2 Warps to Neptune

Beware: Spoilers ahead.

Dude in the middle of a motorcycle race gets zapped back in time by some incompetent scientists to the year 1877, where evil cowboys try to steal his fancy machine and he (the motorcycle dude) has sex with his great, great grandma (the motorcycle dude is in fact his own great, great grandpa).

Fred Ward (Remo Williams, Tremors) plays the motorcycle dude, and everybody loves Fred Ward, but not even Fred Ward can make one of the worst scripts ever written okay. I’m sorry, he just cant. And the motorcycle is just a motorcycle. It doesn’t shoot cool lasers or anything.

Good things I can say about Timerider include:

1. The poster is awesome.
2. It’s an early time travel flick, predating both Terminator and Back to the Future.
3. Everybody loves Fred Ward.
4. The evil cowboys are played in appropriate over-the-top fashion by Peter Coyote (the scientist with all the keys in E.T.), Richard Masur (Clark in The Thing, the dad in License to Drive), and Tracey Walter (the cook in City Slickers).
5. Michael Nesmith, one of The Monkees, wrote the music and co-wrote the script. The music was fun.

(Poster image via SciFi-Movies)

Beware: Spoilers ahead.

Right. So there’s this really hot, stuck up high school girl who wants to be a journalist when she grows up and gets really pissed off when her journalism teacher tells her the piece she wrote to win the big summer newspaper internship isn’t good enough and that she should be a model instead. Hey, just because I’m really hot and totally into myself doesn’t mean I can’t be smart too, she says. But how to prove it? Well, duh!—I’ll just enroll as a boy in the neighboring school and show my boring paper to that journalism teacher to prove that my journalism teacher is sexist.

In this other school (how she/he gets in without parents or transcripts I don’t know) Terry (yeah, Terry) falls for sweet-but-dweeby Rick, which is like totally awkward because she’s supposed to be his best male bud and also she/he has to transform Rick into a cool cat to get him a date with the hot, stuck up girl who’s dating the jock-douche Greg (William Zabka, who played the same part in The Karate Kid).

If you think there’s not a scene where Terry is in fine-looking girl mode, waiting for her shallow college boyfriend to pick her up for a date, when the cute girl (the sexy, adorable Sherilyn Fenn) who has the hots for boy-Terry shows up, and Terry has to run back and forth switching from boy- to girl-Terry… Wait, what was I saying?

The denouement (look it up) unfolds at the prom, of course, when Rick fights the jock-douche and Terry shows Rick her boobs to prove that she/he isn’t gay, just a chick who dressed up as a dude to prove that her journalism teacher was sexist.

(Movie poster via movieposter.com)

http://www.movieposter.com

Restless farm boy Daryl (Anthony Michael Hall, in his first dramatic role) moves to L.A. to live with his big brother, but, wouldn’t you know it, he picks up the wrong bag at the airport—damn, that’s a lot of cocaine!—and wakes up the next morning to find big brother and wife whacked by the exceptionally evil drug dealer. And so the chase begins, with Daryl descending into the urban underbelly of the ’80s, assisted by punker and eventual lover, Diz (Jenny Wright).

The movie is uninspired, predictable, and unbelievable, but Hall is a better actor than anyone ever gave him credit for, and Wright is cute and quirky. I clearly remember seeing this in the theater and noting Hall’s imperfectly covered up acne in certain scenes. It made me feel better about myself at the time.

Siouxsie and the Banshees make a cameo in one of the clubs Daryl and Diz run through.