Ghetto Blaster

 Ghetto Blaster

United States – 1989

Director – Alan Stewart

Prism Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 19 minutes

So are you like, Rambo or somethin'?

Watching 80’s exploitation cinema one begins to tire of all the lamentation about Vietnam. Between the vets wracked by guilt for what they did, or haunted by flashbacks of the horrors and unable to reasimilate into civilian life you would think the cottage industry in ‘Nam vet characters was a symptom of some kind of national trauma. It was as if by cinematic proxy the U.S. was trying to come to terms with what had happened. Yet easily as common as the Regret Vet was his cinematic contemporary, the Vengeance Vet. He reclaimed all that was lost, fixed everything that was broken and righted all that was wrong about post-Vietnam America (lord knows the government couldn’t do it.) If the war had taught us national humility, Vengeance Vet hadn’t gotten that memo.

Ghetto Blaster’s Travis is not the kind of ‘Nam vet who needs to commiserate. Like his eponymous 1976 predecessor Travis Bickle, he’s more interested in talking about cures. The film opens with Travis’s return to his childhood home in Los Angeles where he reunites with his estranged father for the first time after returning from The ‘Nam. In search of some sense of normalcy after the loss of his wife, Travis and his daughter find that the familiar old neighborhood has instead become a "hood." But if routine has taught us anything, the very war Travis is trying to put behind him is where he learned the same esoteric martial-arts combat skills that will enable him to fight it all over again in the streets of America.

Who you trying to get crazy with ese?

Within minutes of arrival, Travis finds himself at odds with The Hammers, a movie-tough gang of Chicanos who promptly murder Travis’s father. Despite a desire to quickly sell his dad’s corner-store and re-leave L.A. just as fast as he came, Travis makes the same mistake as his dad; he refuses to pay The Hammers for protection. But it takes the death of his most loyal customer (how’s that for American prioritizing!) for Travis to revert once again to his “urban warfare, extractions” training and hit The Hammers back as if he were, as his rivals mockingly suggest in a moment of fourth-wall-shattering clairvoyance, “some kind of Rambo.”

As a matter of fact… Camouflaging himself in what clearly is the urban equivalent to mud and leaves; a clown suit, Travis hijacks a shipment of cocaine from the Hammers, leading to the reciprocal and banal hostage/chase/shootout-in-the-abandoned-warehouse climax all too common in low budget drug-crime action films. Still, re-waging the entire war (racial demarcations included) in the ghetto not only reinvigorates Travis and America’s masculinity, it does the tough and morally burdensome job of drawing a clear line between who has the right (and might) to dictate the rules. Set to that wiggy-wiggy wild rap beat all the kids love these days, Ghetto Blaster mixes roughly equal parts of The Exterminator (1980) and Colors (1988) in an almost flawless agglomeration of the ‘Nam Vet revenge/vigilante trope that re-invigorated 80’s exceptionalism and the ghetto-drug-crime genre that would scare the piss out of white people in the 90’s. And as if spoken by former president George H. W. Bush himself, Ghetto Blaster proves without a doubt that we’ve finally defeated the Vietnam Syndrome.

Go read my friends review over at Explosive Action!

The Last Circus

It had been almost a decade since I saw any of the films Spanish writer/director Alex de la Iglesia had made. When I read that Balada Triste de Trompeta, A.K.A. The Last Circus was playing in town I was super excited, but like too many things, it slipped my mind and I missed it. Fortunately thanks to this amazing thing called "home-video" I was able to track it down and give it a watch. Much to my delight and horror, it was fucking amazing. I recommend that you read what I wrote about it at Paracinema, and then watch the damn thing, it's soooo good.

Terror On Tour

Terror on Tour

1980 – United States

Director – Don Edmonds

Media Home Entertainment, 1983, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

This almost feels like it’s going to be a big budget Christian film showing the “true horrors” of rock music, clearly the band “The Clowns” replete with face makeup, wigs and caped leotards is meant to be a KISS knockoff. On stage they dole out a goofy gore theatrics bit while grinding out tame forgettable elevator quality “rock-n-roll”.

For some reason beyond my comprehension, the band is about to hit the big-time and all the members are already gearing up for their rockstar stereotype offstage roles as junkie womanizers. OK, not all of ‘em, but we have to listen to the sensitive creative ones yammer on about it for a while. Meanwhile one of their roadies is making himself up to look like one of the band members, he’s really shy (and creepy) and this way he can get laid by girls who think he’s in the band. Everyone else is OK with that, and laughs it off. After a brief and boring show by The Clowns his buddy, Roadie #2 goes off to score some drugs from some girl, who is shortly thereafter stabbed to death by someone dressed like one of “The Clowns.”

At the after party, there’s lots of chicks and since the clowns are there in full dress uniform, ample opportunity for boobs in every sleazy hookup scene. One of the girls at the party has her throat cut, but who is it, the band or the other…oh WAIT another girl gets stabbed, OH, and abruptly, another. With all the bargain acting and laughably corny effects I’m thinking this is just a fetish movie about clown violence against women? When the cops become interested in the case, it merely adds another slack mouth to the droning robotic utterances of terrible script that sound churned out at gunpoint by a fat, bald, cigar smoking clown with DT's chained up in a New Jersey warehouse. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense.

If all of this wasn’t sleazy enough yet, we've returned to the story of shy roadie who is humiliated trying to flirt with some women in the park, then subjected to an oppressive religious trip at home. Later as a cathartic release he has a laugh putting Clowns makeup on his junkie pal roadie #2 in preparation for the after-show party. Deceiving and manipulating intoxicated women into sex is certainly much more acceptable than permitting any of the homosexual undertones suggested in these repressed outcast/buddy sequences to be realized right?

Finally spilling forth like steaming, excrement-swollen viscera, the sadistic undercurrent of filth in this movie goes all out as one of the Clowns (as far as we can tell) dispenses with the bullshit and issues raspy sexual commands to a drunk teenybopper in a bloodsplattered noose-bedecked room. If she weren’t the most jarring actress ever, I might be even more disgusted with this vile film than I already am.
As it stands, the climax of grotesquery has been reached, and what should have been the subsequent shocking reveal/resolution was neither shocking or resolving, and stood a little off to the side, too stupid and ashamed to sweep all the revulsion under the carpet.