JOYSTICKS (1983)

 

 

If you’re looking for the three most imitated movies of the 1970’s, then two, HALLOWEEN (1978) and ALIEN (1979), stand out as fairly obvious.  The third is, undoubtedly ANIMAL HOUSE (1978), John Landis’ broad, bad-taste collegiate comedy about campus life.  ANIMAL HOUSE made a movie star of John Belushi, and mixed heady turns from new talent (well, fairly new in the case of Tim Matheson) with reliable shifts from well-known character actors like Donald Sutherland and John Vernon.  ANIMAL HOUSE mixes period nostalgia with decent performances, a funny, if gross-out script from Harold Ramis amongst others, with strong direction from John Landis, a director always at his best with broader comedy vehicles.  It was a huge box-office draw, and as we’ve already seen, that light shines bright enough to be seen in the murkiest film-making corners, and so the inevitable happened.

Like HALLOWEEN, ANIMAL HOUSE didn’t cost very much to make, and yet, an imitator could cull out the period setting and the casting costs of assured acting vets and, it was obviously thought, catch the same fire in a bottle.  This kind of thinking was going through the heads of indie producers cashing in on HALLOWEEN – Why pay for Steadicam or Donald Pleasance?  We can just set this sucker in the woods and be done with all that.  So it was with a lot of the ANIMAL HOUSE clones – the more slavish imitators might maintain a period setting, but most just went for tits and gross-outs.

The most obvious ANIMAL HOUSE clone is Bob Clark’s PORKY’S (1981).  Clark’s film has the same period setting, much of the same sex-driven comedy (In this case embodied in the titular Cathouse) but lacks the sense of drive and (believe it or not) subtlety of Landis’ film.  The film’s sequel – PORKY’S II (1983) is even more scattergun, mixing tits and ass comedy with a deep-fried southern race-fuelled melodrama that feels distinctly odd and not particularly funny.  Other films in the same comedy sub-genre that casual viewers may already know include REVENGE OF THE NERDS (1983) and its sequels, and FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982), which is probably the best and most acutely observed of the films that followed on from ANIMAL HOUSE, and which has a little more to it than tits and fart jokes.  Of course, these films were all either made or distributed by major studios, with decent financial backing, so they’re really only of passing interest to us.  It’s the dreck that thought no fart joke too gross or pair of tits to large or small that form the primary exploitation legacy of ANIMAL HOUSE.

Amongst these films are such titles as THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (1982), which we’ll review at a later date and most definitely  isn’t a run-of-the-mill sex comedy, HARDBODIES (1984), PRIVATE LESSONS (1983), MY TUTOR (1983), MALIBU BEACH (1982), PARTY ANIMALS (1983) and the subject of this review, Greydon Clark’s JOYSTICKS.

I could have picked any of these films to look at, but JOYSTICKS is the work of Greydon Clark, and no blog on exploitation movies would be complete without some mention of Clark.  We’ll talk a bit about the man and his work later, but save to say that JOYSTICKS is classic Clark, a cultural fad – driven low-budget movie (in this case the Video Arcade), made with a degree of professionalism, cruising the coat-tails of a big-budget hit, made on the cheap with unknowns, but with a single name actor to provide some audience recognition (in this case Clark regular Joe Don Baker).

JOYSTICKS follows the trials and tribulations of Video Arcade worker Jonathan McDorfus, who manages a video arcade in which more skin is on display than Minsky’s Burlesque and which is populated by the usual assortment of freaks and geeks.  The film is set in an unnamed sun-bleached Californian two-street burg, and the video arcade is the meeting point of high school nerds, Jocks, laughably over-the-top punks (including one of the films two antagonists King Vidiot, the San Bernardino Valley equivalent of Pete Townshend’s deaf, dumb and blind kid) and bleach-blonde Valley Girls.

King Vidiot punks his way through Bubble-bobble

Into this heady atmosphere of Pac-Man and teen groping comes real-estate developer Rutter (Joe Don Baker) and his two idiot nephews.  They want the spot that the Video Arcade is located on, and are prepared to go to all kinds of sub Looney Tunes ACME-sponsored underhand tactics to get it.  Thus McDorfus is given two parallel challenges – best King Vidiot on the Arcade’s newest machine and win the girl, and thwart Rutter and his plans in order to keep his job and protect the future of the Arcade.

JOYSTICKS follows the ANIMAL HOUSE template of kids, ultra low-brow humour and an underlying ‘stick it to the man’ attitude.  Most of these films are the modern equivalent of the beach party and malt shop teen jitterbug movies that AIP turned out in their droves in the early 60’s – usually featuring a Bill Haley and The Comets, or Fats Domino soundtrack.  Almost all of them focus on a generational conflict scenario, though virtually none of them do anything interesting with the idea beyond setting established character actors in their 50’s as comic stooges.  There’s nothing in JOYSTICKS or most of its bretheren that says much about the American teen condition beyond the fact that they’re all horny (fair enough) and that their lives unfold like a Three Stooges short.  Unlike the better entries in the genre, JOYSTICKS doesn’t really have a hook – There isn’t the ‘built in nostalgia’ of ANIMAL HOUSE (or the budget, or technical and artistic competence), nor is there the cool observation of FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, or the surprisingly tough emotional impact of THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN – instead, it’s half Marx Brothers/Warner Brothers cartoon slapstick (Joe Don Baker seems to have modelled his performance on Yosemite Sam) and half sophomoric tits and ass comedy, with more focus on tits and ass than being funny.

McDorfus and his unspeakable tie.

 

The problem with this comedic sub-genre is that all the good films were co-opted into other genres.  CADDYSHACK (1980) is viewed as a sports comedy.  FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH is now part of the Christopher Crowe group of observational comedies.  THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN is often described as a drama.  The rump of what’s left aren’t very good, and as most were dirt-cheap, it’s not much of a surprise that the genre took an almost fatal kicking from the John Hughes and Ivan Reitman tag-team in 1984 – when SIXTEEN CANDLES and GHOSTBUSTERS changed the nature of the genre – it wouldn’t be until the late 1990’s, and the rise of the Farrelly Brothers that low-brow comedy would return to the top of the box office charts.

Whilst JOYSTICKS is very minor fare, it does represent a good entry point to the world of its Producer-Director Greydon Clark.  Clark started his career in the employ of 1960’s zero-budget genre mogul Al Adamson.  Adamson and his Independent International Pictures company was a low-rent version of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, turning out movies and technicians who would go on to bigger and better things.  The three best known names to emerge from Adamson’s stock company of actors and technicians were Jack Starrett, John ‘Bud’ Cardos and Clark.  On the evidence of their back catalogue of films, Starrett was the best director of the three, Cardos was the most commercially successful, and Clark was most akin to their collective mentor.  To be fair, all three have serviceable movies in their filmographies (though the only really genuinely top-notch movie made between them is Starrett’s RACE WITH THE DEVIL – 1975), but it is Clark who has the longest filmography, and who has weathered the changes in indie film distribution best.

Clark has made Blaxploitation rip-offs of Hollywood movies (BLACK SHAMPOO), he’s made Drag-racing flicks, Horror comedies, straight horror films, action movies, spy movies and even a Dance-drama.  His filmography is a temporal road map of cultural and cinematic fads from the early 70’s to the mid-late 1990’s, and almost all of them have jumped on the bandwagon right at the start, carried on the tide of success generated by their bigger budget inspirations.   His best film is the backwoods SF-Horror movie WITHOUT WARNING (1980) one of the most interesting of the glut of backwoods splatter films released on the back of the success of FRIDAY THE 13^th (1980) and we’ll take a run at that at some point in the future, but all his films, even the cheapest straight-to-video action movies at the tail end of his filmography have a certain professional sheen and Clark has a knack of packing his crews with solid technicians – JOYSTICKS is edited by Larry Bock, a New World graduate who’d go on to edit major Hollywood fare such as RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985) and BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989).  Amongst the other Technicians who worked early in their careers with Clark are people like Cinematographers Danny Pearl (PATHFINDER, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE) and Dean Cundey (HALLOWEEN, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?, JURASSIC PARK), Make up effects artists Al Apone (DEEP BLUE SEA, IRON MAN) and Greg Cannom (BLADE, MASTER AND COMMANDER) and production designer Chester Kaczenski (TEEN WOLF, TOY SOLDIERS, TREME) – having an eye for good technicians means that Clark’s films, no matter how daft the story or wobbly the acting, always seem to squeeze more value for money from their threadbare budgets.  I doubt that Clark, who appears in interviews to be a switched-on but amiable guy (who looks a lot like author Tom Clancy), would make any particularly strong claims for his films being anything other than cheap and cheerful money-makers.  That’s fine, the budget for JOYSTICKS was around $300,000, and say what you like about the quality of the film, you can’t argue that every cent isn’t on the screen. 

JOYSTICKS is typical of the low-brow teens and tits comedies that emerged on the back of ANIMAL HOUSE.  It’s typical in that it’s more interested in female anatomy and body function gags than building any kind of sustained comedy.  It’s cheap, cheerful and dim-witted.  Like many of Greydon Clark’s films, however, it was made for next to no money and secured a decent theatrical run, is reasonably polished and probably made Clark a shit-load of money.  I can live with that.