The Groove Tube + TunnelVision

THE GROOVE TUBE
(R, Levitt-Pickman Film Corporation, 75 mins., theatrical release date: June 23, 1974)

TUNNELVISION
(R, World Wide Pictures, 70 mins., theatrical release date: March 1976)

Before Saturday Night Live and SCTV, Channel One Underground Television tuned in to the irreverent potential of pop cultural satire. The brainchild of Bard College buddies Ken Shapiro, Lane Sarasohn & Chevy Chase, Channel One was a comedic troupe who crossed the mediums of theatre and television. The trio recorded 90-minute blocks of racy programming which was then aired on three closed-circuit sets suspended from the ceiling of their East Village "stage." Instead of seats, they had sofas, and the snack bar was replaced with a well-stocked refrigerator containing snacks and sodas. Audiences, critics and colleges became abuzz with hype surrounding Channel One, and a compendium of their most popular sketches was making the rounds under the name of "The Groove Tube."

Keep in mind that VCRs were a distant dream of the future, and though there was such a thing as cable television in 1972 when HBO was launched, Channel One's content was bawdy to the max. No self-respecting network would give Shapiro & Co. free reign to skewer the medium with as much free-minded puerility as they had demonstrated. So how did Channel One expand to the masses away from Greenwich Village and Manhattan?

The answer is simple: Channel One went cinematic.

The Groove Tube debuted in movie houses starting in 1974. Although the promotional budget didn't allow Shapiro to go the full William Castle and hang TV monitors in every screening room in America, it was an independent film success, just the same. Even after its initial run, you could've seen The Groove Tube double-billed with Flesh Gordon later in the 1970s and it was later loosed onto video via Media Home Entertainment and got regular pay-TV play, including on The Movie Channel. And I remember seeing it on both of those formats.

What is lost to most people was just how influential The Groove Tube proved to be. Later omnibus films like The Kentucky Fried Movie, Amazon Women on the Moon and Movie 43 are well-known in one capacity or another, but you had lesser variations sprouting immediately, too. Case in point: 1976's TunnelVision, which shared with The Groove Tube a bankable early appearance by Chevy Chase, who became a certified star thanks to Saturday Night Live. Alas, TunnelVision also spotlighted a handful of recognizable comic performers, including big names known from Second City and The Groundlings.

Aside from Chase, who appears twice in the film, The Groove Tube has only a couple of other names which are of instant recognition. The first is Richard Belzer, best known as Sgt. Munch from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but also a superstar of the stand-up comedy circuit who was immortalized as emcee both on film (Fame, Scarface) and in the Friar's Club. The third is Martin Kove, who had previously played the bumbling deputy in Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, but would later become famous as the Cobra Kai dojo leader from The Karate Kid.

As for the big names peppered throughout TunnelVision, I'm going to hold off for a bit.

The main thing both these movies have in common is that they are period pieces which lampoon the average television programming of their time. There is a Putney Swope-style inclination toward uncensored, in-your-face advertising and storytelling where the prurience and scatology are left unchallenged by any standards & practices committee. In the post-hippie era of increasing cynicism and social upheaval, The Groove Tube and TunnelVision mock the bland, earnest constrictions of the commercials and sitcoms and newscasts familiar to the average TV viewer.

Don't kid yourself this is righteous disillusionment on the order of Gil Scott-Heron, who favored civil rights awareness over the lavish attention awarded to soap operas and celebrity. The blows these films land are about as superficial as their subjects, and their success depends entirely on your predilection for rampant bad taste, leering nudity and casual profanity. The Groove Tube, by dint of being the first of its kind, has a bit more counter-cultural curiosity to it than TunnelVision, particularly in skits involving openly explicit sex and drug use. The latter movie can't help but feel like an also-ran by comparison, especially given the increased volume of throwaway gags which don't reward one's avid attention.

Also counting against TunnelVision is that the movie boasts a flimsy framing device, looking ahead ten years into the future where the filmmakers believe 1980s audiences will be watching dirty-minded take-offs of distinctly 1970s entertainment. This is not exactly forward-thinking, nor particularly funny, as All in the Family will have been supplanted by Family Ties and children's entertainment will be inescapable. Furthermore, the plot involving station owner Christian A. Broder (Phil Proctor from the Firesign Theatre) being taken to trial by irate senators doesn't even live up to the juicy potential of foretelling the PMRC witch hunts and Video Nasties furors to come.

The Groove Tube kicks off with an amusing twist on the apes' discovery of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and a titles sequence which posits the TV set as the ultimate technological advancement. There is your sacred cow. Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up" kicks into gear as the scene shifts to a pair of free-spirited young adults stripping and sprinting through the woods, the proverbial Gadda-Da-Vida, only for the lustful drifter to run smack into a policeman, buck naked and bewildered. This is indicative of Ken Shapiro's comedic approach to the remaining hour's worth of material.

Shaprio, a former child star whose first exposure was televised as the meddling kid passing by fast-talking huckster Sid Stone's booth on the Texaco Star Theater, uses his insider position to the best of his abilities. The Groove Tube works on the precise level of stylistic parody, taking off from established formulas and templates for maximum outlandishness. A send-up of static cooking tutorials, "Kramp TV Kitchen," finds Shapiro's somnambulant voice detailing a nutty recipe for "4th of July Heritage Loaf," with roundabout instructions that aggravate and confuse the faceless chef handling the load. A Rome apple is peeled only to be reconstructed with toothpicks, Bing cherries have their pits replaced with those cut from olives and there is enough gross overuse of vegetable shortening to put you off Crisco for life.

Shapiro appears in person at the start as Koko the Klown, an excitable Bozo doppelganger who mugs and honks his way towards "Make Believe Time," where he shoos all the "big people" out of the room with the aid of his Magic Monkey. He then removes his big red nose, lights up a j and reads requested pages from various erotica tomes like Fanny Hill and de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. Even better is a brief commercial for "Babs & Roy," which puts Barbie & Ken through the paces of ill-fated matrimony replete with stifling domesticity, workplace adultery and psychiatric care.

Other mocking ads for vitamin supplements and toothpaste lay bare the latent sexuality of their forebears with as much vigor as their female actresses disrobe. Aside from "Babs & Roy," the highlights are Chevy Chase (seen previously in the "Geritan" ad with porn star Jennifer Wells) showing the Yellow Pages' "walking fingers" performing sexual intercourse and the testosterone-damaged "Butz Beer," in which an entire pub, manned by Marty Kove, breaks out into a violent frenzy at the drop of a glass. And then there's the infamous "Safety Sam" PSA about venereal disease, which gets its reliable testimony straight from the source. I will say no more.

The movie's extended bits are the "Channel One Evening News" as well as an episode of "The Dealers," a fictional show about two fly-by-day marijuana sellers unable to keep their heads above water. Shapiro plays the idealistic Boss and Richard Belzer is the gabby Rodriguez. Clearly, this is a precursor to the kind of comedy Cheech & Chong would popularize, and the gag involving the ingestion of pounds of grass is similar to one used in the duo's debut comedy album, on "Cruisin' with Pedro." But Shapiro seems focused more on the hard times faced by the dealers, with paranoia and poverty the defining characteristics of their misadventures.

Their first errand involving a glad-handing WASP is spoiled by the appearance of a silent witness who screams "Narc," and the duo barge into an occupied restroom desperate to flush their stash. On the drive to their next stop, a squad car tails them and even hits the lights, forcing them to eat handfuls more of their supply. Their only respite comes when they hide in a movie theater, where Rodriguez woos a female patron into wild sex and Boss clumsily tries to get close to her disinterested friend. The apex of Boss' nervous breakdown, waking from a psychedelic nightmare to chase away a thieving junkie, comes when he confesses that he wants to sleep with his oblivious partner, who instead offers him more reds to calm him down. The stinger essentially turns this into a Reefer Madness-style propaganda piece.

As for the nightly news, Shaprio plays anchroman Robert Elgin, who reports on the war breaking out in Suc Muc Dik, the latest madness from the White House (Belzer's president is a proto-Sandler manchild), the disastrous Russian spaceship launch (really just clips from old Commando Cody serials with correspondence), and the prostitution epidemic in NYC (Belzer plays the black transvestite who gets to work on his latest trick, the newsman also played by Shapiro). Once Robert signs off, there is another surrealist punch line which has to be seen to be believed.

The Groove Tube is a relic, indeed, but a very well-made relic, too. At a solid 74 minutes in length, both the individual parts and their sum don't overstay their welcome. Even at its most unabashedly tasteless (see "Brown 25" and "The International Sex Games"), the jokes are varied and betray a sharp knowledge of their subjects which the writers use to their advantage. The really refreshing thing about Shaprio and Sarasohn's efforts is that their comedy does resonate even after 40 years have passed, and that's mainly because for all their japery, a sense of showmanship is the guiding principle. Fitting that the movie ends with a pair of song-and-dance routines, Chevy Chase's a cappella rendition of "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover" and Ken Shapiro prancing down the Midtown streets crooning "Just You, Just Me" to various passersby.

What could have been really enervating is in fact quite entertaining, and it's a shame Channel One couldn't catch a break as its offspring catapulted into stardom. Alas, its 1976 bastard son TunnelVision marked the creative debuts of two people who would dominate the industry in the 1980s and onward. The first is director Neal Israel, who wrote the scripts for Police Academy, Moving Violations and Real Genius with Pat Proft and also made the ribald Tom Hanks vehicle Bachelor Party. The second is producer Joe Roth, who became chairman of 20th Century Fox in the late 1980s and then of Walt Disney Pictures immediately after, from 1994 until 2000. He was co-founder of Morgan Creek Productions with James G. Robinson and launched his own production company, Revolution Studios, in 2000.

But Roth was also the pitiful director of both Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise and Christmas with the Kranks. That coupled with the Police Academy franchise launched by Mr. Israel should tell you everything about the comedic pedigree behind TunnelVision. These were the guys who also gave you the duly forgotten Cracking Up (1977) and Americathon (1979), which squandered a fortune in comic and musical talent (George Carlin, Harvey Korman, Elvis Costello, Meat Loaf) for some of the cheapest laughs possible.

Their M.O. remains just as below-the-bar in this debut feature, which crams at least three times more gags into its 67-minute runtime than The Groove Tube, but manages to elicit far fewer laughs in the process. TunnelVision is even more brazenly un-P.C. than Ken Shapiro's earlier film to the point where the gags turn smug and loathsome. Whereas you could sense a framework and imagination behind even the low points from Shapiro's film, Israel and co-writer Michael Mislove expect your automatic laughter at such sights as a proctology school promo, replete with a row of hairy man-ass, a game show where the ultimate tournament is a fart competition (King Frat, this is not) and a gypsy-themed rip-off of All in the Family which is more outwardly coarse but infinitely less hilarious.

That particular lampoon even throws in a mincing gay stereotype in desperation, which coupled with a previous bumper for Curt Gowdy and his hunting team "stalking the wild faggot," reveals a hostile attitude undermining the overall comedy when contrasted with The Groove Tube. In that previous film's "Dealers" bit, the joke was that sexually-frustrated Boss was rebuffed by his "cute" companion Rodriguez ("You ever hear of gay lib?") because the latter guilelessly pleaded ignorance. The juvenile mentality of TunnelVision offends in the most asinine manner possible, without anything clever or clear-minded to compensate.

It takes a special incompetence to bungle nearly every surefire laugh it comes across, whether it be Leon Russell promoting a "marijuana-gram" or an interactive concert experience where audiences beat on the bands. Israel and co-director Brad Swirnoff demonstrate it time and time again. There's another send-up of the six o'clock news involving political chicanery and exaggerated world conflict, which is bad. There's a buddy-cop drama called "Get Head!" starring a mute John Candy who carries around his partner's dismembered dome, which is bald. There's a commercial for an "Ego-spray" deodorant which equally wastes the talents of Al Franken, here a long, long way from Stuart Smalley, and is simply arid. Even Chevy Chase's brief appearance is forgettable, which definitely could not be said for his parts in The Groove Tube.

Glimmers of talent do creep through a mere couple of the sketches, particularly a sexually-liberated send-up of Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore sitcoms which pairs Lynne Marie Stewart and Gerrit Graham, of all people. Stewart is recognizable as Miss Yvonne from Pee-Wee Herman's shows as well as Charlie's Mom on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Graham had already proved his chops in Brian De Palma's early movies including as egotistical, speed-addled glitter rocker Beef in Phantom of the Paradise. These two combine their campy expertise for what is surely the two single funny minutes in this movie.

Sadly, I can't say the same thing about Joe Flaherty and Betty Thomas, who both later starred in the rude, crude and truly hilarious Used Cars (also with Mr. Graham), as the aforementioned quiz show contestants. Again, the premise should have been black comedy gold, as the two of them confess sordid secrets involving pedophilia and miscarriages for points. And once again, its execution is pitiful. They have electroshock lie-detecting sensors in their scalps (and later their anuses) which never come into play. What a waste of potentially good slapstick humor as well as its stars.

I've mentioned John Candy and Joe Flaherty (soon to be SCTV), Chevy Chase and Al Franken (of early and later SNL), Lynne Marie Stewart, Gerrit Graham, and Betty Thomas. TunnelVision's only curiosity comes from its large roster of familiar names, and there are minor roles for the likes of Laraine Newman, Howard Hesseman, Ron Silver (who has his own sketch playing a disreputable Spanish language teacher), Rick Hurst, and a young Danielle von Zerneck (later a star of La Bamba and Living in Oblivion, here eating out at a fast-food broccoli stand). Hell, even the film's gratuitous T&A quotient is filled by Dody Dorn, who didn't become a comedienne but had a healthy career as both a sound and film editor, working with James Cameron (The Abyss, T2) and Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia).

TunnelVision could've thrown in Rick Moranis, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, and Gilda Radner, and it still would've been an abomination. It's a blatantly cheap, flailing and ankle-biting attempt for the au courant by so-called humorists who are about as edgy as a softball. The movie's tagline is "Laugh or get off the pot," but TunnelVision is a pants-shitting embarrassment.

Used Cars

USED CARS
(R, Columbia Pictures, 113 mins., theatrical release date: July 11, 1980)

If I told you about a movie which was from the creators of Back to the Future, with Steven Spielberg as executive producer alongside maverick story writer John Milius, and starring Kurt Russell in one of his first major breakaways from his Disney child star past, the unspoken assumption would be of a prestige picture so massive that Tom Hanks himself would've hopped in the magical DeLorean to covet it if given half a chance. Alas, the Academy Awards weren't quick to acknowledge the result of such a lofty-sounding collaboration, which turned out to be the 1980 cult film USED CARS, a scrappy but satirically-blessed comedy in the rude, crude model of Slap Shot, Animal House and Caddyshack. A screwball comedy with a liberal dose of T&A and roiling patriotic pessimism from the man who later gave us Forrest Gump. Go figure!

Remember Daffy Duck's sing-songy disdain of "honesty in business affairs" from Quackbusters? Well, here's a feature-length, live action extension of that scoffing attitude, with enough double talk and dirty deeds to forge the establishment of a whole new colony. It's the tale of two dodgy motor salesman so full of B.S. that they each, naturally, have political aspirations. On the one middle finger, you've got Rudy Russo (Russell), who wheels and deals at the disreputable New Deal Used Cars lot owned by Luke Fuchs (Jack Warden), a paternal but ailing old gent who disapproves of Rudy's conniving but prefers those to the schemes of his twin brother Roy (Warden again), who runs the Auto Emporium across the way. Rudy is ten grand behind on buying a seat in the Arizona senate for grafts and gratification, whereas Roy has bribed the mayor in an attempt to advance the construction of a highway overpass which will cut a swath in his sibling's business.

Impatiently, Roy decides to stir Luke into a fatal stroke with the aid of demolition man Mickey (Michael Talbott). After a chrome-plated funeral for Luke in the driver's seat of an Edsel, Rudy and his associates concoct an excuse to prevent Roy from seizing the property, namely that Luke has driven to Miami Beach for some R&R. This gives them free reign to start jamming television broadcasts and hiring strippers (including Hill Street Blues star/future filmmaker Betty Thomas) to boost their flagging sales, but Roy is hardly deterred. Rudy, meanwhile, develops guilt when Luke's long-lost daughter Barbara (Deborah Harmon) arrives for a go-nowhere reconciliation with her pappy and a budding romance with Rudy.

But first there's both a football game and a presidential address to sabotage with the assistance of Michael "Lenny" McKean and David "Squiggy" Lander as electronics wizzes Freddie & Eddie, the latter boastful of his DIY $12.95 pacemaker for the former. In the midst of a colorful cast of character actors (watch out for Al Lewis, Dub Taylor, Alfonso Arau, and Dick friggin' Miller) as well as Kurt Russell, both these moments as well as several others are duly stolen by Gerrit Graham in a typically offbeat, outlandish supporting role as Rudy's right-hand man Jeff. Superstitious to the point of self-loathing, he has an FCC-violating meltdown on the first go when posing in front of "a red chariot to take my ass straight to Hell!" And that's before he gets hopped up on valiums and decked out in cowboy garb as Marshal Lucky for an orgy of shotgun and dynamite destruction which even Jimmy Carter hears with unmistakable clarity.

Not to diminish Russell's rakish charms, which were as plain as plaid even before his string of Carpenter classics, or the brazen villainy of Warden as Roy L. Fuchs, but Graham is in top form for the many set pieces he's called on to carry. When a down-and-out Rudy wagers his life savings on the opposite team in a football match, Jeff (sym)pathetically springs into action to turn the odds against himself, spilling every salt shaker and opening up every umbrella within reach ("Is there a black cat in the house? How about a ladder?"). In a ploy to guilt trip a bulky family man into driving off in a pre-owned Gran Torino station wagon, he feigns the death of beagle mascot Toby ("I raised him from a puppy!"). And it's Jeff who holds the fate of New Deal Used Cars when Roy finally comes within crushing distance of his competitors. In short, Gerrit Graham makes every moment he's in a joyride.

Robert Zemeckis, scripting with occasional partner and producer Bob Gale, would go on to helm two more decade-defining comedies, including the masterful Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but even within the confines of a rare R-rated romp such as this, the esteemed Spielberg protégé gets a surprising amount of mileage from perceivably junky materials. The aforementioned Marshal Lucky commercial provokes some hysterical impromptu reactions from Graham, Warden and Russell, who distracts the unaware Harmon with a ridiculously prolonged kiss. There is a memorable gag which deploys a cadaver pre-Weekend at Bernie's as well as an action-packed finale where 250 cars are piloted by drivers ed students, with a chain-whipping Roy hot on their trail. Credit is especially due to film editor and Spielberg stableman Michael Kahn, who is expertly fluid in making a two-hour trip.

But at the center of it all is Russell, one of those boisterously funny gentlemen who can perk up many a commentary track (including the one he shares with Zemeckis and Gale on this film's DVD/BD releases), but whose CV in hindsight is more action and drama-oriented. Embracing the profane rat-a-tat dialogue and cocky duplicity with an élan akin to freedom, you wonder why he as well as Zemeckis haven't returned to that embellished form of japery in so long. Used Cars is the kind of movie whose opening montage of a lemon being twisted into a cherry (a twist of the pliers here, a wad of bubblegum there, don't forget that store-bought spray of factory freshness) pretty much sums up the talents of its makers. It's one of the funniest films of its era. Trust me.

Boutique label Twilight Time, known for their limited-to-3000-copies pressings of various catalog titles, ported over this one from Sony and retained several of the original DVD extras, namely the outtakes reel, vintage radio/TV adverts (see Russell cameo in a plug for the real life Mesa Chrysler lot which doubled as Roy Fuchs' Auto Emporium) and that indispensable three-man commentary track, in which the participants are stunned that Columbia Pictures let them make this movie, although their marketing wing ultimately proved ineffectual. Exclusive to this edition are an expanded photo gallery, an original theatrical trailer and two isolated score tracks, including one which restores several alternate, grandiose music cues from an unaccredited Ernest Gold.

Enchantéd, Part VII: TerrorVision

Enchantéd: A Retrospective Tribute to Diane Franklin

VII. TerrorVision (1986)

(R, Empire Pictures)

Charles Band, more so than Golan/Globus or Dino De Laurentiis, was responsible for producing a great deal of my adolescence. It was through his 1980s distribution company Empire Pictures and subsequent Full Moon Features that I was inundated with pretty much all the cheesy bliss my heart could ever stand. Of course there were the Puppet Master and Trancers series, plus certified classics such as Re-Animator and...err, Ghoulies. That latter movie's poster art was the perfect distillation of Band's entrepreneurial ability to con you in with a memorable image and tag line. Have an ugly green monster emerge from the potty and slap on the tag line "They'll get you in the end," and the low-hanging fruit of such was the siren call of schlock cinema. It may have been funnier than anything in the movie it promoted (intentionally so), but it helped produce a surprise theatrical hit that kept the Empire banner afloat for a while.

And Full Moon was also one of the best video companies in the early 1990s by virtue of Band's engaging promotional newsletter called "VideoZone," which mixed behind-the-scenes footage and trailers and merchandise plugs to give us perhaps the earliest and most significant form of special feature on tape. Of course, DVDs now have enough room to offer closer, crisper approximations of the theatrical experience and hours worth of paraphernalia, but renting a film like Demonic Toys or Arcade or Bad Channels at least offered a little more than your average feature presentation.

Besides, Band's legacy has yielded a glorious trickle-down effect. Without Troll, Claudio Fragasso would have been forced to name his Z-movie cornerstone simply "Goblins." Without Trancers and Dollman, Tim Thomerson would have never established himself an unlikely action hero. Without Re-Animator and From Beyond, Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs would've been remembered as irreverent theatre vets instead of true gifts for the bookish B-movie buff. And without TerrorVision, chances are I'd have forgotten completely about Diane Franklin, writing her off as a one-flick wonder to my endless dismay.

TerrorVision, writer/director (and occasional editor) Ted Nicolaou's 1986 feature debut from Band's Empire days before helming the Subspecies series for Full Moon (as well as Bad Channels), arrived at the starting gate with yet another indelible image predetermined at Band's will, that of a monstrous eye staring from within a satellite dish as its tentacles (as in te-NT-acles) reached out to an entire suburb. And aside from a top-billed Diane Franklin, fresh off her shamefully ignored star turn in Better Off Dead..., the rest of the cast was a cult cinema fantasy league drafting in Gerrit Graham, Mary Woronov, Jonathan Gries, Bert Remsen, and Alejandro Rey. With those names and that one-sheet, TerrorVision was bound to become an underground transmission of immense proportions.

Yet Nicolaou and his movie experienced multiple static frequencies from a shoestring marketing budget, the lack of a massive wide release and non-stop negative reviews. Even Joe Bob Briggs' reaction upon its release was lukewarm at best. Both of the video movie guides I owned as a boy awarded TerrorVision with their lowest possible grades, be they a turkey or a "Woof!" Naturally, the only outlet for which it could deserve any defense was on home video, and sure enough the Lightning Video cassette was unavoidable on horror shelves out where I lived. And it was a lucky thing they printed the credits right at the bottom of the box, the better for me to catch a glance at the first name on the starring roster and realize it was Monique herself.

Even luckier to me was the discovery that Diane Franklin was permitted to go to Camp.

Looking back at the movies in the series thus far, both The Last American Virgin and Amityville II: The Possession don't completely qualify as campy fun particularly because of their crudely-committed solemnity. These are bitter movies at their core, calculated exploitation endeavors whose promise as empty, exaggerated diversions are weighed down by taboo subject matter, earnestly mimicking the affectations of Afterschool Special-level melodramas with no intended absurdity (the incestuous shenanigans of Amityville II, in particular, are unfeasible but still incredibly icky). They don't go for broke in the manner of a Mommie Dearest, where the hurtful reality of child abuse is glossed over by Faye Dunaway's diva/devil ferocity and the dialogue takes even the slightest, most innocuous trigger (bearing walls, rose gardens and, of course, wire hangers) as an excuse to take off from the runway of sanity. Second Time Lucky and Better Off Dead..., by contrast, take more gonzo chances with their characters and locales than either Virgin or Amityville. And honestly, Diane seems a lot more uninhibited as a performer, by extension also completely delightful to watch, in the movies made from Summer Girl to TerrorVision.

What I'm trying to say is that I feel that the best gauge of a performer's charisma and intelligence isn't so much emotional breakdowns as it is inhabiting a larger-than-life version of a human being. Michael Shannon, for instance, did a giddy job as crooked detective Bobby Monday in David Koepp's courier chase flick Premium Rush. There was an energy and determination and humor to that role which is admirable to take in whether you chose to watch it actively or not. John Waters, of course, has been consistent in regards to directing name stars like Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner and Johnny Knoxville to their fullest potential as character actors. And Diane's co-stars Gerrit Graham and Mary Woronov have each built reputations for themselves in the realm of camp, if titles such as Phantom of the Paradise, Used Cars, Rock ‘n' Roll High School, and Eating Raoul stick in your memory.

That's where Suzy Putterman comes in, the truest symbol of 1980s spunk by virtue of her cosmic embellishment. With her rainbow-colored weaves, Dale Bozzio eye shadow, Encino accent, and Madonna/Cyndi Lauper fashion sense, Suzy is beautifully tacky pop art made flesh. Go visit the Cinema Gonzo web site if you doubt just how Warholian little Suzy truly is. In the TerrorVision chapter of her autobiography, Diane Franklin talks about how she gravitated towards comedy as a means of expression beyond the ingénue image she was saddled with throughout her career. She makes the same point in the special features on Shout! Factory's release of the film, but by the end of the 1980s, the Princess Joanna role in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure arguably put her back in that box just in time for Diane to develop a bankable name for herself. That she endured as a cult star doesn't feel so much directly tied into her blue-eyed, birth-marked sex appeal as much as it demonstrates she had a chameleonic propensity and accompanying range the industry never really could fulfill.

Diane holds her own against the bug-eyed Gerrit Graham and the rubber-lipped Mary Woronov as the most flamboyant members of the Putterman clan, the straightest straw being drawn by eleven-year-old Chad Allen as Sherman, although even he's polluted by the weirdness surrounding him. Sherman is a pint-sized Lane Meyer in this case, the only one who catches wise to the chaos, endures continued screams of disbelief and is forced to hold his own against the self-centered instincts of his elders. And father Stanley (Graham) is the one who obliviously begets the televised invasion of the plot, as a beam of energy containing an exiled Hungry Beast from planet Pluton is picked up by Stanley's brand new Do-It-Yourself 100 satellite dish. Ostensibly over his head in trying to install the device, Stanley is even more klutzy in regards to his primary reason for buying the damned thing: to put the final touches on his high-tech Pleasure Palace and become the hippest swinger in town.

Mary Woronov portrays the inverse of Mrs. Bland here as the pushy Raquel Putterman, whose forays into hedonism aren't purely materialistic but just as misguided. Her and Stanley answer a classified ad and pick up a couple of eccentric Los Angelenos, glad-handing Grecian Spiro (Alejandro Rey) and shrill-voiced actress Cherry (Randi Brooks), whose kinks intimidate and embarrass them. Stanley is worked into a libidinous frenzy at the sight of Cherry in her Gordian-knotted string bikini, whereas Raquel learns that Spiro is way too faithful to his boy-loving heritage, a definite turn-off for the Spartan, straight-laced Puttermans.

Suzy, meanwhile, is out on a date with her new boyfriend, the heavy metal bozo O.D. (Jonathan Gries), and Sherman is left home alone for a spell under the watchful, wacky care of his grandpa (Bert Remsen, who had a bit part in Jeff Lieberman's equally cross-pollinating Remote Control), a survivalist nutter who advocates lizard tails as a resourceful form of junk food. The boys stay up all night to ogle chesty creature feature hostess Medusa (Jennifer Richards) until the Hungry Beast materializes and devours/mutates first with Gramps and then later with Stanley and company, leading to a bizarre moment which bridges the gap between John Carpenter's The Thing and Brian Yuzna's Society. Suzy and O.D. return to taunt the hysterical Sherman until they come face to face with the monster, who proves docile at the sight of O.D.'s studded leather armbands, thus easing him into an E.T.-style crash course in the wonders of music and television. 

Thus, they have successfully trained the world's first extraterrestrial couch potato. Oh, but for how long?

Perhaps that's the funniest joke in the entire film, the notion that the already doofy-looking beastie is as much of a TV junkie as the MTV-obsessed lovebirds and the status-seeking parents. Like Sherman and Grampa, the Hungry Beast is distracted by the sight of Medusa and her science fiction marathon showcasing such 1950s ephemera as Robot Monster and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, grunting giddily as the alien threat of the latter lays waste to national landmarks. As designed by Empire stableman John Carl Buechler, the Hungry Beast is a mountainous turd of a terror replete with a third eye attached to a stray limb and a lethal pincer that reduces hapless victims into gooey green puddles to be lapped up by a mile-long tongue. Revealed to be a common pet on its home planet, the Hungry Beast is like man's best friend if said owner happened to be Seth Brundle.

Fittingly, TerrorVision suggests a telepod experiment which merges nuclear-family sitcoms, Ed Wood, an entire VH1 special's worth of Eighties signifiers, and the aforementioned Spielberg blockbuster into one lumpy sum. It's also one of the many Charlie Band flicks released in 1986 where the production migrated to Rome, resulting in a distinctly Italian mise en scène similar to From Beyond or Crawlspace. Cinematographer Romano Albani had already twice collaborated with Dario Argento (see: Inferno and Phenomena) before lensing TerrorVision and Buechler's own Troll concurrently. And production designer Giovanni Natalucci, who worked on all of Band's foreign affairs, doubled up here as art director. The idiosyncratic color schemes and set decorations they devise end up pushing TerrorVision further into surrealism, especially the pornographic artwork and erotic sculptures which consume the entire Putterman household.

As for how Ted Nicolaou's script capitalizes on all this lurid excess, let's just consider TerrorVision a film at the crossroads where Dada meets dum-dum. The plot is 1950s kitsch in a hyper-modernized setting where narcissistic characters grouse about the most minor of inconveniences, lean too much on pop culture in their personalities and are mannered to the point where you expect a laugh track to chime in at any second. Mary Woronov is introduced wearing aerobic Spandex (similar to her villainous appearance on the season finale of Sledge Hammer!) and nagging about the bad reception getting in the way of her regimen. Jonathan Gries as O.D. makes Bill & Ted and Wayne & Garth look like savants by virtue of his dopey, dim-witted swagger. Gerrit Graham and Alejandro Rey strip down to their briefs and quirk up their every line of dialogue, from the way in which Stanley pronounces "Jacuzzi" to sound like "j'accuse" to Spiro's Italian waiter patois. Suzy foolishly decides to become the monster's "business manager," blissfully unaware how the rules of King Kong could apply to this very scenario. Rather than something you'd normally see on Adult Swim, Frank Zappa's juvenile approach to satire is the norm here, very much an acquired taste (Mr. Mother of Invention himself was considered as a composer before the job inevitably went to Richard Band).

Nicolaou's approach is perhaps more polarizing than Boaz Davidson or Savage Steve Holland, primarily because it is so committed to going far out and far gone from anything resembling a familiar universe. That's very much the film's greatest charm or an insufferable hindrance depending on your perspective. Even Killer Klowns from Outer Space allowed the alien threat to feel genuinely threatening and produced a couple of frightening, grisly set pieces. TerrorVision is pure goofball abandon, extremely self-conscious about its genetic tackiness and Me-Decade trappings to the point where even the horror elements do not feel legitimate, especially given that every character appears made from straw and slime. Although categorized as "horrror," TerrorVision plays wholly as comedy, and in a just world, TerrorVision and Killer Klowns from Outer Space would've swapped places at the Video Update I remember renting both those tapes from.

I also bring up Killer Klowns because in the spirit of that film's loopy musical assistance from punk rockers The Dickies, TerrorVision boasts a catchy theme song of its own as written/performed by The Fibonaccis. Singer Magie Song chirps, chants and croons through a senseless array of lurking horrors and gloomy lust in the lyrics, which at least mentions Medusa in the pre-chorus. Still, damned if I could locate swarms of insects anywhere in the film proper. It's more dreamlike compared to the direct awesomeness of "Killer Klowns."

TerrorVision is the epitome of the kind of movie one would see on the monitors of a trendy nightclub or hipster house party, a visually deafening experience that is equally loud in terms of concept and performances. It's equally right at home in the living room of any 13-year-old boy crazy enough to give it a temporary pardon from the VHS shop. It's a bizarre hydra of elements that are equally over-the-top and under-ambitious, squeaking by on its spirit rather than by story or smarts. One would be better off embracing the same year's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as a merciless, dark comic send-up of big business, sexual mores and dysfunctional families, although the New Wave-riding pastel paradise which is TerrorVision does have a worthy "the more things change..." attitude. It's an iridescent display of intellectual decay, but at the end of the day, I simply can't resist Diane Franklin puckering her lips as she bops along to W.A.S.P. 

I'll take the last train out of Squidsville, fer sure, like, totally!

TerrorVision shares space with 1987's zombie-themed The Video Dead on Shout! Factory's combo pack double feature release, but both films are given bonus commentaries and featurettes to satiate the whims of each film's audience. Of course, after seeing and hearing Diane on the Second Time Lucky DVD, I gravitated towards the former. She joins Ted Nicolaou and Jon Gries for a yak-track that is sprightly and contains plenty of amusing production specifics and quirks such as Gries' industry connections stemming back to the sci-fi films of the 1950s, namely King Dinosaur, not to mention the familiar-looking shape which the remains of his O.D. form upon disintegration. It's equally amusing to see the trio on-camera for "Monsters on Demand," which incorporates more of the cast (Chad Allen, Mary Woronov) and crew (the brothers Band, John Carl Buechler) for a cohesive summation of the film's inception and reputation. When you hear the remarkably perky Diane proclaim her "No way!" reaction to some fans' recollection of the flick as well as her quoting of certain Suzy-isms, it's hard to think that a potentially debuting Belinda Carlisle could hold a candle to the actress. Meanwhile, Woronov provides a good word for the absent Gerrit Graham and Allen recalls walking around the risqué set in the company of his Italian Catholic parents. There is a still gallery to round things out, but surprisingly missing is the theatrical trailer. 

The things we do for love...