>Wild Thing – I Think I Watched You

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WILD THING

(PG ~ 1987)

Directed by
Max Reid

Writing credits
Larry Stamper		(story) and
John Sayles		(story)
John Sayles		(screenplay)

Starring: Rob Knepper, Kathleen Quinlan, Robert Davi, Maury Chaykin

A child witnesses drug dealers murder his parents. He escapes and grows up wild in the city’s slums. Years later he emerges to help the residents of the area who are being terrorized by street gangs and drug dealers.

Wild Thing is one of those harmless, afternoon piece-of-crap pulp potboilers that seem to have gone the way of the dodo in today’s Hollywood. The ‘modern-day’ Jungle Book/ Tarzan tale tracks a child of slain hippies grown into an urban legend neo-primitive (white) ‘ghetto-warrior’ stalking the streets of ‘the Zone,’ bent on avenging his parents’ deaths. The film is also notable as an early credit for independent auteur John Sayles (Matewan/ Eight Men Out), who probably scrawled the screenplay on a cocktail napkin.

The prologue, of course scored to ‘White Rabbit,’ shows us the grizzly deaths of Wild Thing’s folks, slain in their VW bus, as they travel from the idyllic highway into the mean streets of ‘The Zone,’ and fall victims in a gun robbery by the fearsome, skull-tattooed ‘Chopper’ (dependable baddie Robert Davi) and a corrupt cop (Maury Chaykin). Their child escapes into the nearby river, presumed drowned. Next we see the adolescent Wild Thing in full Jungle Book mode, being raised by an off-the-grid bag-lady (Betty Buckley). Here Sayles entertainingly sketches the world of Wild Thing as shaped by his mother-figure- she rails against The Company (civilization) and its paper (money). On her deathbed with disease, she begs the youth not to let the ‘blue-coats’ (police) or ‘white-coats’ (hospitals) get her, and he obliges by burning her hovel down, leaving Wild Thing on his own.

 Fast forward to the ‘modern-day’ Zone, a cheap set-bound 80s NYC pastiche complete with fake graffiti and dark ‘edgy’ lofts. A group of ‘urban’ street kids tell ‘boogie-man’ tales of the Wild Thing, and his werewolf/Robin Hood exploits. We are given thankfully few glimpses of the adult Wild Thing (Rob Knepper), (late of Fox’s ‘Prison Break’) a smallish weaselly guy with teased hair and Chuck Taylor high-tops.

Chopper is still the BMOC, holding the cops under his thumb and running the local vague drug/sex trades. There is a hilarious ‘pimp-lifestyle’ escort party scene set to a Michael McDonald-ish tune called ‘Business-Lady.’ Cue love story (yawn) – Jane, a social worker (Kathleen Quinlan) arrives by bus, to take over the local priest’s youth rehabilitation work at the safe house. She receives a rude welcome, as Chopper’s henchmen attempt to subdue and rape her. But she is saved by the mysterious Wild Thing, who kicks off the thugs and vanishes- in order to begin finger-painting her likeness on his loft wall (uh-oh.)

Jane’s work draws ever-deeper into Chopper’s world, as the good-hearted lesbian street-kid loses her lover in his clutches, and her building is burned to the ground as the whole Zone watches. The film takes its inevitable turns, as Wild Thing and Quinlan explore the ‘body-bump,’ and she gives him the means to finally get Chopper once-and-for-all. He throws him through a plate-glass window and stuff, then dives back into that damn river. O well- at least they use the Troggs version as the theme song.


Wild Thing [VHS]

>Your Daughter is One.

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TIMES SQUARE

(R ~ 1980)

Directed by Allan Moyle
Writing credits: Jacob Brackman writer, story: Allan Moyle & Leanne Unger

Stars:

 Tim Curry, Trini Alvarado and Robin Johnson 

Two ill-matched teenage girls form a punk band and soon have New York by its ears. (IMDB)

Sleez Sisters Unite! Director Allan Moyle’s (Pump Up The Volume) 1980 theatrical flop/cult fave is a lost classic of New York punk romance- an urban Tom and Huck adventure between two teen female runaways seeking love and meaning in the gnarled heart of the city. Filmed on location amid the ruined neon marquees and docks of seedy pre-Giuliani Manhattan, it also foreshadows the struggle that would transform the neighborhood in the next decades to a Disney-fied grotesque mall, its grimy soul melted away with the sleaze. Along with the later Stigwood-produced rock fable Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982), this film provided ground zero exploitation/inspiration for a new bunch of kids lost in a plastic world.

For Johnny LaGuardia (reliable Tim Curry of Clue, Rocky Horror Picture Show etc.), a ‘celebrity’ overnite DJ at rock station WJAD, Times Square serves as his muse, as he spins mellifluous odes to the filthy streets of Gotham as an Oz to be savored. Trini Alvarado is Pamela Pearl, his biggest fan and privileged daughter of the up-and-comer ‘liberal’ mayoral candidate, who rails against the dangers of letting the streets be – fabricating fables about how he can’t take her to a movie safely on 42^nd St. 


Pamela protests the lies so Dad takes his emotional ‘troubled’ daughter to a hospital psych clinic for study, where she meets her rocker counterpart, Nicky Marotta, (Joan Jett-like Robin Johnson), a streetwise juvie lifer who plays The Ramones’ “I Wanna be Sedated” on her duct-taped boombox in bed. After a few days, Nickie has left her mark on Pamela, inspiring her to write journal poetry and stuff. She persuades Pamela to stay off the meds cause they ‘take your fight away,’ and the two bust loose into the city.

Soon they are shacked up in a waterfront pier warehouse, coining the name The Sleez Sisters. Nicky finds Pamela a dancer job in the Cleopatra Club (“You don’t take yer clothes off – I like that.”) and begins writing her own poetry – rock songs like ‘I’m a Damn Dog Now.” The Sisters exploit and provoke themselves to punk legend status through guerilla ‘street art’ like dropping TVs off tenement roofs and putting bandit masks on Pamela’s bus-side ‘missing’ posters. They even gleefully provoke their paranoid ‘grownup’ pursuers live on the air (to LaGuardia’s mutual benefit) – “Spic, Nigger, Faggot, Bum – Your Daughter is One!” 

Pamela’s father eventually closes in to her whereabouts, locating her smoking onstage at the Cleo as the colored girls sing ‘Walk on The Wild Side.” She’s all grown up, daddy. Nicky (did we mention she’s troubled?) begins to realize that Pamela will return to her path on her terms, where she has nowhere to go but further out. 

She lets LaGuardia have an exclusive ‘scoop’ They will stage an impromptu farewell show atop a marquee that night – their own ‘Let It Be’ moment, an underground spectacular hyped to those ‘in the know.’ We see a montage of chaotic female fans (the Sleez Army) roaming the streets, street vendors selling plastic trash bags as ‘Sleez Bags’ to the tourists. After performing a rousing ‘Damn Dog’ reprise, the cops come to shut them down, and Nicky says her goodbye, falling into the adoring arms of screaming girls as Pamela rejoins ‘civilization.’

Times Square is more than another ‘cult classic’ with an amazing double-LP soundtrack (Roxy Music, Gary Numan, Suzie Quatro etc.) It is a wide-eyed ode to the power of the city, youth, transformation and rock n’ roll – and it all seems like a fairytale now, which is alright by me. Whatever happened to the Teenage Dream?

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