Holiday in Confusion - PUNK VACATION

Tonal shifts in movies can be risky business.  A perfectly timed hairpin turn is exciting; startling the audience and deepening their engagement.  Perfect is hard to pull off, though.  An awkward shift breaks the flow, pulling the watcher out of the story.  The filmmakers need to know exactly what they are doing or it could be disaster.  If you can't nail it, don't even try.  Alternatively, go in all the way.  Throw in so many tonal shifts, redirections, and crazy tangents that the watcher is left punch drunk, staggering through the movie in stunned fascination.  Guess which approach Stanley Lewis took for 1990’s PUNK VACATION?

The Capsule:

In a quiet Californian desert town, Deputy Steve Reed (Stephen Fiachi) fills his days with unsuccessful target practice in an empty field, responding to false alarms, and getting yelled at by his paranoid, commie hating boss, Sheriff Virgil (Louis Waldon).  The monotony ends on the night an eclectic gang of bike punks ride into town.  An altercation over a Dr. Pepper vending machine outside a diner leaves the owner dead, his young daughter catatonic, and one punk in the hospital.  While Reed and the other cops bumble around, his girlfriend, Lisa (Sandra Bogan), vows vengeance for her father and sister.  She hunts down the gang on her own, but finds herself on a head-on collision with its equally strong willed--and frighteningly psychotic--leader, Ramrod (Roxanne Rogers).  Lisa's fate, and that of the entire town, will wind up in Deputy Reed's hands, and no one is happy about that.

This direct to video cheapie was released in 1990, but is a product of the '80s all the way.  Early '80s, at that, Billy Idol "White Wedding" period.  The anachronistic aesthetic is just the first sign of this movie's serious case of multiple personality disorder.  In the beginning, our punk vacationers seem like they have rolled straight out of DEATH WISH.  They come just short of Jeff Goldblum’s vile band of caricatures as they torment and ultimately murder Mrs. Kemper.  The DEATH WISH comparison is so pronounced they even use the same catatonic daughter cliché, though thankfully the sexual assault is implied rather than shown (at least I think its implied, there is zero exposition explaining what is wrong with her).  The trajectory is set for a full-on revenge flick, swapping a despondent father for a pissed off sister.  Straight forward, right?

Except, a weird thing happens.  The longer the movie spends with the punks, the less they seem like vicious animals and more like a quirky collection of misfits, each with their own unique look and personality.  There’s the French chick who looks like Siouxsie Sioux from Siouxsie and the Banshees.  The bandana wearing emo guy who plays a sad harmonica.  The bald Goth punk who carries nunchucks but doesn’t know how to use them.  The skinny white dude who dresses like Prince.  Two valley girl punks discuss future career opportunities while on guard duty (one wants to be an electrical engineer).   

They are an odd crew, and none odder than Feggy (Billy Palmieri), who clearly did not read the entire job description when he answered the Punks Wanted ad.  He’s a bit of a hippy peacenik, always whining when Ramrod wants to play it tough.  He usually falls in line, until eventually making a stand and declaring he doesn’t want to be involved in "senseless violence or car theft."  Not exactly the poster boy for the renegade punk lifestyle, yet everyone in the gang not only puts up with him, but genuinely cares for him.  The family that stabs diner owners together stays together, I guess.

Incidentally, true to the title, this is literally a punk vacation.  The gang aren’t on a drug run, or on the lamb, they are just taking a road trip, getting out of the hustle and bustle of L.A. for a few days.  When they are holed up in a barn after the unplanned murder, Feggy even complains that he thought they were just going fishing.  I think he is actually carrying traveler’s checks.  

Whether this was the intent or not, I started to like these lunkheads.  Every once in a while, there will be another radical tone change and they will become threatening again, but for only so long.  For instance, pistol packing Lisa confronts Ramrod at their barn hideout, but the punks get the jump on her.  The next scene has her tied to a tree in her underwear, which doesn’t bode well.  It turns out she was only stripped because Ramrod needed her clothes to sneak into town disguised as a normal, non-punk girl (pretty clever, really).  The punks guarding Lisa have their minds more on stick sword fighting rather than anything sordid.  At one point, Lisa is tied to the ground with rat cages at her hands, but no one lets the rats out, and Lisa doesn’t seem overly concerned.  It’s like the Spanish Inquisition staged by elementary schoolers.

Ramrod is the only legitimate badass in the bunch and stays on point the entire time.  It’s an interesting group dynamic.  She is so intense that no one dares question or challenge her, but she has a fierce, almost maternal attachment to her band of freaks.  She keeps things democratic, like asking for a vote on what they want to eat. Her administrative skills are solid.  She gets seriously fucking scary at times, like when she faces down Reed, ignoring his gun and makes her gang vote if they should rape the deputy before killing him.  I think she’s just trying to intimidate Reed (it works), but since she was the one getting aggressive with the daughter, who knows?  During a Viking funeral for some of her fallen punkmates (they just toss the bodies on the fire rather than making a fancy pyre), she advocates rampaging through the town and killing all the cops.  So, yeah, she’s a firecracker.  The dodgy kind, that might blow up in your hand as soon as you light the fuse.

Whether this was an intentional feminist nod or not, I like that the story is advanced by two assertive and (comparatively) competent women.  Lisa, while not as badass, is fearless in her personal pursuit of justice (not just revenge).  She certainly runs rings around the fantastically inept, all male police force.  Maybe if Lisa was the sheriff instead of the clueless, commie obsessed doofus, Virgel (“Did Patton call for the State Troopers when he invaded Iwo Jima?”), they wouldn’t be so useless.

This includes her boyfriend, Deputy Reed.  I’ve never seen a main character this bad at his job outside of a (intentional) comedy.  He  takes out one of the punks fleeing the scene of Mr. Kemper’s murder completely by accident.  He hits him with his car while pulling into the parking lot, knocking himself out in the process.  His investigative skills aren’t exactly razor sharp, either (“If they haven’t left the area, they might still be around.”).  At one point, he goes into the hospital carrying some girl we’ve never seen before.  When the nurse inquiries about what happened, he just says “Don’t ask.”  Both the girl and the nurse react like this isn’t unusual for Reed, and we never hear about it again.  My guess is that he accidentally shot her while trying to get her balloon out of a tree.  Again.

After Lisa is kidnapped, the movie switches tracks once more as Reed teams up with fellow cop Don (Don Martin) to come to the rescue.  Kind of a LETHAL WEAPON vibe, but with morons.  So, more like SAMURAI COP.  They make the smart call of not telling Sheriff Virgil what they are up to, because that lunatic would have gotten everyone, killed.  Instead they break into an unspecified house, steal some guns, and handle it themselves.  Astonishingly, not only do they get Lisa out unharmed, the take out a couple of punks along the way.  Also, Reed shoves a cucumber on to the barrel of his shotgun before shooting someone.  I…don’t know why that happened.

The climax brings another whiplash, putting us in the punk's camp when they face off against Virgil’s posse of drunken redneck hunters (including a Vietnam vet wearing a pith helmet, as Vietnam vets are known to do). The punks are automatically more sympathetic because ‘80s movie law always has drunken rednecks higher on the asshole scale.  Only Nazis rate worse.  The punks initially have the advantage because of Ramrod’s decisive planning.  Then they split up, and without her direct motivation, everyone’s bloodlust tanks, even the dude who was Special Forces in ‘Nam (or maybe just ROTC, they weren’t super clear on that).  The traps they set for the hunters make Kevin from HOME ALONE look like Jigsaw.  Rednecks get knocked off a pipe into a four-foot ditch, tripped down a slight hill slope, and caught in a net.  Luckily, the boozed-up gun nuts are too dumb to just lift the net over their head, so that buys some time for our heroes/villains.  

Everything boils down to the final confrontation between Lisa and Ramrod, the movie's emotional core.  And yes, there is an emotional core, and character arcs, though they resemble a Richter scale measurement more than a graceful arc.  Bullets are exchanged, justice is served.  Maybe?  I might have mentioned early that this movie can be a tad confusing.  

So many questions are left unanswered, such as what the hell did I just watch? Was this a gritty revenge story or a screwball comedy?  Will Feggy ever go fishing?  Director Stanley Lewis followed this up by not making movies anymore, as did most of the cast, so we may never know.  PUNK VACATION is a mess, but for reasons I can't explain, I still dig it.  Sometimes we should just follow Deputy Reed's advice and don't ask.

C. Chaka