Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS
(R, 106 mins., Warner Home Video, premiere date: September 19, 2014)

This may not be so much a review as me finally throwing my arms up and just deciding to end this project once and for all. And good riddance.

After enduring eleven Cannon Films for the express purpose of this series, scrapping one previously familiar title (Going Steady, the abysmal sequel to Lemon Popsicle) and two freshly-watched disasters (the Lou Ferrigno Hercules vehicles), I got burned out. This was the second feature aside from my Diane Franklin retrospective which I completely walked away from. Maybe I should've focused on something else like before, and I tried, but there was once again a wave of depression that left me uninspired and exhausted.

Besides, Ain't It Cool News already beat me to the punch, title and all. And I'm just not that kind of a geek, to be honest.

But I was gathering thoughts about Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films in my apathy. So maybe this is the right time to wrap this up and put a bow on this once and for all.

First thing I noticed was that the subtitle of this is a blatant echo of Mark Hartley's previous sizzle reel documentary, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation. This particular "wild, untold story" felt like such when I first watched it on DVD, exposing me to a lot of movies (Snapshot, Nightmares, Alvin Purple, Barry McKenzie, Stone, Stunt Rock, Pacific Banana, Felicity, etc. etc.) that completely bypassed my radar. This was an entire geographical subgenre of exploitation filmmaking that I originally wondered in my Epinions.com review, "Where was Joe Bob Briggs when these were playing the drive-ins?"

Cannon Films, however, was a studio based in America and aimed directly at this market. So they already cultivated an infamy which was talked about in the press and trades of the time, with Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus taking regular drubbings for their steady stream of shite cinema. Even at the dawn of my writer's ambitions during those videocassette days, Golan-Globus were burned in my brain as the schlock factory to rival Charles Band and Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz. I even knew they were Israelis and that Golan's first name had a distinctive "ack" syllable.

What separates Not Quite Hollywood from Electric Boogaloo definitively for me is that the former was more consistently passionate and pleasurable about Hartley's homebrewed underbelly of cinema. The New Wave, as Barry Humphries laments, meant that Australia suddenly needed to project an "image" outside of Peter Weir's penchant for little girls walking through rocks. A more proletariat alternative suddenly manifested itself in the Ocker T&A comedies, the nitro-burning dementia of their action movies and the collected works of producer Tony Ginnane. This attention to context, which addresses respectability with a hatchet to the warbles, gave you a sense of the stakes Australian cinema was confronting and how it shook loose of its white robes.

Electric Boogaloo could've used a briefing on what was cooking back in Tel Aviv prior to the one-two slap of Operation Thunderbolt and Lemon Popsicle. Menahem Golan was the first Israeli producer to get an Oscar nomination back in 1964 for Sallah Shabati, starring Chaim Topol (Fiddler on the Roof) as a likeable louse contriving get-rich-quick schemes to afford public housing in the newly-minted Israel. With cousin Yoram Globus in tow, the duo garnered a couple more successful submissions if not victors with Moshé Mizrahi's I Love You Rosa (1972) and The House on Chelouche Street (1973), the latter nominated in the same year a Dutchman named Paul Verhoeven was making his name known with a film called Turkish Delight.

Aside from Israel's early acclaim, there was a bizarre juggling of tones which accommodated both broad slapstick and melodrama. In 1971 Sallah director Ephraim Kishon released another Oscar-nominated project, The Policeman, produced by neither Golan or Globus. The titular officer, Constable Azulai, engages in tomfoolery which would predate Police Academy as much as Lemon Popsicle foretold Porky's, but he's forbidden to act on a love affair with a vivacious prostitute nor can he prevent impending ejection from the police squad, despite an arranged arrest and due promotion to sergeant. Golan & Globus must have taken a cue from The Policeman's surprisingly defeated ending because they mirrored it in both Operation Thunderbolt and Lemon Popsicle (that film's hopeless Benji is a cross between Hermie from Summer of ‘42 and The Policeman).

Hartley's Cannon expose, with a boost from exec producer Brett Ratner, doesn't really broach either of these juicy topics, instead taking a cue from Sweet's "Action" and quadrupling down on the boundless cheap thrills that were their specialty as the Go-Go Boys crossed overseas, having purchased the U.S. studio who distributed a few of Golan's productions. Electric Boogaloo tells you what to expect once Golan unscrupulously tossed his newborn child into a horse-drawn wagon for a dangerous stunt, proceeding to deluge you with a generation's worth of B-movie mania, roughly chronological in order but stopping cold every once in a while to dish further dirt on the Golan-Globus business model.

For the first few years under Cannon's new ownership, the studio produced and distributed a gross amount of films piggybacking on trends, lowbrow mores and diminished celebrity. The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, the third in a trilogy tethered to both periods of Cannon Films, found Martine Beswick not too pleased with both the gratuitous orgy inserts and seeing a clear parallel between the sabotage of the plot and the practices of her producers. Schizoid, New Year's Evil and X-Ray (Hospital Massacre) aimed at the post-Friday the 13th audience with bloodshed and nudity. Lady Chatterley's Lover, a proposed "new marriage" between erotica legend Sylvia Kristel and her Emmanuelle director Just Jaeckin, initially began with a script that was a glorified porno but became wannabe literary. Sylvia's luck didn't improve with Mata Hari, as she struggled with both acting and alcoholism.

The Golan-Globus partnership, forceful and efficient as it was in pursuing what by many accounts was a very sincere passion, sadly didn't wash with those early efforts at breaking into the American market. Golan craved good stories, production values and star power to compete with Hollywood, but The Apple, Death Wish II and The Last American Virgin, all boiled down to their essences herein, weren't rich in any of those aspects.

Referred to by historian David Del Valle as "the Mount Everest of bad musicals" (even using the movie's artwork for the cover of his Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign), The Apple was as "bold" as it was culturally tone-deaf. Catherine Mary Stewart, the folksy ingénue Bibi, is self-effacing in her recollections of the project, which proved Golan wrong in his insistence that this was going to be the next Ken Russell's Tommy. Listening to Golan muse on the afterlife "beyond E.T." against the split-screen clips of the climactic deliverance would be charming if The Apple clearly wasn't a pitiful misfire by "a man in advance of his time."

A similar strain occurs in discussion of The Last American Virgin, Boaz Davidson's retread of his own Lemon Popsicle with new wave hairdos, outfits and music. Not a lot of real insight emerges from the time spent covering this film, the only takeaway being that the teenage crowd who saw this post-Porky's were unprepared for the downer conclusion which is still treated as the be-all-end-all of what is a pretty sleazy movie. Hearing one participant chuckle over the cross-cutting between Diane Franklin's character being knifed for abortion and a pizza getting sliced really doesn't help (it cannot ever match Quentin Tarantino's WTF fascination with Fair Game from Not Quite Hollywood). Franklin is the sole cast member interviewed, oddly enough, but only given about 20 seconds of sheer redundancy.

Between Davidson smugly asserting that Golan & Globus were not part of any "Hollywood bullshit" and Del Valle bluntly stating that they were never accepted in the first place, it becomes obvious throughout the trajectory and sound bites assembled that the Go-Go Boys yearned for a prestige they were too boorish and penny-pinching to attain. But oh, how they tried! Starting with Death Wish II and ending with Superman IV, they stumbled onto properties of varying quality which they put their stamp on. Death Wish II bowdlerized David Engelbach's script for a graphic retread of the original at the satisfaction of returning director Michael Winner. But it did revive Charles Bronson's fallen star enough that Golan-Globus capitalized on his vigilante persona for two more Death Wish sequels and a series of lurid one-offs (10 to Midnight, Messenger of Death, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects).

In 1983, Cannon truly began to reflect the kind of "so bad it's good" cult appreciation which justifies the "wild" side of the subtitle. Following their international success of Enter the Ninja (listen for Franco Nero) and Revenge of the Ninja (with a story ad-libbed by Golan when the original movie died in the editing room), Ninja III: The Domination introduced Lucinda Dickey in a nutso fusion of Flashdance and The Exorcist, with a dead ninja in the Pazuzu role.

As in-house music supervisor Richard Kraft puts it, Golan was fond of "the intersection of ideas that should never meet each other." The Apple, Ninja III and the Brooke Shields fiasco Sahara share this dubious honor. Yet he really had Oscar gold in his starry eyes. It wasn't going to happen, though, with the kind of films Cannon were knocking out under their distribution deal with MGM. Suddenly, Golan commissioned a kids-friendly version of Hercules from Luigi Cozzi (out with the banana-sucking, in with the grizzlies hurled into the cosmos) that outdoes Starcrash in the field of anti-special effects. Golan's own Over the Brooklyn Bridge (a.k.a. My Darling Shiksa) was an ethnic dramedy which sank to the bottom of the East River. To make up for the lack of titillation, we got the deal-breaking disaster Bolero. To make up for the lack of financial clout, along came the shrewdly-conceived Breakin'.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films tries to balance an appreciation of Golan and Globus' supposedly maverick sensibilities with a candid understanding of the many times they shot themselves in their feet. From the rushed production of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo to the misunderstood casting dictum which landed Sharon Stone in King Solomon's Mines to the botched family film Going Bananas, which Golan was insane enough to pitch to the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose, Electric Boogaloo is ripe with absurdities and contradictions.

The only times Cannon lived up to their movie-loving sensibilities was in courting truly iconoclastic artists who could call their bluff to make the passion projects which haven't dated as poorly as their predominantly lesser oeuvre: John Cassavetes' Love Streams; Barbet Schroeder's Barfly; Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train; Franco Zeffirelli's Otello. The once-disgraced Endless Love director himself is tearfully happy of his movie and the faith of his producers.

In between those rare moments of legitimacy, though, Cannon became a conveyor belt for cheesy movies both real and imagined. Entire film budgets were spent on publicity at Cannes and in Variety to promote and pitch as many ideas as they and their art department could sell. There were press releases for unscripted projects. Gunga Din! Who's in the Closet?! It Ate Cleveland! Charles Bronson is The Golem! Not that the ones that did get made were any good, as they lacked the patience and time to edit their films into coherent stories, and Golan's stream-of-consciousness notion of creativity was hackneyed. They could still distribute movies at an average of one per week.

But there was only so much magic in Chuck Norris' beard to keep The Cannon Group in the black. As Hartley's doco burns its calories on Lifeforce, Death Wish 3 and The Delta Force, eventually the big-spending cousins' bravado worked to suck them dry. They would lose $90 million in one fiscal year, and the movies that were supposed to push them into the mainstream (Over the Top, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Masters of the Universe) instead morphed into box-office bombs. A lot of defected blame and compromised principles are laid bare, although only some bad decisions (hiring an Italian money man as a partner despite his criminal past) were more lamentable than others.

Electric Boogaloo's success as a documentary ultimately depends upon one's fondness for Cannon Films. Even though Hartley's fast-paced editing (with assistance from Jamie Blanks and Sara Edwards) fits in with Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed, I wouldn't recommend you stock your Netflix queue with Golan-Globus productions, as many don't really live up to the tales being told. The structure is more scattershot and repetitive than previously, and it has a lot to do with the formulaic conventions of Cannon films as well as the limited amount of titles on show (no 52 Pick-Up, Oscar-winner The Assault, Street Smart, Tough Guys Don't Dance, Firewalker, Making the Grade, any of the myriad Lemon Popsicle sequels and spin-offs). Their mid-80s action movies usually ended with a lead bad guy dispatched by rocket launcher and the cheesecake they loaded into their sexy stuff were too stoically tawdry to be turn-ons. Those Filipino and Aussie equivalents were way more spirited in their crassness.

The roster of interviewees is also a bit more unwieldy and given to making similar points. Because Golan and Globus, in their patented style, declined to participate so they could tell their own story on the fly, archive footage and photos of them are essentially overwhelmed by the caricatured perspectives of others. Also absent is a wild card talking head on par with Tarantino or John Landis, who could either champion these movies or call bullshit. Alex Winter (Death Wish 3) comes the closest in poking at the pretensions of Menahem Golan, Charles Bronson and Michael Winner, as well as articulating the "wild carnival" atmosphere of Cannon's working conditions. Bo Derek holds nothing back about just how lowdown her producers were during the events of Bolero. Robert Forster (The Delta Force) sticks his neck out for Golan with greater conviction than others within the company. There's also Cassandra Peterson, Laurene Landon, Molly Ringwald, Marina Sirtis, Shabba Doo, Boogaloo Shrimp, William Stout, and multiple accessory Tobe Hooper, whose reputation sank in tandem with Cannon's (watch the "It Runs in the Family" featurette on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 special edition for the real skinny on how Golan-Globus had their way with this proposed black comedy turned "red comedy").

There's little room for earned poignancy by the time the movie wraps up with Golan and Globus' unamicable split, which saw them struggling to make their own Lambada knock-offs that eventually played theatres simultaneously. What you get is one more zesty story in this cautionary tale which is often deliriously bitter, occasionally riotous yet ultimately trifling.

Cannon Fodder: Making the Grade + Hot Chili

MAKING THE GRADE
(R, Cannon Films, 104 mins., theatrical release date: May 18, 1984)

HOT CHILI
(R, Cannon Films, 86 mins., released in August 1985)

Now here's a movie which you won't find discussed in Mark Hartley's Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. Actually, I've seen two of them, and they're both thudding attempts by Golan-Globus to cater illicitly to the pubescent teenybopper set. They're both very loosely based on their earlier The Last American Virgin, and they were just as day-late and dollar-short, too.

Why Making the Grade isn't included in Electric Boogaloo, even in a passing two-second interval, is astounding. Another relic of Cannon's disastrous association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, you'd think Hartley would've paid this one a little more mind since the topic was broached. This one also spawned the careers of Judd Nelson, just a year before his induction into the Brat Pack, and Andrew Clay Silverstein, whose character is named "Diceman" as an omen of his later notoriety.

Yes, this was the film that gave you Andrew "Dice" Clay. Reactions may vary, but suffice to say there are no naughty nursery rhymes anywhere in the film. Perhaps if there were, Hartley and Brett Ratner would've jumped on that opportunity. God knows my image of Ratner is hardly different to that of the Diceman.

Besides, if you're going to make a shrine to the Eighties, then what better clip to highlight than Clay's show-stopping goof on a jazzercising John Travolta? Even without Frank Stallone on the soundtrack, that moment is golden. What, were the makers of Electric Boogaloo afraid they'd play up the kitsch too much?

Initially titled "The Last American Preppie" in a bald attempt to capitalize on that Boaz Davidson job, despite neither him nor any of the cast (physical or musical) returning to the fold, Making the Grade is another bog-standard row between the stuffy rich and the snazzy poor of our educational system. You've seen this done many, many times, whether you were there in '84 or not. There comes a point where you as a filmgoer feel like one of these sub-Animal House underachievers, being held back so as to endure the same canned anarchy and tedious characterizations over and over again without ever feeling like you've learned a damn thing.

Dana Olsen, the sitcom writer who'd go on to pen The 'Burbs, assumes the poor man's Bill Murray position as Palmer Woodrow III, the living embodiment of both snob AND slob. Smarmily secure in his own arrested development and the shame it brings his wealthy family, Palmer's flunked out of six boarding schools in three years and is threatened with losing his inheritance if he doesn't graduate his senior year at Hoover Academy. Rather than cancel his semester overseas, Palmer buys himself an impostor when he meets Eddie Keaton (Judd Nelson), a youthful hustler running away from $3,700 in gambling debts.

So it's off to Preppie High for Eddie, where he confronts the atypical melee of boors and bores. There's the geeky roommate (Carey Scott) who is also Palmer's best friend, agreeing to mentor Eddie for a healthy lump sum. There's principal antagonist/king of the campus Bif (Scott McGinnis) and his would-be girlfriend/founder's daughter Tracey (Jonna Lee), who fancies Eddie for his salt-of-the-gutter charisma. There's a ragtag faculty comprised of hapless dean Mr. Harriman (Gordon Jump), corpulent lacrosse coach Wordman (Walter Olkewicz) and memory-deprived Professor Mueller (Ray Hill). And finally, there's the neurotic fat kid known only as Blimp (Daniel Schneider), socially awkward and severely overemphasized.

Dorian Walker, whose only other directing credit was the campy Teen Witch ("Top that!"), can't even be counted on to give this movie a serviceable flow. The movie seems to shuffle its scenarios, conforming to the episodic ordinariness of its genre with brazen apathy. Chestnuts like the school social, the loud party and the "romantic" sex scene just seem plopped in to satisfy the producers' demands, and screenwriter/producer Gene (Treasure of the Four Crowns) Quintano strains to adapt them to the then-current vogue. More often than not, it's just dead silly, like when Eddie shows off his Breakin' prowess (note that the only black person in the cast is Palmer's sassy maid) as the live band launches from a limp cover of "My Sharona" to a song by Reflex, the one-hit wonders behind "The Politics of Dancing," despite not having a synthesizer player! (Imagine Reeves Nevo & The Cinch from Fast Times at Ridgemont High suddenly turning into A Flock of Seagulls.)

The result is as schizophrenic as expected of a Golan-Globus exploitation, yet crushingly formulaic and half-baked. What may work in a fast-paced action movie like Ninja III: The Domination becomes stultifying in a teen movie, and this movie's constant switching of gears from raucous (the return appearance of Palmer, which may as well suggest surrender) to proselytizing (Eddie's inexplicable personality shift into a stereotypical Ivy League killjoy) registers as incompetence. The only plus here is that Nelson, Olsen and Clay do not want for one-liners: "I don't even know you and you're breakin'my heart," Eddie raps at Tracey, before admitting "I've only felt that way about Pia Zadora." But despite all of their combined sarcasms, Making the Grade uses the cheapest of primer to paint by numbers.

One of the major idiosyncrasies of Cannon Films is that they were inches ahead of the game (Breakin') and miles behind the curve, as Making the Grade demonstrates. You'd think that the previous year's Risky Business and the concurrently-released Sixteen Candles would've refined Cannon's coarse stance on teen movies. But Quintano is on the same mean streak as his predecessors in the teensploitation field. He thinks it's charming to hear Coach Wordman, who is introduced in the presence of trashy women, speak contemptibly of wallflowers as "woof-woofs" and "dogs." He falls back on Blimp being humiliated by Aryans with argyles or, at the height of condescension, stuffing his face at the commencement ceremony. Even the wanton nudity reeks of arch disdain, which in this film is the dominant style of humor.

At least The Last American Virgin had the brevity of a 90-minute runtime, whereas Making the Grade is a veritable cramming session at 100 minutes. Despite the lack of chemistry between Nelson and Olsen, the credits suggest Palmer and Eddie would return for a sequel, "Tourista." This never officially happened, nor did a planned sequel to Virgin which would've had the male leads cross paths with Cannon regular Sylvia Kristel (Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mata Hari) in an exotic locale, but I believe Golan & Globus followed-up both movies in spirit with William Sachs' phenomenally worthless Hot Chili.

Since three of the four main players from Virgin went on, like Judd Nelson, to way better things in 1985 (Monoson in Mask, Antin in The Goonies, Franklin in Better Off Dead opposite Dan "Blimp" Schneider), Hot Chili's only encore appearance is from perennial third-wheeler Joe Rubbo. And since the premise involves four boys' summer vacation to Mexico, it's as close to "Tourista" as Cannon would ever get.

The big problem here is that whatever marginal graces Davidson's cult favorite possessed, in performance and photography, are completely lost here. All that's left are the tackiness and tastelessness.

WASP-ish hero Ricky (Charles Schillaci in his only movie credit), buddy Jason (Allan Kayser, the bully from Night of the Creeps) and bickering nebbishes Arney (Rubbo) & Stanley (Chuck Hemingway, who appeared in My Science Project and Neon Maniacs before dying young in 1996) arrive south of the border on a work program at a resort hotel, the Tropicana Cabana. Though the manager, Esteban (Jerry Lazarus), is a soul-sapping dictator, they have high hopes to indulge their yen for sex and booze which are immediately stoked by the presence of another degraded Virgin alumnus, Louisa Moritz, here squeaking like Betty Boop as she struts about in nothing but an apron.

Hot Chili basically goes through the dopily titillating motions from this point onward. Ricky takes music lessons from a naked cellist (Bea Fiedler). Stanley carries a snooty guest's luggage all around the hotel, even ending up in a bullfighting ring, while the film is sped up a la Benny Hill and cartoon sound effects augment the chipmunk voices. Tawny blonde veteran Taaffe O'Connell brandishes a dildo in Ricky's face, claiming it's something "all boys want." And then she and the boys straight-up rehash the Carmela gangbang from Virgin, complete with Rubbo's apprehensive face and the unwanted appearance of an irate lover.

And the less said about Ricky's letters-to-mother narration, the better.

Skinny dipping, strobe lights, dressing in drag, belching, meat thermometers in delicate areas, breasts toppling out of their dresses, under-the-table foot penetration. Hot Chili is a compilation of the Lemon Popsicle series' greatest hits, and calls into question why company man Boaz Davidson didn't demand a writing credit opposite William Sachs and Menahem Golan given how many derivations are on display. All that's missing is his smug chauvinist moralizing.

Even if you despised The Last American Virgin, you'll miss the compositional skill of Adam Greenberg, the fresh-faced casting of Lawrence Monoson & Diane Franklin and the fluke assemblage of simpering CHR staples. All Hot Chili serves you are four bland actors on auto-pilot, predominantly revolting mise en scène and one patronizing, puerile gag after another. Not even as flavorful as store-brand mayonnaise let alone cayenne peppers.

This is perhaps the worst movie Sachs has ever commanded, even more dire than The Incredible Melting Man and Galaxina. Hot Chili is only recommended to completists of either Cannon Films or Joe Rubbo, and even they will wish for a Palmer Woodrow III to provide the snarky commentary Hot Chili truly craves. Mark Hartley was right to let this one rot in peace.

Enchantéd, Pt. II: The Last American Virgin

Enchantéd: A Retrospective Tribute to Diane Franklin 

II. The Last American Virgin (1982)

(R, Cannon Films)

Welcome to the first film in my always independent but never disengaged look back at the films starring American actress Diane Franklin. This is dedicated not just to a true heroine from my childhood, one who brought soulful and sincere qualities to any number of roles from well-remembered cult films from the 1980s, but to those who, like me, at least remember. If you haven’t read my introductory piece, please go back and read it by clicking here and you’ll know what I mean. With all the love and respect born from years of memory retention and genuine affection, as well as a naturally inquisitive, informative disposition, I’m eternally grateful to Diane Franklin not just for coming back to public attention to revisit her movies in a fantastic book available on Amazon, Diane Franklin: The Excellent Adventures of the Last American, French-Exchange Babe of the Eighties, but for her Cult Radio a Go Go program which talks openly to fellow female fixtures of the 1980s cinema scene who have been relegated to obscurity but who have proven endearing in their own special ways as Mrs. Franklin. I will touch upon as many films as I can, hopefully including her TV movie appearances, and cap it all off with a book review.

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With that said, I must say that in taking it upon myself to plan and commit to this retrospective, I realized the inevitable possibility that I would be revisiting Franklin's big screen debut, 1982's The Last American Virgin. Every thought about this movie leading up until now would immediately be haunted by my mental jukebox queuing up Lloyd Cole's "Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?" in a peculiarly psychological understanding.

Franklin was 19 years old when The Last American Virgin began pre-production, coincidentally the same age as I was when I first came upon the movie on the shelves of a Best Buy store on August 5, 2003. I had come to pick up a DVD copy of Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing, the first of two beloved John Cusack vehicles from 1985 alongside, serendipitously, Better Off Dead... MGM had just released a slew of 1980s teen movies digitally, including 1983's elusive Valley Girl and countless others that I had an awareness of, be they lousy (1986's Johnny Be Good, with Anthony Michael Hall playing a jock in my own first outcry of casting heresy) or mediocre (1988's Bright Lights, Big City). I immediately touched upon two titles released theatrically by Cannon Films, who in their schlock-o-block salad days rarely appealed to the young demographic as directly as they did with Breakin' and The Last American Virgin.

The latter's cult reputation was already well-established, and it had a bikini-clad eye-candy DVD cover (see also The Sure Thing) that was similar to what I later found was the cover for the UK Lemon Popsicle series box set. I turned it over immediately and found at least three name actors in the then-unknown cast with at least one unforgettable appearance in films watched during my youth. Not just Diane Franklin, but also Lawrence Monoson of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter immortality (wherein he foreshadows through exposition a fatally libidinous Crispin Glover's post-coital doom with two harsh, computer-generated words) and Steve Antin from The Goonies. Finally, it was called "bittersweet, humorous and insightful" in a major magazine's pull quote (see also The Sure Thing).

Call it a Shabba-Don't if you must, but I cashed in the free DVD offer applied with purchasing both The Sure Thing and Valley Girl on The Last American Virgin.

My favorite coming-of-age movie made in the 1980s, one which I thank my older sister for hipping me towards, was the one set in the 1950s that was not associated with the teen sex craze of the contemporary times. I'm talking about Stand by Me, Reiner's finest hour-and-a-half as a director following This Is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing. Corey "Mouth" Feldman left more of an impression in that film as Teddy Duchamp, another outlet for the teen idol's typical cocky bravado albeit one leavened by an existential destiny he hasn't the introspection and growth to subvert. Try and recall, if you can, the moment when he foolishly projects his own idealistic dénouement to Gordie Lachance's "Barf-o-rama" campfire story. Don't read any further until that scene is properly fixed in your memory.

This is the exact same reaction I had to the cherry-bombing conclusion of The Last American Virgin.

Imagine a teensploitation film like Porky's ending with the same leftfield violence as Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop or, to be more astute, an alternate Fast Times at Ridgemont High in which Mark Ratner's puppy love for Stacy Hamilton escalates into a monumental wreckage of deceitful instincts, lonesome desperation and, in then, in the end, sad-sack martyrdom.

Throughout The Last American Virgin, the most empathetic character amongst the hedonistic cast of sexually-active archetypes is taunted by an unattainable desire for consensual passion from the girl of his dreams. He sees her first in a transfixed state of instantaneous infatuation, is told that the best he can hope for is a rebound once she instead clings to his callous best friend, proves himself to be the most compatible choice once she gets disposed of in her time of greatest need, and then comes to the realization that not only will his love remain unrequited, but that he had just been used in the same manner as his paramour. Without a safety net to fall back on, the viewer has just witnessed a vicious cycle of casual cruelty and ambiguous despair in the wake of a typically broad sex farce that pushes the concept of schadenfreude to its brink only to give you a kiss and send you plunging into the poignant, painful abyss.

If Better Off Dead... helped to embolden whatever hopeless romantics responsible for it's word-of-mouth credibility, then The Last American Virgin has the polarity to drive the same quixotic contingent to actual suicide. Still, after a decade of abstinence, I'm finally prepared to answer the burning question I posed to myself in the wake of my inaugural viewing experience: "Was it bad for me?"

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The Last American Virgin was Tel Aviv-born co-writer/director Boaz Davidson's attempt to translate his 1978 blockbuster Eskimo Limon (Lemon Popsicle) for the Anglos (an alternate American title was Going All the Way, although no enterprising thought was ever given to "Israeli Graffiti"). The original film was Davidson's attempt to confront a cycle of adolescent turmoil that dogged him until he was 33.

The character of Benji, played by 18-year-old Yiftach Katzur in what would be his career-definer, was Davidson's fictional surrogate engaged in a solitary battle between the hormonal and the heartfelt, the center of a trio of promiscuous boys living in the 1950s ("but only if you measure in terms of years"). One of the other roles went to Zachi Noy, who came to the filmmakers' attention due to a role in 1977's The Garden (a film which imported an American actress named Melanie Griffith) and was reportedly hired without a screen test.

Eskimo Limon was released domestically in February 1978 to a very wide and lucrative audience, so much in fact it was deduced that nearly half of Israel's population came out to see it. When it played in Milan during the MIFED International Film Market festival, producer Yoram Globus remembered people getting up to leave a half-hour into the film, giving him the impression that they were walking out of the screening out of disdain, but in fact they were merely trying to secure distribution rights. The movie went on to be released and received with astounding success internationally, which was a huge boon for the Israeli film culture, was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and no doubt went on to land Globus and cousin Menahem Golan their great prominence as the owners of Cannon Films starting in 1979.

The deluge of sequels all incorporating the original lead actors would last until 1988, although Davidson surrendered control of the franchise following the fourth film, Private Popsicle, after feeling there was no more authenticity and originality to be gleaned. Around the same time as Private Popsicle, Davidson and the Cannon Group pushed to create a proper, contemporary U.S. update of Lemon Popsicle seeing as how there were unprofitable stigmas to foreign films either dubbed or subtitled. There were fresh new faces behind the character types made famous by the original, the return of future renowned cinematographer Adam Greenberg (an irrefutable, expressionistic genius in my mind since the first VHS viewing of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark) to capture alluringly neon lighting and, in the spirit of the original film, a wall-to-wall soundtrack of era-defining songs, only this time the evocative boogie-woogie and balladry of Little Richard and Paul Anka gave way to the new/old wave represented by Devo and The Commodores.

None of the information I have just regurgitated (let's give due credit right now with a footnote link to the UK Lemon Popsicle franchise database) was provided to me when I first picked up the MGM DVD of The Last American Virgin because it was a one-bone affair in terms of special features. No context, no connections, nothing at all but a theatrical trailer which duly pimps the roster of artists (and using their proper promotional fonts!) just as much as the theatrical poster. I felt like there were K-Tel personnel inhabiting the Cannon Films marketing wing at the time.

Time would pass for The Last American Virgin to get some due recognition, beginning in particular with a 2007 screening at the New Beverly hosted by filmmaking fanboy Eli Roth and boasting a micro-reunion Q&A panel that included Lawrence Monoson, Louisa Moritz, Kimmy Robertson, and Brian Peck, but alas no Antin (now an openly gay scriptwriter and director, bless him for life, but I really hope he hits a stride greater than Burlesque) or Franklin (what's this I see, but…hey, a book!) or Joe Rubbo (now a network executive based in South Florida). Being a regular reader of the superlative criticism site Film Freak Central clued me into founder Bill Chambers' positive appraisal of the film in a review of The Monster Squad. And Diane Franklin, you magnificent mother of pearl…have you read her book?!

Once you have done so, then you'll be aware of just how much authenticity and critical insight Franklin bestows onto Karen (or Nikki, to conjure the original character), the luminous stranger who is unable to even buy her first rocky road ice cream cone without a longing look thrown her away. The gawker in question is Gary (Monoson as Benji, suitably giving off non-stop puppy dog vibes), a terminally awkward pizza delivery boy who comes to the local youth-frequented diner to meet up with easygoing buddies Rick (Antin, playing a more conventionally hunky version of Bobby rich with unctuous confidence) and David (Rubbo as Huey, still a portly smoothie with a black book for keeping tabs). So far, so Limon-y, although the updated scene where the trio zero in on a random collective of girls leads to a straight lift not from the first movie, but the 1981 second sequel known by us Yanks as Hot Bubblegum.

This means that the triple date converges at Gary's house, where Rick and David effortlessly charm their targets into putting out ("I'm not on the pill" — "Neither am I") than the host, who gets stuck with the obese, bespectacled and completely apathetic third wheel of the bunch. Having bluffed their way so far with the promise of drugs, they rely on sugar substitute as a replacement for cocaine (in a very well-acted gag moment), and by the time Gary's parents come home, his nude guests arrive in time to shock Gary's mom into stress, thus resulting in the classic gag where the odd man out (David) sneaks unawares into a bed not with his intended, but a frightened older other woman who screams rape.

The same doubts that Davidson had about continuing to advance the official Lemon Popsicle films come back to render The Last American Virgin the entertainment equivalent of sloppy seconds. A lot of the humor in this takes its tenor from the farcical Hot Bubblegum, which opened with beach-bound shenanigans at fat Huey's expense (complete with a dog pissing in his face as he stood buried up to the neck in sand) and proceeded into a particularly icky subplot about a buxom cousin pitting Benji against his father in attempting to lay her. This extends into the trio's encounter with the oversexed and all alone Spanish bombshell (here Carmela, played by the legitimately Cuban C-queen Louisa Moritz as a Charo-caliber caricature of carnality), which is more silly than sexy. Davidson loses touch of the naturalism and raw terrain of the film that begat it at times and this revamp feels more like a bored compendium of a trilogy than a worthy update. It counts the beats rather than getting into the groove, as a true 1980s paragon of playful perkiness would soon advocate.

The episodic aversion to flow in the editing only exacerbates things. It's sitcom protocol, to get right down to it, and the broad comedy just comes in and out without any real lasting smiles. When David has his turn with Carmela to the tune of "That's the Way I Like It" by KC & The Sunshine Band, it throws into sharp relief what more earnest teen movie figureheads like John Hughes and Savage Steve Holland were able to achieve in terms of rhythm (two years later, Revenge of the Nerds would ironically cop The Gleaming Spires' "Are You Ready for the Sex Girls," which simply fades into the background here despite being the abrupt harbinger of a scene transition). But the surprisingly meticulous soundrack cues often have the power to literally pinpoint the romantic highs and unanticipated lows in Gary's pursuit of Karen, especially in the recurring appropriation of Quincy Jones & James Ingram's "Just Once."

Somehow in all the conventionality, which post-1982 begat the likes of the Porky's sequels, Spring Break, Hardbodies and Losin' It, the movie boldly deigns to put the lord of the woobies through the ultimate ringer. After tricking bike-toting Karen into accepting a ride to school, trying his damnedest to charm and appeal to her single disposition, the next time he sees her at a party, she is immediately Rick's new squeeze. A few self-sabotaging swigs of a whiskey bottle don't impress her and also reduces his confidential request to David to "tell Karen I love her" to crazy drunk talk. Gary further delays Rick's inevitable deflowering of Karen by introducing the trio to a hooker who finally and swiftly relieves Gary of his virginity (and his dinner), just so we can get the three of them reconvening at school with a rude venereal awakening that produces the movie's own photocopied but still hysterically awkward highlight when they go to the pharmacy coyly trying to ask for ointment.

And then it happens, the point at which Gary should realize his fruitless dream is only going to hurt him severely. He still can't let it go, as he has continually denied the willing advances of Karen's best friend Rose (the stunning Kimmy Robertson as the original’s Martha, with purple highlights in her hair and superfluous glasses) and refused to take David's word that Karen is not worth it. This doesn't stop him from driving to and searching about the football field where Rick has lured Karen, hiding out in the press box above, for the conception of the dagger that will later draw the final bit of innocent blood from Gary.

The final act of the film starts when sullen Gary sits alone in the diner waiting for Karen to return, and there she is with Rick, who screams the truth to a disbelieving Gary. It is at this point the movie stops trying to be funny and decides to get serious. The fallout stemming from Karen's pregnancy allows Gary the overdue opportunity to show Karen what he's willing to do to care for her, no matter what the cost. Since the rest of the group are convening on the slopes for Christmas break, the two of them have some quality time alone. The result plays out exactly the same as Lemon Popsicle with the exception of one chaste detail: Gary and Karen don't have the smoldering embrace which was immortalized on the poster for the original film. It's just a kiss, and Gary refuses to take advantage of Karen, going so far as to blanket her erogenous parts as she lays sleeping.

What hurts most about this development now as it did then is that in a movie that treats its female lead as a cipher and male a dewy-eyed loser, Lawrence Monoson and Diane Franklin, especially in regards to close-up shots, display natural graces denied to their characters throughout the prior two acts. The European sensibilities, which are wholly archetypical and deliberately streamlined for a purpose, just vanish for small moments. All you get are two all-American kids who can only see the dark forest for the shady trees. The programmatic paces can't stop both these actors, who were genuine teenagers at the time, from being wholly endearing, thus providing a tender set-up to the sucker punch that, like Stella, surely is a-coming.

Somehow, someway, and in this supposed comedy about boys trying to nail, the biggest impact comes when you realize somebody is truly going to get screwed.

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For the longest time, I've been on the fence about how unfair my initial criticism of The Last American Virgin was when I first published it on Epinions. I've come around to finally resigning that piece to the great recycle bin in the sky and allowing it the blessing of a proper erasure. Honestly, I was very false, not to mention crude and juvenile, and looking back on it has proven to be a huge embarrassment. I was philosophically not in direct opposition to an exploitation movie that paraded its artificiality only to really offer up one of the most blunt truths about the nature of love, and watching the original Lemon Popsicle made me appreciate The Last American Virgin more on principle alone. Yet I felt so much outrage at the time that I wasn't able to articulate the faults in execution to the best of my ability, but they're still there, mainly my initial hunch that the script doesn't have the sensitivity to carry the rough edges underlying the emotional turmoil and that the comedy is ultimately boring and very boys' club meeting in its overall scope. And, really, who wouldn't let Diane Franklin and Kimmy Robertson, two lasses with a good sense of humor and courage, climb up into their treehouse?

If this film was intended to launch an American equivalent of the Lemon Popsicle series, it wasn't going to happen, vicious audience receptions notwithstanding. This is disheartening considering it was creator Boaz Davidson who handled the job. Not much effort really went into updating the source script for the Eighties, as a lot of the same dialogue, scenarios and set-ups from the first film (and, as I mentioned in one case, the third) are merely just cloned. The humor is handled indifferently and with way less tact than before, and the drama sticks out in the worst way, because you just don't get any real personalities to decipher and the banal laffs undermind it instead of complementing it.

The performances are suitable if clearly mannered (the actors may have taken more of their cues from watching Lemon Popsicle), and in the cases of Monoson and Franklin, very winning in their unguarded displays of humanity. Yet you can only appreciate Robertson at arm's length (the unsung tragedy of this stalled series was that Rose's foreign prototype had a wrenching scene of her own in Davidson's second Eskimo Limon movie, Going Steady) and Return of the Living Dead franchise fixture Brian Peck (a dead ringer for Fred Armisen as much as Joe Rubbo provides the missing link between Malcolm Danare and Jonah Hill) is squandered as the stereotypical nerd with a curious understanding of manly competition.

Revisiting it for the first time in years, though, I was taken aback by the potency of the soundtrack in providing intermittent commentary both caustic (Oingo Boingo's "Better Luck Next Time" during the first party scene) and devotional (Journey's "Open Arms" for when Gary consoles Karen in the locker hall following her row with Rick). The song selection alone, despite hewing close to era-confined acts like The Waitresses and Tommy Tutone, complements the drama with the finesse and fluidity that the cutting and comedy both seem to defy. The DVD version, due to rights issues, had to drop The Human League's narcotic synth-pop gem "Love Action (I Believe in Love)," and of any potential song released around the time (I lamentably discount ABC's "Poison Arrow" from 1982) that could serve as an elegy for Gary, this easily was the best. The chorus alone gets right at the root of the problem when Gary first encounters Karen ("Lust's just a distraction/No talking, just looking"), but the verses give voice to the introspection necessary to allow Gary true faith in his later romantic travails.

It took long enough for me to reach a peaceful conclusion, but I can't deny now that The Last American Virgin feels as raw an experience as a one-timer of sex itself, a night of passion fueled by irresponsibility and the transfusion of sticky fluid and feelings that make up life. You'll come for the laughter, yet cry for the future. Once you get over it the morning after, chances are you may try to distance yourself from it to the best of your ability. Yet it lingers in the most sensual and aching of ways, and though you may not yearn to see it again, it does reward a repeat offense.

God, I’m horny.

Part III of this series doesn't exactly promise you a rose garden, either. Next up will be Amityville II: The Possession, which once again has the beatific Franklin, fresh off The Last American Virgin, as a girl victimized through a queasy sexual awakening, but only this time the tragedy, more explicit in both theme and character, is bestowed upon her. As I prematurely beg for the sweet release of Monique Junet, I'll once again leave you with a sweet distraction.