THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (1982, Boaz Davidson)

 

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Three horny teenage boys pursue girls in suburban Los Angeles.

Starring  Lawrence Monoson, Diane Franklin, Steve Antin, Joe Rubbo, Louisa Moritz

Written by  Boaz Davidson   

Produced by  Yoram Globus, Menahem Golan, David Womark   

Duration  92 minutes   

 

PORKY'S. REVENGE OF THE NERDS. SCREWBALLS. LOSIN’ IT. HARDBODIES. SPRING BREAK. THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN.

One of these 1980s teen sex romps is not like the others.

Despite coming from the less-than-reputable Canon Films – known for such dubious output as SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, as well as for igniting/prolonging the careers of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, and Charles Bronson – THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN turns out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s not what I expected at all; well, it does have everything I expected in it, but also a lot more besides, making it unique among its peers.

It doesn't stand out just because its director, Boaz Davidson, took the uncommon step of remaking his own film: AMERICAN VIRGIN is a US-based version the Israeli LEMON POPSICLE. Other members of this exclusive self-remaking club include Alfred Hitchcock (THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, 1934/1956), Michael Haneke (FUNNY GAMES, 1997/2007), John Woo (THE KILLER, 1989/2024) and Michael Mann (kind of – he expanded his 1989 TV movie LA TAKEDOWN into HEAT in 1995).

AMERICAN VIRGIN isn't notable for having a cast who went onto bigger things, either. There's only Kimmy Robertson, years before portraying dim-witted secretary Lucy Moran on Twin Peaks, and Diane Franklin, who would go on to feature in BETTER OFF DEAD and BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE. Probably the biggest up-and-comer is found on the other side of the camera. The film looks unexpectedly great, due to being lensed by Adam Greenberg, the cinematographer who had ALIEN NATION, GHOST, NEAR DARK and both of James Cameron’s TERMINATOR movies in his future.

It also doesn't stand out in terms of plot. It's a pretty loose affair, mostly tying together a series of misadventures – at first comical, then more serious. The sensitive nice guy from three best buddies is infatuated with a new girl at school, but his more studly and less ethical mate gets in with her first. Meanwhile, their other, chubbier pal wears sunglasses indoors, talks about ‘partying’ a lot and provides frequent plus-sized comic relief.

So, while it may not be distinctive for any of those reasons, let me give you a flavour of what the cinematic artifact named THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN is.

It’s luring some girls you just met in a diner back to your parent-free house with the promise of Class-A drugs, then surreptitiously racking up lines of Sweet N Low on a mirror – which they gleefully snort, declaring "This is the best Columbian we’ve ever had!"

It’s strutting into a party with your collar up and your hair slicked back, tearing open a pack of Marlboro Reds and swigging Jack Daniels straight from the bottle. Then when you return home and drunkenly interrupt your parents' sophisticated dinner party, you try to seduce the most stern-looking matriarch in attendance before collapsing onto the dining table, sending plates and drinks flying.

It’s delivering a pizza to a nymphomaniac cougar, and then returning to her apartment again with your two mates in tow so you can take turns having sex with her, peeking in on each other through the keyhole. And when her husband comes home, he totally buys her explanation that there are half-naked teenagers in the house because she was "giving them Spanish lessons."

It’s parking on the beach so you can furiously make out in the back seat of a convertible and kicking the handbrake off in the throes of passion, and then being so preoccupied that you don't even notice the car's rolled into the surf and you’re drenched with sea water.

It’s catching the nerdiest guy in gym class spying on girls showering through a peephole (a la PORKY’S) and, when he claims to possess the largest penis in school, deciding to line up all your schoolmates and measure their erections one by one with a ruler. And it turns out the nerd was right.

It’s hiring LA’s least sympathetic prostitute so you can lose your virginity, and then feeling worse after the deed is done than you did before – and not just because of the resultant STD.

It’s also practically a music video montage with a movie in between, years before MTV. And the early ’80s soundtrack is stellar, not to be beaten until the video game GTA: Vice City, with which it shares some songs. 

Among others, the track list includes:

‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da’ – The Police

‘Whip It’ – Devo

‘Better Luck Next Time’ – Oingo Boingo

‘In the Flesh’ – Blondie

‘Oh No’ – The Commodores

‘Open Arms’ – Journey

‘Keep on Loving You’ – REO Speedwagon

‘Love Action’ – The Human League

‘Shake It Up’ – The Cars

‘I Will Follow’ – U2

 

But also, and ultimately, it turns out to be a lot more soulful and earnest than the raunchy tone, bawdy dialogue and excessive nudity of its early stretch suggests. Two thirds through there's a plot development similar to that in 1982’s FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, another movie that rises above genre trappings: sensitively handled unwanted teenage pregnancy.

So, yeah. We like these kids. We don’t judge them for being young and led by their impulses. We end up invested in their dodgy decisions and flawed but ultimately well-meaning pursuits. 

And the movie has one of the all-time gut-punch endings of the ’80s, maybe even up there with the decade’s ultimate downer denouement from David Cronenberg’s THE FLY.

I can’t believe I’m going to give THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN this rating, but ... yep, there you go.

Four stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  The original LEMON POPSICLE spawned eight sequels in its native Isreal, so although this movie had no follow-ups (and yet we got four installments of both PORKY’S and REVENGE OF THE NERDS!), there were plenty more virgins left out there.

What would a movie called THE FIRST AMERICAN VIRGIN be about?  Maybe a teen sex romp mashed-up with 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE?

Previously:  LAST TANGO IN PARIS

Next time:  THE TOXIC AVENGER PART III: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF TOXIE 

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (2009, Dennis Iliadis)

 

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Just like the 1972 original: when a different middle-class couple realise that the drifters they have let into their home are responsible for the rape and murder of their daughter, friendly hospitality once again turns into bloody revenge.

Starring  Sara Paxton, Martha MacIsaac, Garret Dillahunt, Aaron Paul, Tony Goldwyn, Monica Potter

Written by  Adam Alleca, Carl Ellsworth

Produced by  Wes Craven, Sean S Cunningham, Marianne Maddalena

Duration  110 minutes

How exciting – my first review of a remake of a film I've already reviewed!

I can’t remember whether back in 2009 the word ‘remake’ was still in vogue. In more recent years, recycling/resurrecting existing intellectual property has tended to be called either a ‘reboot’, which takes stories we know and reinterprets them (the PLANET OF THE APES movies come to mind, or the various iterations of BATMAN), or a ‘legacy sequel’ (good ones: SCREAM 2022, TOP GUN: MAVERICK, BLADE RUNNER 2049, BAD BOYS FOR LIFE; bad ones: COMING 2 AMERICA, THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS, TRON: LEGACY, HALLOWEEN).

LAST HOUSE ’09 is definitely a straight-up remake. It’s not trying to update for the 21st Century the tale of ostensibly respectable parents avenging their murdered children by brutally dispatching the culprits. It’s certainly not a continuation of the same timeline or a long-in-gestation direct sequel.

Horror has to have the most remakes of all the major genres. There’s been a lot of ’em! And it would be wrong to dismiss them as uniformly bad just out of principle even if, for sure, it tends to be pot luck which way things go.

Bringing back the creator(s) to produce can seems like a good sign: the LAST HOUSE and HILLS HAVE EYES remakes are both pretty decent and have Wes Craven on board as a producer, whereas he went nowhere near the unpleasant A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET from 2010. I find it hard to see this as a coincidence. On the other hand, fellow genre-legend John Carpenter is credited on 2005’s disastrous THE FOG, and has admitted more generally that he doesn’t care about how good the new versions of his films are, so long as he gets paid.

So anyway, yeah: ‘pretty decent’. That basically sums up this THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. It’s hard to imagine anyone preferring it, unless they found the early-’70s fashions and slang from last time too distracting. But LAST HOUSE ’09 does omit certain elements from the original whose absence no one could possibly miss – I’m talking about the bumbling comedy cops who hitch a ride atop a truck loaded with chickens, or the jolly closing tune with lyrics that cheerfully recount the grim events we've just sat through.

This version nails its forbearer's gruelling sense of impending dread to a tee, albeit in a slicker, bigger-budgeted, noughties kind of way. Garret Dillahunt managed to go straight from loveably dopey deputy in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN to one of the most effective amoral sickos in recent memory, his portrayal of the monstrous Krug certainly equalling David Hess’s.

It's longer than the first go-around, so pads the runtime out with some unnecessarily detailed character introductions for heroes and villains alike. It shows the world what Jesse Pinkman (actor Aaron Paul) would be like if he himself broke bad beyond redemption. The score sounds like John Murphy put his ‘In the House, in a Heartbeat’ from 28 DAYS LATER in as a temp track and then forgot to replace it.

And, all in all, I liked it. In the face of lazy, knee-jerk opinions about the limited value of remakes, I always lean on the fact that THE FLY and THE THING turned out to be two of the best films of the ’80s. LAST HOUSE ’09 is nowhere near that level, but it does what it sets out to do with competency and professionalism and just about earns its right to exist. It may have sprouted deep in the looming shadow of the original, but it still managed to grow in that shade into a perfectly edible … mushroom, I guess that would be. So, there you go.

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  It’s an isolated vacation home by a lake this time, so the proximity to previous or subsequent houses is even harder to determine than in the ’72 vintage. But why would, um, Greek director Dennis Iliadis, known for, er, a film titled HARDCORE (one that doesn’t have George C Scott in it) lie to us?

What would a movie called THE FIRST HOUSE ON THE LEFT be about?  Right, so I have to do this again, too. OK, well, this time, let’s say the people living in that earlier house turn out to be even more unhinged than Krug and company and slaughter the whole gang seconds after welcoming them in, forgoing the act-three suspense and just cutting straight to the grisly retribution.

Previously:  THE LAST DESCENT

Next time:  THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS  

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

LAST MAN STANDING (1996, Walter Hill)

 

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A drifter gets caught up in gang warfare in an isolated Prohibition-era town.

Starring  Bruce Willis, Christopher Walken, William Sanderson, David Patrick Kelly, Bruce Dern, Michael Imperioli

Written by  Walter Hill

Produced by  Walter Hill, Arthur M Sarkissian

Duration  101 minutes

When I first watched LAST MAN STANDING, on video at some point in the late ’90s, I had no idea it was based on anything. I’d never heard of Akira Kurosawa, and while I knew that Clint Eastwood had starred in some films labelled ‘Spaghetti Westerns’, I hadn’t seen any of them either and didn’t know from what they had drawn their inspiration.

In the end, I ended up travelling the path of the films that lead directly to LAST MAN in reverse order. I started to get more into Westerns and went through Sergio Leone’s Eastwood-starring so-called ‘man with no name’ trilogy, noting that A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS’ plot seemed awfully familiar. Then I tracked down a copy of Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO and thus completed my journey at the start. Well, not quite – I haven’t read Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which is believed, albeit not universally, to have inspired the 1961 Japanese film.

Let’s talk for a moment about Walter Hill. Why isn’t he better known? In my mind, he’s comparable to John Carpenter, in terms of style (economical yet thematically rich), sensibility (men being men and fighting the system) and love of Westerns. I guess Hill never had a hit that birthed a neverending franchise, like HALLOWEEN, or any flops that became cult classics, like THE THING or BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, or one that has joined meme culture, such as THEY LIVE.

A couple of years ago, I attended an all-night John Carpenter marathon at London's famous Prince Charles Cinema, where they screened, in order: THEY LIVE, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE THING, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS. On the first train home Sunday morning, I mused in my sleep-deprived state about which other directors deserved the same treatment; Hill came to mind straight away. I would definitely hit the Red Bulls to watch a five-movie programme of, say, THE DRIVER, THE WARRIORS, SOUTHERN COMFORT, 48 HRS. and EXTREME PREJUDICE.

But wait, no LAST MAN STANDING in that line-up?

Well, here’s the thing: diminishing returns. YOJIMBO is great. FISTFUL OF DOLLARS is also good, but definitely the weakest of its trilogy and Leone’s least accomplished movie overall (not that I’ve seen THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES.) And LAST MAN …

It’s a curiously empty film. It should have a lot of atmosphere, with its 1920's cars and clothes and the dust creeping through a sinisterly rundown town. It should be exciting, with a perfectly cast Willis playing two sides against each other and running a gauntlet of double-crosses and attempts on his life. It should be thrilling, with its John-Woo-goes-West sensibility, arming Willis with two Colt 1911s that magically fire 20+ bullets per clip and have the stopping power to launch people 30 feet in the air through plate glass windows. But instead, it’s oddly lifeless and even dull.

Is the problem style over substance? Sure, but that imbalance doesn’t have to be an impediment. I wouldn't call Michael Davis’s SHOOT ’EM UP (2007) a classic, but something like that does at least know what it’s got to offer and doesn’t try to overreach its grasp. Ditto DESPERADO (1995), which came out a year before LAST MAN and strongly resembles it aesthetically. So, maybe the issue here is that the movie takes itself too seriously – that it doesn’t lean into being an exercise in cool sets, frenetic action and hardboiled dialogue, but misguidedly attempts to express a weight that isn’t actually there.

There's definitely too much plot – much of it delivered courtesy of Willis’s mumbled voice over – and not enough story. It's easy to lose track of the betrayals and switched allegiances and sink into apathy, especially since the characters are only archetypes (stoic loner; tough-but-vulnerable dame; powerless sheriff; bickering gangsters) and the protagonist himself is a blank slate. All that's left is to bide your time between shootouts and wait for second-billed Christopher Walken to finally turn up. It's worth the wait, naturally, especially for those who enjoyed his cameo in TRUE ROMANCE and were itching for more of the same, except with his hair dyed ginger this time since he's an Irish gangster, instead of a jet-black Sicilian.

In fact, the supporting cast is the biggest plus and goes a long way towards holding the viewer’s interest. William Sanderson delivers exposition in his distinctively quirky way while compiling himself an audition tape for Deadwood. David Patrick Kelly simmers with little-guy menace. There’s a pre-Sopranos Michael Imperioli and a pre-Mrs Apatow Leslie Mann, and Bruce Dern has fun as the town’s lawmaker who keeps himself well away from all the trouble.

In the final analysis, I was reminded somewhat of 1999’s similar and superior PAYBACK, which was itself based on existing material (Donald E Westlake’s novel The Hunter and 1967 neo-noir POINT BLANK). The difference with the Mel Gibson film is that writer/director Brian Helgeland throws in a lot of dark humour, something the po-faced LAST MAN STANDING could have done with like a shot of whiskey for a thirsty and beaten-down drifter.

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Practically everyone except Willis is dead by the end, so it gets a pass. 

What would a movie called FIRST MAN STANDING be about?  I guess a retelling of the book of Genesis? Zac Efron is ... Adam!

Previously:  THE LAST WITCH HUNTER 

Next time:  LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT  

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com