a whole half-hour, but then he jackknifes into his usual doofus role. As his platoon of poltroons set out to throw the Nazis off their Axis, my only wish was that they get captured and thrown into the same camp where his legendary, little-seen Holocaust farce, The Day the Clown Cried, takes place. Regrettably, nothing of the sort happened. I wonder what the aged members of the French Resistance made of this – I bet they wished they could collaborate retroactively.

Thinking that nothing could be worse than this, I squeegeed the sweat from my brow and went back the way I came – and was again proven horrifically wrong. Empire Records lie waiting for me, the “brain”child of one Allan Moyle, a man responsible for foisting some of the most heavy-handed teensploitation tales ever to be wrapped around some pretty good soundtracks (the horrendous Times Square and the accidentally-entertaining Pump Up the Volume). This one, you may recall, was so bad that it was never even theatrically released – this day-in-the-life study of a gang of dimwit teens fighting to save the record store they work at from a corporate takeover is distinguished by a completely pointless plot, the pre-Jerry Maguire appearance of Jewel doppelganger Renee Zewilliger as a short-skirted piece of slunkmeat, Australian actor Maxwell Caulfield proving the heretofore-thought impossible tenet that there is farther down to go from Grease 2, and Liv Tyler showing off the ugliest female skivvies ever designed by human hands.

From there, I broke into a run. There had to be an oasis somewhere. Wait. I hear steel drums, smell fresh air… there’s a man dancing stiffly… I come closer, grasping the remote in my sweaty palm… oh, there’s… uh, Barry Bostwick… uh-oh… Jonathan Silverman… oh, god… Andrew McCarthy. Oh, please, sweet Jah, no… it’s not… Weekend at Bernie’s II!!!

And that’s when I woke up, screaming and so mortified that only a case of Red Stripe and a trunkful of what the natives call “sugar cane” could even begin to calm me down. Never again, dear Lord. Never again.