State Park (Rafal Zielinski, 1988)

Three friends enter Weewankah Park located in the wilds of Michigan... (Hold up. Aren't you going to bemoan the fact that this film is yet another Canadian production pretending to be American?) Nah, I'm done doing that. Besides, State Park (a.k.a. Heavy Metal Summer) was, according to my exhaustive research, shot in both Québec and North Carolina. However, when Rafal Zielinski's name appears in the credits, that should tell all you need to know as far as the national makeup of this motion picture goes. I know, he made Valet Girls, the ultimate L.A. movie. But, for the most part, the bulk of his cinematic output is Canadian. Like I said, though, I'm done doing that. Anyway, where I was? Oh yeah, three friends enter a Yellowstone National Park/Algonquin Provincial Park-style park located in Michigan. It sounds like a simple premise, but what occurs to these three friends whilst inside will... (Don't tell me, it will alter the spiritual trajectory of their lives forever.) It's true, some trajectories of a spiritual nature will be altered; three, to be exact. But the manner in which this film goes about altering these particular trajectories is the stuff of Canuxploitation legend.

Don't believe me? Um, a creamy, freckle-covered redhead dons a bear suit (in the middle of summer) to help a handsome environmentalist save his small business from an unscrupulous land developer.

Still not convinced, eh? How 'bout this. Instead of cheating on her boyfriend by engaging in vaginal intercourse with every able-bodied, penis-owning male in the park, a vivacious blonde gives them all haircuts.

Really? You still need convincing? Okay, if this doesn't convince you, than nothing will. A fashion-forward woman thinks she has landed a real hunk when she uses her no-nonsense gams to bag herself a good-looking fella down by the water. Only problem being, this anatomically correct hunk is actually a punk. Or, to use her words: "He's a heavy metaler!!! A disgusting lowlife!"

And thanks to a well-written scene that took place earlier in the movie, this fashion-forward woman makes it abundantly clear that she despises everything associated with heavy metal.

There you have it, this film has three strong female characters each with their own distinct personalities. Your move, other movies.

The cool thing about each character is that they all reminded me of someone else. The actress who plays Eve (Kim Myers), the creamy, freckle-covered redhead, was a dead ringer for Meryl Streep, while the actress who plays Linnie (Jennifer Inch), the vivacious blonde, had a Kelli Maroney vibe about her.

As for the fashion-forward woman, she reminded me of... Oh, who am I kidding? There's only one Isabelle Mejias. Not to take anything away from Miss Myers and Frau Inch, but the moment I saw Isabelle Mejias appear onscreen as the adorable Marsha, I knew she was going to be my favourite character.

You're right, her character could have turned out to be a real hosebeast. But I didn't care, I was on Team Marsha from the get-go.

Oh, and I just remembered who Isabelle Mejias reminded me of. She reminded me of, that's right, Isabelle Mejias. A channel called Citytv used to air a movie called Unfinished Business all the time back in the days when they didn't run infomercials 24/7, and the female lead was played by none other than Isabelle Mejias.

In an ironic twist, Unfinished Business features music by The Parachute Club. What's that? How is that ironic? Oh, I'm sorry. There's a scene in State Park where Isabelle Mejias is wearing what she describes as a "two hundred dollar jogging suit," and her designer jogging suit, believe or not, practically screamed The Parachute Club.

After enduring the film's goofy opening scene (a guy in a bear suit causes havoc on a construction site) and an opening credits sequence set to a song that was the definition of Yello-esque, we meet our principle cast. From what I gathered by paying attention to what the characters were saying, Eve needs money, Linnie is about to get married and Marsha... Well, Marsha, to put it in the crudest terms possible, just wants to get laid.

How about those guys a few cars back who are also waiting to get into Weewankah Park? What am I saying? Those guys are heavy metalers, and we all know how Marsha feels about heavy metalers. (Are you sure "heavy metalers" is the right term? I mean, I thought "headbanger" was the preferred nomenclature.) It is. But Marsha calls them heavy metalers. Which, in a weird way, makes me like her even more.

When the spiky-haired heavy metaler, Johnny Rocket (Peter Virgile) starts smashing his dark-haired pal, Louis (Louis Tucci), against the side of their van, Marsha says: "Violence is so passe."

Finally entering the camp... Though, you have to wonder how Johnny Rocket and Louis managed to get past Corky (Andrew Jackson), the park's sycophantic head of security? It wouldn't take much for Corky–who, on top of being sycophantic, is a real asshole–to send the heavy metalers packing. Hell, just looking at them would be enough. What I think happened was, Corky temporarily left his post to help Mr. Rancewell (Walter Massey), the area's resident evil businessman.

It would seem that Louis and Johnny Rocket and Eve, Linnie and Marsha have a lot to learn about camping, as both their attempts to prepare food are met with failure. To make matters worse, the women mistake one of Marsha's belts for a snake and Louis's Gerontophobia is brought to forefront when he discovers the camp site next to theirs is occupied by an elderly couple named Tallahassee Ray (Rummy Bishop) and Ethel (Jessica Booker). Upon seeing them, Louis says, "Old people.... weird, man."

Remember when I said that Eve "needs money"? Well, she needs it for collage. And she figures she can earn a quick 5000 bucks by winning the "Wilderness Challenge," a race that involves swimming, running, kayaking and orienteering, or, as Louis calls it, "oriental-teering."

This plan hits a bit of a snag when we discover that Eve doesn't know jack-shit about orienteering. And, to make matters worse, all the orienteering classes are booked solid. So what's a freckle-covered redhead with alabaster thighs to do? After rebuffing her first request to help her, Truckie Honeycutt (James Wilder), the owner of the Honeycutt Market, is given no choice but to help her when Eve threatens to reveal Truckie's secret identity. That's right, Truckie is a mild-mannered store owner by day, a bear suit-wearing environmental activist by night.

You see, while wandering the woods, Eve spotted a man carrying what looked a bear suit through the woods. She didn't see his face, but she did see his ass (which was packaged in a pair of tight cut-off jean shorts). Well, later that day, Eve saw that ass again (packaged in the same tight cut-off jean shorts). Anyone wanna guess who was attached to that ass? Yep, it was none other than Truckie.

Oh, and don't feel too sorry for Truckie for being saddled with a name like Truckie, his younger brother's name after all is Trailor (Christopher Bolton); who, by the way, spends the majority of the movie hitting on Linnie.

While Linnie is busy giving random dudes "haircuts" and Eve is out "orienteering" in the woods with Truckie, Marsha has decided to snag herself a man. Grabbing her trusty binoculars and slipping into a Adrienne Vittadini one-piece bathing suit, Marsha scopes the beach for man candy.

Spotting a colossal man-babe in the water, Marsha positions herself on the dock so that the first things he sees when he comes ashore are her sexy stems. Repositioning her legs in order to maximize their impact on the male viewer, Marsha uses her shapely lower half the same way a fishermen uses a lure to land himself a mackerel or a bass.

To surprise of no-one, Marsha catches her prey with relative ease. What is a surprise, however, is the identity of the man she caught. Yep, the guy Marsha snagged by employing her first-rate gams is none other than Johnny Rocket. Robbed of his spiky hair, make-up, leather jacket and chains, Marsha doesn't seem to realize that she has just fallen for a heavy metaler!

Will Marsha be able to put aside her prejudice towards heavy metalers and embrace the power of love? Will Linnie run out of men to give haircuts to? Will Eve win the Wilderness Challenge? Will Louis get over his fear of old people? Will...

Enough with the questions, tell the nice people if this film is good or not. Right. So, yeah, it's good and junk. In fact, it was more than good. It was refreshing to watch a camp-based movie that doesn't involve a masked psycho-killer murdering teens or one that has to rely so heavily on crass humour. Boasting a strong pro-environmental message, State Park (a.k.a. Heavy Metal Summer) taught me that you shouldn't judge people based on their clothing, some old people are not lame, and slow and steady does in fact win the race.

National Lampoon's Last Resort (Rafal Zielinski, 1994)

Here's a film that features the winsome Maureen Flannigan (7th Heaven) cavorting about in a tropical paradise in a plethora of slit-heavy sarongs and boasts the ever effulgent Demetra Hampton (Red Shoe Diaries) writhing on her bed in black opera gloves and crouching on windowsills in black fishnet pantyhose, yet the thing I can't seem to shake, the thing that is currently keeping me up at night, are the fedora hat bands attached to the fedoras sitting atop Corey Feldman's head. Wait a second, fedoras? Do you really think he has eight fedoras? Or does he have one fedora and simply switches the hat band on it depending on his mood? For example, purple means he's feeling like a self-absorbed douchebag, red is for when he's going for the whole pompous douchebag vibe, blue is his hateful douchebag look, and... Well, you get the idea. He might have owned eight fedoras at the height of his fame, but this is 1993/94 were talking about it (money's tight and fedoras ain't cheap).  Anyway, I'm at a loss. I mean, what was with the freakin' fedoras? Here I am, trying to enjoy the surrealist nightmare that is National Lampoon's Last Resort (a.k.a. National Lampoon's Scuba School) like a normal human being, and Corey Feldman is ruining it with his asinine fashion sense.

Should I even bother bringing up the black blazers with the arms cut off? Ahh, just writing that makes my inner Tim Gunn feel all queasy and junk. What am I doing? Stop being such a big baby. So, Corey Feldman wears black blazers with the arms cut off (blegh) and sports a different coloured hat band on his fedora in every scene, I'm not going to let a little thing like that spoil the filmed headache that is this sort of motion picture.

Besides, Corey Feldman does wear pointy black leather shoes with buckles on them with his so-called ensemble. In other words, it's not a complete disaster.

Taking a break from tearing apart Corey Feldman's signature look for just a second, I would like to point out that this film was directed by Rafal Zielinski and written by Patrick Labyorteaux. The fact that this film was directed by the man who brought us Valet Girls and Screwballs should come as no surprise, as it has the same sense of whimsy and off-kilter fun. However, Patrick Labyorteaux? Ram from Heathers? Out of all the actors who appeared in Heathers, the guy who played Ram was the last person I expected to get a screenplay produced. Why? It's simple, really. He's an idiot. Not Patrick Labyorteaux, the character he plays in Heathers.

A profound meditation on the meaning of life, National Lampoon's Last Resort is actually a sardonic satire, a wickedly funny one to boot, that attempts to shed some light on the importance of being true to yourself.

Is anyone buying that? (You lost them a long time ago.) When? (I'm not sure exactly, but going on  incessantly about Corey Feldman's fedoras didn't help your cause.) Again, I don't think pluralizing the word fedora is necessary, as I think Corey Feldman is trying to trick us into thinking he has an endless supply of fedoras by merely changing the hat band.

Getting through the opening credits of  National Lampoon's Last Resort without having a seizure will be a minor miracle, as bright colours and hypersonic camera work bombard the viewer almost immediately.

The sight of a mop-wielding Dave Eisenhower (Corey Haim) rollerblading in the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant with a virtual reality helmet on combined with the sight of Sam Carver (Corey Feldman) relaxing on the beach are the next images that greet us.

It turns out that Sam Carver isn't at the beach after all, he's just day-dreaming about being at the beach, and being surrounded by a bevy of babes in bikinis. In fact, he's working at the same fast-food joint as Dave, his best bud.

In his dream, Sam is wearing a black fedora with a white hat band. But in reality, Sam is wearing a black fedora with a red hat band while standing over a vat of fries. I wonder if there's any significance to the colours of his hat bands. I mean, why white for the dream, yet reality gets red? Hmmm.

You'll notice that all the bikini babes are wearing black and white as well. I know, pretty interesting, eh? If you thought that was interesting, wait until I tell you who's standing in line at the fast-food restaurant Sam and Dave work as at. (Well?) Oh, a member of the Detroit Red Wings. (I don't get it?) Don't you see? Red hat band, Red Wings. It's all connected, man.

What these connections mean exactly is anyone's guess. But it does prove that there's more to National Lampoon's Last Resort than meets the eye.

While helping a choking victim, Sam, who actually thought the choking victim was his dream girl in a black one-piece bathing suit, the piece of food lodged in her throat goes flying off the helmet of the Detroit Red Wings player and hits the owner of the fast-food restaurant in the head causing him to step into Dave's mop bucket.  Unable to keep his balance, the restaurant owner then crashes into the fuse box, causing a fire to break out.

With their place of employment reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble, Sam and Dave go home to relax. The colour dichotomy of the previous scene continues unabated during this scene as well, as Sam and Dave's apartment is half blue and half red. Unfortunately, Sam and Dave won't be able to enjoy their apartment's colour scheme for much longer, as they're evicted by the building's landlord.

Sitting on a bench, Sam and Dave try to figure out their next move. While going through their mail, Sam discovers a letter from his Uncle Rex (Geoffrey Lewis), a former actor (known for a series of pirate movies) who now runs a pirate themed resort on the Grand Cayman.

How, you might ask, are two down on their luck losers from Detroit going to be able to afford to fly down to the Cayman Islands? Duh. They use the magic doohickey given to them by the bag lady (Jane Swofford) sitting next to them on the bench. And before you can say, does Corey Feldman really front ska band called Truth Movement?, Sam and Dave land on a beach on the Grand Cayman with their luggage in tow.

And when I say, "land on a beach," that's exactly what I mean. To quote Dave, they literally "jumped through the sky."

Oh, and just to prove the producers are not lazy morons with no sense of humour, we see the bag lady pushing her shopping cart around the island every once and awhile. It would seem that the bag lady "jumped through the sky" as well.

Met on the beach by Sonja (Maureen Flannigan), an Earth servant to the island Amazon goddess of Ya-Ya, Sam and Dave manage to convince the ebullient young tulip that they're scuba experts from Detroit. And Navy Seals... and C.I.A. agents; Dave's code name is "Storm Shadow."

However, Dave does say one truthful thing upon meeting Sonja. It occurs when he introduces himself as an "anally compulsive cyberpunk searching for electronic bliss." Call me crazy, but I think that's the best line in the movie.

The film's funniest line, in my opinion, is the one where Flash Mackenzie (Michael Ralph), an island tour bus driver, says, "Right in the middle of scuba country," after learning that Sam and Dave are scuba experts from Detroit. The other genuinely funny bit occurs when an elderly married couple (Milton Slezer and Eda Reiss Merin) mistake a family of "Morgies" (fans of Rex Carver's Captian Morgan pirate movies) for Guns N' Roses.

Anyway, when Rex Carver's rival, a fellow actor named Hemlock (Robert Mandan), hears that a couple of C.I.A. agents masquerading as scuba experts are on the island, he does everything in his power to disrupt the everyday operation of the resort. I think that makes sense. Let me put this way, Rex and Hemlock don't like each other.

Okay, now that I got that plot-based nonsense out of the way, let's get back to focusing on what's really important. And that is, my love-hate relationship with Corey Feldman's wardrobe. I think the reason his clothes struck such a profound chord with me is because they're so close to what I used to wear on a daily basis. It's true, I've never donned a fedora (at least not out in public). But I did wear pointy creepers with buckles on them. In fact, like Corey Feldman does on several occasion during this movie, I think I even wore them to the beach.

To put it in even more frightening terms, every time I saw Corey Feldman canoodling with Demetra Hampton's Alex, a femme fatal secretly working for Hemlock, it was like looking directly into a mirror. Ugh, talk about honesty in motion.

I don't care who knows it, so here it goes: I am, simply put, Corey Feldman's character in National Lampoon's Last Resort. The creepers, the black clothing, the ponytail, the attraction to dark-haired women in black fishnets, the spastic dance moves, the Jerry Lewis-style approach to comedy, it's all there in stark technicolor.

Ahhh, that was tough. As they say, admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.

Fourth wall breaking a go-go, a game show hosted by Zelda Rubinstein, wackiness-a-plenty, tag team ballroom dancing, red berets, implied mermaid sex, Tony Longo in drag, and, best of all, an underwater concert by Dread Zeppelin, National Lampoon's Last Resort is cinema at its... Oh, man, I wanna say, "finest," but I can't seem to pull the trigger. How 'bout this, National Lampoon's Last Resort is cinema at its most bewildering? Yeah, I like that, bewildering. Yo-Ho-Ho...