I'll Never Forget Whatsisname: John Vernon, Page 5

I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATSISNAME:
A TRIBUTE TO CHARACTER ACTORS

JOHN VERNON, PAGE 5

THE 80'S

As Herbie Goes Bananas indicated - prophesized, I should say - the 1980's found Vernon transitioning into more of a one-dimensional bad guy. Although the hardened visage glowering in the direction of the ostensible heroes was undeniably Vernon-esque, its targets just weren't as formidable as in the past. That is to say, even though his 80's villains were arguably more unrelentingly cold-hearted than ever before, you totally get why he'd be irritated by the likes of Jim Varney's Ernest or some interstellar Killer Klowns. In Ernest Goes to Camp, he even gets the line, "This isn't business any longer - this is personal!" - that's usually the type of thing the hero says. With a decline in worthy rebellious rivals that decade, there just wasn't as much evolution in the John Vernon persona as there was in the 60's and 70's. That said, it's always a joy to watch the man dish it out to his lesser enemies of the 80's, whether they be a gang of rapist creeps, busty, shiv-happy lady convicts or a trio of wayward bailbondsmen.

SAVAGE STREETS (1984)

Oh man who the fuck are you, the principal?

THAT'S RIGHT!

This one's a big leap from Herbie - if the love bug rolled unwittingly onto the savage streets of this movie without a can of mace clutched firmly in his antennae, he'd probably end up begging for whatever those goons with the tools had in mind for him. Instead he's replaced by a '67 Chevy Bel-Air convertible, but this ride don't drive itself: it takes a quartet of leather-clad mid-level dope dealers called the Scars who cruise town collecting payments from deadbeats and just barely avoiding running over deaf-mute high school girls. Unfortunately the one they almost hit on this particular night is the timid sister of a not-so-timid Linda Blair - rather than apologize, they give Blair an approving once-over (hey, it's dark out) and invite her to come party. In retaliation, Blair and her gang the Satins jack the Chevy and take it for a joyride, leaving the Scars shaking their fists on the skidmark-strewn savage streets!

With this spirited act, Blair & co. teach these turkeys not to underestimate feminine power and unity - the Scars go home, clean themselves up and never hassle another innocent girl again. The end. Oh wait...this is actually just the set-up for these creeps to seek vengeance on Blair by infultrating her high school and gang-raping her poor deaf-mute sister Heather (played by legendary scream queen Linnea Quigley). This leaves Heather in a coma (you know, since violent rape turned Paul Kersey's daughter and Sandra Locke's sister into catatonic vegetables and Frigga from They Called Her One Eye into a deaf-mute, I was hoping there would be a silver lining in this and the sister would be able to hear and talk after she recovered...no such luck I'm afraid) and drives the already unbalanced Blair, mad with guilt over not being there for her sister because she was busy beating down a bitch in the locker room shower, over the edge. After the Scars murder another member of her girl group, she crossbows up and sets off to get her revenge.

Basically Savage Streets is the story of two gangs: what they each accomplish as a group, and the price they pay when they aren't there to stick up for one another. After the Bel-Air heisting, the girls never hang tight as a team and the two victims of the Scars' rape and murder spree pay the price for setting out solo when they should be traveling as a pack like the Lizzies from The Warriors. When they are together, all they do is ogle a Playgirl with Kurt Russell on the cover (March 1984 issue - it's called research, bub) and trade such non-sequitors as "Anything under 10 inches is a waste, I always say!" Why don't the girls fight together as a gang? The car theft is a good team effort, they should follow up on that? Instead little sis is assaulted alone, Blair's friend is brutally tossed off an overpass alone, and Blair sets out on a soul-consuming path of vengeance all by herself - at that point it's all she's got left to become a scary psychopath who wipes out the members of the Scars once they too have become separated from other members of the gang. If Remar had stuck with the Warriors instead of chasing tail, he'd have made it back to Coney with the rest of the group. Turkey foresakes the Wanderers and gets killed, but the combined forces of the Wanderers, Del Bombers and Wongs are able to repel the onslaught of Ducky Boys - there's safety in movie gang numbers is what I'm getting at here, whether you're threatened by potential rapists/murderers or from retaliation from the victims of your arrant rape and murder. Frankly I'm surprised I even have to go over all this.

My point is, I think Savage Streets would have been more entertaining if it had focused on a gang war scenario rather than serving as one big build-up to Blair's climactic Kerseyan revenge (which is foreshadowed as early as the opening scene, when a cruising Blair & co. check out a sporting good store window exhibiting a crossbow and bear trap...you know, just in case anybody in the audience would earnestly wonder to themselves, "Waitaminute - where'd she get that crossbow and bear trap? This has stretched plausibility to the point that I've become completely detached from the film's narrative! Ohhhh right, they were in a window and she was looking at them that one time...my mistake.") For one thing, it's hard to get behind her in this movie: she's got some serious baggage and is a little reactionary to the slightest provocation. Her internal issues spill out onto the bar of a local dive owned by an older lady who appears to be endorsing Blair's teenage alcoholism while reassuring her she's just got to believe. "In what, GOD?? I gave up on that when my father died!" God, she's such a wreck - even though Linda Blair's acting range in her Razzie-winning performance is limited to raising her eyebrow, it's always interesting to see a genuinely fucked up "hero" in these nutty reactionary revenge fantasy scenarios. A gawking jock with a faulty fly on his jeans speaks for the audience when he tells her, "You're exciting. It almost seems like you're gonna blow up or something. I never know what you're going to do, and I like it!"

Still, if I'm rooting for Blair to get revenge I might very well be disappointed that the high school rival she beats down in the shower doesn't get her own retribution on Blair. She receives as savage a thrashing as the Scar gang over a few harmlessly insensitive quips. And it seems wrong to leave Blair walking the savage streets after her night of ruthless annihilation of the Scars, especially since she's right to feel guilty over Quigley's assault. She antagonized the Scars in the first place and condescends to her sister so often Quigley practically throws herself at the first gang member prior to the assault, implying that she's eager to shed Blair's protective shield and grab a little action for herself. And Blair should have been watching out for her, considering that for all their dirty deeds the Scars are really just your basic variety of Mace Jackson style creep - if any two members of the Satins were together these sleeveless, safety pin-affixing, bandana-sporting bozos probably wouldn't even try anything. I do like the opening of the movie, where one of them is going out for the evening, conservatively dressed, then he dives into a shed to change into his "punk" outfit like a Richard Hell-inspired Superman and meets up with his beer-guzzling buds. Apparently this scene was the result of a reshoot at the request of the producer to the consternation of director Danny Steinmann; it's a good addition tho, like that part in Class of 1984 where Stegman sits down to play the piano and suggest that just the whole cackling psycho act is just an image bred of a blend of insecurity and neglect. Watching a scene where these poser-punks shake down a nerdy student at the school, I thought about how much tougher school security is now, how less than a month after my high school graduation I visited the building to check out my old locker like Richard Dreyfuss in American Graffiti and ended up being detained by school security who demanded to know what the hell I was up to. This school doesn't seem to have any security at all if a quartet of dorks wearing dark eyeliner and single earrings are allowed to casually raise hell in its hallways.

Well I was wrong - this school has something better than security, it has John Vernon as Principal Underwood, who makes James Belushi's The Principal look and sound like James Belushi's Curly Sue. You get a strong impression he'd like to put the whole Scar crew "under wood," the wood of a bat or a club (or a 2x4 or a bo, any wood-based implement really) or a coffin, but the only weapon he needs is his penetrating glare.

All four Scars are thoroughly emasculated, resorting to unconvincing "whatever" attitudes when confronted by the unpretentious power of Vernon's pure scorn! Just to throw these fuckers off, he comes up with the confounding yet severe insistence that they "Go fuck an iceberg!" (an ad-lib by Vernon, who explained to the director that it was "a saying that many people used" - up in Canada, I guess?) Satisfied that his dominance has been established, he then responds to one of the gang's impotent, dry-sounding loogie to his shoe with the decidedly un-P.C. retort "Now why don't you take your faggot asses out of here?"

In Savage Streets we get Vernon at his surliest, presumably because he's been demoted: he's not even a college dean anymore, he's a meager high school principal (once upon a time he was the goddamn mayor of San Francisco!) These sad excuses for outlaws are going to pay for every Dirty Harry and Bluto Blutarsky to slip out under Vernon's foot - you can bet they're going to be experiencing some conflicting wet dreams involving oceanliner-devastating icebergs in the weeks to come. However, his insensitive remark re: the Scars' sexuality may have inadvertently caused a tragedy: what if, cut low by the "faggot ass" comment, the gang specifically attacked Quigley to re-establish their masculine dominance? It's an only slightly more sinister twist on the Deltas defiantly throwing a hedonistic toga party in response to Wormer putting them on trial to revoke their charter - isn't a toga-draped Tom Hulce on the verge of date-raping a drunken minor in a misguided act of civil disobedience? This is a possibly unexplored side of Vernon's villanousness, that his imperious domineering doesn't so much impede the activities of those he seeks to thwart as encourage them. Which is all well and good when he's encouraging Clint Eastwood to go out and stop Scorpio from killing a bunch of kids, or Michael Caine to jettison his apathetic company man exterior and save his son, but not so much when he's inspiring a gang of otherwise innocuous bullies to violently rape a high school student in the gym locker room. Therefore the ineffectiveness of the authority head, largely the basis for most of Vernon's character work, becomes more dangerous when dispensed to undisiplined timebombs who already have depravity on the brain.*

Despite - or possible because of - Vernon's intimidating presence and castrating remark, the Scars are able to accost poor Linnea Quigley** in the school gym in the middle of the day, then haul her off and gang rape her in the bathroom. Again it's the 80's, so we're dealing with some ridiculously unscary assholes going about doing some socially unconscionable stuff in the goofiest way imaginable (see also: Class of 1984, Death Wish II, Death Wish 3 etc.). The on-site school rape consists of the gang giggling and high-fiving as they assault their victim; in a truly bizarre yet kind of inspired moment one of the guys even pulls the leader in for a full-on mid-rape smooch. This disturbingly kooky rape scene is the appropriate crux of a guiltlessly lowbrow film filled with sexual threats that run the gamut from quesy to juvenile. Just consider this line from one of the Scars: "All you fuckin' cunts like Hide the Salami!" Now, "fuckin' cunts" is pretty harsh, but "hide the salami"? That's like threatening to "tear off your dress and make whoopee with you." Another one of them (who sets a cinematic record for groin-grabbing fellow gang members) is so distracted by his puerile sense of dominance he walks into Blair's trap chuckling and calling out to his already-dispatched friend, "Where's the pussy?" I think he literally might not know. Blair's no better, settling a long-standing feud against her preppy schoolyard rival by ripping the girl's top off, thus sexually degrading her in front of the entire class (not unlike the Deltas' "revenge" against Babs in Animal House, which I always a little uncomfortable with).*** The rape of Quigley is juxtaposed with Blair and her rival's "sexy" shower fight..Savage Streets is like an 80's sex comedy made with the horny inmates of a Ken Russell-esque madhouse in mind as its target audience.

Not that it doesn't have its moments. The pre-mentioned early scene of "changing into gang clothes." That mid-assault kiss between rapists is a notably off-putting highlight. One thing I love about the infamous shower melee is that a seemingly unrelated fight between two random nude girls appears to be happening in the background for no discernible reason. I guess it's possible that one of the "side fight" combatants is a fellow Satin keeping the preppy girl's pal at bay, but if that's the case it's not made clear; it just seems like two other gals have gotten into the spirit of this shower skirmish (or maybe shower fights are just that regular an occurrence at this school that two could conceivably break out at the same time?)

Jake, leader and most sadistic of the Scars, has possibly the most unexpectedly endearing moment towards the end. He's beaten Quigley into a coma and tossed another of Blair's friends to her death - there's no question he deserves what he's got coming, although after suffering serious wounds and firing impotently into the dark night, his tone suddenly shifts to something a little more pathetic as he calls out to Blair's character: "Brenda!...I didn't get you, did I?" Considering how unrepentantly misogynistic he's been since his introduction, you don't expect this weird little bit of commiseration, like he's accepting his comeuppance while acknowledging Blair as a normal person rather than a piece of meat. I think it's the only time any member of the Scars even calls one of the Satins by their name (cheerleaders at the high school have their names stenciled onto their shirts like in Satan's Cheerleaders). So there's a little hint of complexity, although I'm not sure how much of it was intentional - the movie was directed by Danny Steinmann, who debuted with the straight-forward Harry Reems porno High Rise ("The highest rise of all!") under the name Danny Stone. He went on to direct the weird Jason-less Friday the 13th Part V before getting into a serious bike accident that permanently sidetracked his career.

The main thing I wonder about this movie is why it had to be set in a school. For one thing, everyone looks closer to 30 than 16. Is there supposed to be some kind of comment on youth society's downfall? We know the students out of control because they do things like draw penises on teacher's anatomical diagram and dance with a skeleton in the background in science class:

When a weepy yet seething Blair meets with Vernon a second time (she's already lit up a cigarette in front of him and advised him to "Fuck off" because she's hardcore), he tells her he's sorry about what happened to her sister, but that "she shouldn't have been there in the first place." Where, the school gym in the middle of the afternoon? It's not like she knowingly time-traveled to Nanking in the late 30's wearing hot pink lingerie and a "rape me" sign. I guess he's all bluster in this one: he should have brought down the iceberg on these punks. Or at least not baited them with homophobic threats. Or at least offered to buy Blair that bear trap (do they i.d. for those kind of purchases?) The ineffectivenss of the authority figure continues into the new decade.

Something else I noticed is that not much savagery occurs on the actual streets themselves. The Satins steal the Scars' car, but that in and of itself is pretty harmless. Francine gets thrown off an overpass, which I guess is a street, technically, but in broad daylight in the middle of nowhere it doesn't come off as particularly savage.

CHAINED HEAT (1983)

The worst types are in here: thieves, prostitutes, murderers, dopers...perverts. Terrible things happen here - terrible things.

I owe this movie and John Vernon's role in it an apology. I had always assumed, from the vague plot descriptions I'd read, that Vernon was a ball-busting, no-bullshit, sadistic bureaucrat of a warden: Dean Wormer transposed to the penal system. Turns out, he's even more of a prancing, goofy horndog than Eric "Otter" Stratton! This film kind of junks my theory that Vernon's "Character Actor Memory" had soured him on trusting women for fear of future Lee Marvins or Frederick Staffords (the lead from Topaz - you've forgotten him already, haven't you?) using agents of the fairer sex against him. Surrounded by busty female inmates and giant female guards, his character in Chained Heat instigates a unique program of getting snitches to not only narc for him but willingly participate in the production of amateur porno movies within the confines of the prison. Although these randy misadventures ultimately precipitate his downfall, compared to the behavior of much more rotten characters in the film I'm tempted to describe such antics as incorrigible and even charming (except, of course, when he rapes the lead heroine).

But then this movie owes me an apology for not being nearly as sleazy as it should be. That's a pretty bold criticism considering it's aimed at a movie that features rampant drug use, rising racial tensions, hate crimes, multiple murders (including one in a bathroom stall), non-consensual communal shower breast examinations and corruption to such an extent that it includes amateur prison pornography, the off-site prostituting of female prisoners, numerous instances of conspiratorial rape of the inmates by prison guards and officials, and a dope ring run within the jail by infamous sleazeball Henry Silva. This stuff may be smarmier than the intolerably "classy" Women in Prison films of the 90's (Last Dance, Paradise Road, Return to Paradise, Brokedown Palace) but compared to the hundreds of purely exploitive entries to the subgenre of the 60's and 70's it's fairly tame. Between the brutal beatdowns and sud-studded molestations are lots of office scenes, debates over the right way to run the various interior schemes and dull soliloquies that wouldn't be found anywhere in movies directed by Jess Franco, starring Pam Grier or featuring "harem keeper" somewhere in the title.

I'm not one to complain about movies not being sleazy enough (oh wait, maybe I am) and, in all fairness, it might just be that the uninspired direction of the film kind of sucks the fun out of its lurid content and does little to distinguish it from other prison movies of the era. Because of its title, I constantly confuse it with Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat from 1974, and the plot with 1982's The Concrete Jungle. Chained Heat was filmed at the same location as Caged Heat (Lincoln Heights Jail) and shares cast members with Jungle, but the one thing it has that those movies don't is John Vernon.

Vernon's Warden Bacman is introduced nude in a cheesy penthouse setting, recalling his final scene in Point Blank. He maintains the signature Vernon scowling, no-nonsense, lack-of-patience demeanor when dealing with the snaky Silva and Silva's partner/lover Stella Stevens (also captain of the guard) but after hours his hard, resolute warden melts into Mr. Dollars, frolicing like a fox in the henhouse as an eager redhead disrobes and joins him in the hot tub. The fact that he's getting shots of a nude young lady recalls taking the polaroids of Delphine Seyrig to blackmail Michael Caine in Black Windmill, although here he's less businesslike and a lot more into the act as well as the artistic process - "Don't call me warden! Call me Fellini!"**** Business comes afterwards as he gets the inhouse gossip from his snitch-slash-co-star, who in payment for services rendered requires merely a dimebag of blow. Honestly, it's hard to condemn this cat: he's like James Bond, banging the girl to get the information he needs. He certainly goes about it no sleazier than Bond, who I'm sure stores his own cache of personal videos featuring the likes of Holly Goodhead and Plenty O'Toole. Being a snitch gets Bacman's girl killed, but the same fate befalls Bond girls in The Man with the Golden Gun, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Tomorrow Never Dies and as recently as Skyfall, just to name a few off the top of my head. Add to that victim's list the SPECTRE agent Bond fails to seduce to the good side who is nevertheless dispatched by Donald Pleasance into a pool of piranhas for failing to eliminate 007 in You Only Live Twice played by Karin Dor, who turned snitch on Vernon and got her purple dress sprayed all over the floor in Topaz.

Like in Sweet Movie, we get to see what a Vernon-depicted big shot would do if he had anything resembling real power: he'd install a shag carpet and hot tub into some secret sex chamber beyond the boiler room at the government institution where he works and proceed to mince about. Considering the characters that fell between Dollars and Bacman - Windmill's humorless Drabble/McKee, broken Fletcher, bitter Dean Wormer, prickly Prindle in H.G.B. - Bacman feels like Vernon letting his hair down, harking back to the Mal Reese days when he actually had hair to let down. What I'm saying is, don't tell me Bacman wouldn't paint his penis gold should such a concept be floated out to him.

His giddy abuse of power is so capricious and over-the-top it's hard to think of Bacman as a villain. On a scale of evil wardens that ranges from Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke to Patrick McGoohan in Escape from Alcatraz, he doesn't even rank above Stephen Tobolowsky in Wedlock. And he ends up being a victim, tragically drowned in his own hot tub just before the film's final act. If anything, the movie's real villain is his killer, a butch screw who shotguns a girl armed only with an obvious toy gun, locks new fish in a cell to get raped by a male guard and cackles sadistically as she watches, helps kill the warden and murders a witness, then frames Sybil Danning for it.***** This ambitious plan is in service of Stella Stevens, who in true Shakespearean form seeks to overthrow Bacman and take over the whole operation (wait - the captain of the guard is promoted to warden? Is that how it works? Is this a monarchy? I don't think the order of succession works that way in a prison, probably to prevent chief guards from routinely murdering the warden and usurping his position. No, she'd probably have to be elected...or at least apply for the job.) Bacman's own misconduct is largely private, whereas his murderers spin a dastardly web of corruption that ends up igniting the entire prison in a chaotic riot by the end of the movie.

As for his off-screen rape of Linda Blair, whom Bacman has been grooming for future camcorder sessions, it pales in comparison to the calculated, aforementioned assault on another inmate by the butch screw and a male guard. Vernon is stoned out of his mind, the obnoxious Blair is whining about her torment at the hands of the prison's sadistic crack-peddling lesbian rapist population - she just wants to play checkers! - and we never actually see it happen. He's just as high when he's murdered later on, and the prison dominatrix has no problem dunking the weak-as-a-kitten warden under the bubbling surface of the sauna until his body shuts down and stops resisting - you're telling me in the same state he was able to pin down Blair and have his way with her? One thing's for sure: Sybil Danning's sober as a priest on Sunday when she cozies up to Blair in the shower, and she turns out to be a good guy. Also Blair seems sad after she hears he's dead. Look, I'm not giving this alleged rape a thumbs up or anything, only making the argument that it comes off as almost routine in a movie like this and isn't anywhere near as convincingly grotesque as various other events before and after. I also just don't buy that Bacman would take advantage, even high out of his mind, especially when he's got much, much, much better looking girls willing to indulge his goofy fantasies (the redhead from the beginning is so cute and has a killer body, it's too bad she didn't end up in more movies). The whole rape almost feels like an afterthought meant to conclusively profile Bacman as a bad guy, not just a harmless diddler who talks girls into consensual romps (even the video taping is made clear to them) whose greatest transgression is that he probably misappropriated tax dollars to secure that fatal hot tub.

Clearly we the audience are meant to symapthize with Blair, but as with Savage Street it's impossible to side with her. She's such a compulsive crybaby, it would be like rooting for the weepy fat guy Clancy Brown beats to death at the beginning of Shawshank Redemption. I know she's not a hardened criminal and is only in jail for jaywalking or something, but she comes off as such a wuss next to stone cold Sybil Danning with her low-cut shirt and Tamara Dobson, Cleopatra Jones herself, looking so cool and distractingly tall (she kicks a switchblade out of Sybil Danning's hand by just barely raising her leg). And then there's Vernon, who looms over a canary in a cage in his office (I believe they call this kind of visual "symbolic"). Having been introduced to him in the jacuzzi, leering with such unadulterated joy, I honestly believe it's Bucman and not Blair who's stuck in that cage. Behind his steel gaze, you can see he just wants to leave this tedious shuffling of prison duties and drug smuggling to someone else, to cast off his stifling suit and sing the sweet song of amateur smut auteurs everywhere. God bless him.

It may be giving the movie too much credit to think about the character this much, but I think Vernon as an actor earns it even if the script doesn't. Once again, Vernon's harsh managerial mien within an organization brings out bad behavior in others further down the chain: getting the redhead to fink puts her on the wrong end of a shiv and exiling a two-timing Henry Silva from the building (in the most Vernon-esque scene of the movie) gives Stella Stevens the excuse she needs to arrange a hostile takeover. But you can see how his short-lived authority actually mattered for a change: that heat was chained when he was running things, then they bump him off and the heat becomes unchained. Just goes to show that sometimes you have to tolerate a little harmless hanky panky behind the scenes if it means keeping the racial tensions in the prison in place to avoid inmates banding together, breaking out and exposing the dope dealing business. I'll bet even Vernon's successor, Chained Heat II's Brigitte Nielsen, would have to agree with that.

Chained Heat has a few similarities to Savage Streets: rape, girl-on-girl shower scene, cat fights, unwelcome Linda Blair nudity, John Vernon. Blair can't get revenge in this one, since all the other characters are so scummy and backstabbing they all manage to kill each other. Apparently Linda Blair maintains that this movie ruined her career. It's odd that she'd pick this particular movie over all the other career-ruining roles she played post-Exorcist. Seriously, how is this one any more degrading or exploitive than Exorcist II, Hell Night, Roller Boogie, Savage Island, Grotesque, The Chilling, Bedroom Eyes II or Zapped Again? Why single out this and not Savage Streets? She didn't even win the Golden Raspberry statuette for this one, she lost to Pia Zadora. I would submit that, if anything, Linda Blair ruined Linda Blair's career.

W.B., BLUE AND THE BEAN a.k.a. BAIL OUT(1989)

Let my commitment to completion never be questioned - I actually sat through this endlessly cheesy, mercifully forgotten DTV dinosaur from the late 80's that rounds out the unofficial Linda Blair-John Vernon trilogy. This tops Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo as the lowest I've ever gone to follow the path of a great character actor. I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest my willingness to sit through this Hasselhoff vehicle and write about it deserves to be rewarded with internet movie writing's highest honor (the 'Nettie), but some internet movie writing spirit brother of mine over at www.moviewinnerorwiener.com or something definitely ought to consider nominating me for this prestigous fake award. Just saying.

Linda Blair is busted with her boyfriend on some kind of trumped up narcotics charge or something and she's out on bail. Anaconda III's David Hasselhoff (who co-starred with Blair in Witchery) plays broad-chested bounty hunter and part time tennis instructor Roger "White Bread" Donaldson, also known as W.B. He accepts an assignment to make sure Blair gets to court but is seconds too late to prevent her being kidnapped by a couple shady characters in a van who rudely order W.B. to "hit the road, fuckface." Said fuckface does in fact hit the road and follows the van, only to witness a second group of kidnappers shooting the first set and forcing Blair into their own van, a kidnapping on top of a kidnapping. White Bread continues to tail this fresh set of kidnappers, but gets distracted by some random trollop flirting with him from her own convertible and loses them. Oh White Bread, you incorrigible rascal.

W.B. calls in his pals Blue, an ex-NFL player who also professes to be a legendary boxing manager who "taught the rope-a-dope to Ali" (do all professional bounty hunters have side athletic jobs?) and Bean, a jittery Mexican with a large family and lots of bills. Together they infiltrate the villains' lair, save Blair, then head south of the border after Blair is kidnapped a third time and start blowing shit up.

Given his previous on-screen relationships with Blair, it's kind of funny that here John Vernon plays her father, Mr. Ridgeway. His reputation precedes him, so he's not fooling anyone when he claims to be an innocent albeit fabulously wealthy bystander caught up in the middle of this international drug war between the Cubans and the Aryans. We know he's the one in charge of this mess, so it's a genuine shock that he actually isn't. He's not the bad guy, he's just...an innocent bystander. Doesn't seem like a greedy, crazy rich guy at all...I'll bet his penis isn't even gold. Vernon gets two scenes, one in front of his mansion and one in the foyer, and the most interesting thing he gets to do is throw up his hands in frustration when the cartel honchos turn up to kidnap Blair yet again. Then they leave and we never hear from Mr. Ridgeway again - oh come on, he doesn't even get killed? Not even a casualty of this allegedly brutal gang of drug runners whose most violent act is perpetrated against one of their own faceless lackeys? Vernon's part is so thankless, I feel like some other reliable character actor (we'll say James Hampton) had a conflict filming his guest appearance on "Perfect Strangers" and had to bow out at the last minute; Blair borrowed one of the prop department's hilariously gigantic portable phones and placed a call to her boy John Vernon. And, being a decent guy, he agreed to head over to L.A. for the one day of filming.

So should this nearly Vernon-less, absolutely rape-less expenditure even be considered part of the 80's Blair-Vernon experiment? It does feature Blair in the shower, so at least that icky visual motif remains consistent. This time it's a more private venue, a cheap hotel where they charge by the hour. A full frontally nude desk clerk spies Blair waiting in the car and playfully suggests that Hasselhoff is a SAM - like it's some cute thing!! It's no slippery shower fight or unwanted breast examination, but that is one sleazy sense of humor. Blair is tastefully (and mercifully) framed in a very long shot covered by the shower door. Blair, at her Yeardley Smith-est, saunters out seductively and feeds Hasselhoff the ol' "take a shower then we'll fuck" gag - he falls for it, she steals his clothes and leaves him with only a towel. Ha - he should change his name from "White Bread" to "Blue Balls." I'm sure Blue wouldn't mind - his is the only nickname that doesn't appear to have anything to do with his ethnicity.******

That's the weirdest thing about this movie (and all I have to write about since the total number of words in my paragraph on Vernon probably amount to more than he gets to say on screen): its weird racism. At first it seems aware of itself - sure, there's a screwy Mexican named "the Bean," but he uses the "irresponsible Mexican day worker" stereotype character to fool people in his bounty hunter work. First he pretends to be a forgetful delivery guy, then he pretends to be a dangerously underqualified guy from the gas company - you get the idea. All the stupid white people fall for it (although it doesn't make sense later when they meet Danny Trejo and Bean acts like he doesn't speak Spanish) and he seems to revel in his Cheech Marin-style self-stereotyping, even going so far as to enthusiastically misquote the famous "We don't need no steenk-eeng badges" bit in the middle of a shootout. But then later the movie introduces an actual jokey Mexican comic relief character whose every line is cringe-inducing; after White Bread blows up the bad guy chopper, the guy gleefully shouts, "Just like a tortilla!" Whaaaaaaaa?

But it doesn't stop at just horrible racial stereotypes: there are also some "oh those crazy bum" antics courtesy of professional homeless character actor George 'Buck' Flower, a prancing flamboyant clerk who loves the phrase "nose tackle" for some reason (suddenly Vernon's "faggot ass" line in Savage Streets seems tolerant) and an unforgettable mid-chase moment in which Hasselhoff, "White Bread" Donaldson himself, our hero, makes the off-handed comment: "These guys drive worse than Orientals!"

However I choose to forgive all these unforgivable samples because of the truly transcendent moment in which Hasselhoff plays invisible slow motion tennis with an on-stage stripper from across the room while he's talking to his buddies.

Director Max Kleven is best known as a Hollywood stunt coordinator for Hollywood movies from 99 and 44/100% Dead to Hot Dog the Movie, which explains the sheer number of gratuitous grenades, gratuitous getting shot off horses, gratuitous helicopter exploding over the Mexican mesas. It also explains why so many members of the cast are seasoned stuntmen, including Gregory Scott Cummins (Acrobat Thug #1 in Batman Returns), Tony Brubaker, a.k.a. Blue, and Thomas Rosales Jr., a.k.a. the Bean (Rosales, well into his sixties, continues to do stuntwork in movies like Vince Offer's InAPPropriate Comedy!) While the most prestigious feat on his filmography is working as second unit director for several Robert Zemekis movies, Kleven also directed the Charles Napier-starring (you read that right) The Night Stalker and something called The Hunted that came out between the Christopher Lambert and William Friedkin movies of the same name, and had its title changed to Champion Fugitive for video (rather than "from the director of W.B., Blue and the Bean," the video box read "from the action director of Batman Returns and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.") Kleven had previously cast Linda Blair in his 1981 film Ruckus and worked with Vernon again in his Bean followup Deadly Stranger. Recently he did stunts for the Mr. Bean movie Bean - no sign of W.B. or Blue in that one though.

NEXT: The John Vernon series concludes with the great actor working for a great director on a very shitty movie

* I wonder what would happen if John Vernon had ever used his powers of intimidation for good? He never did play president of the United States, probably because whatever foreign enemy or cosmic threat challenged the sovereignty of our nation would tuck its testicles between its legs and scurry home after two minutes with that steely gaze. Also he was born in Canada and therefore not eligible for the presidency...in fact, this consideration isn't observed often enough when casting actors as president: a bevy of Canadian actors have portrayed the Command-in-Chief including Phil Hartman in The Second Civil War, Dan Aykroyd in My Fellow Americans, Robert Beatty in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Leslie Nielson in the Scary Movie movies. Vernon's Black Windmill co-star Donald Pleasance certainly wasn't born in the U.S., yet Carpenter didn't even require him to tailor his noticeably non-American accent in Escape from New York. Is it too late to doctor up some "Mr. Dollars for Prez" t-shirts?

** It's a letdown in retrospect to see one of the great scream queens of the 80's (who's a mute so doesn't even get to scream) play such a helpless victim, though it is notable that lipstick is smeared on her breast, since one of her most famous scenes (Night of the Demon) has to do with lipstick.

*** I'm willing to concede that neither Babs or the Savage Streets preppy chick's humilitation is anywhere near as offensive as the respective date rapes of subsequent Stockholm syndrome-stricken "snobby popular girl character" in Sixteen Candles and Revenge of the Nerds.

**** What a missed opportunity that he didn't say "Pasolini," whose work also featured controversial content and who was likewise murdered, quite possibly due to a conspiracy.

***** My favorite non-Vernon part is when an inspector looks at a bloody night stick "found" on Danning's bed and immediately concludes "It matches the blood of the dead girl." She could tell just by glancing at it? Keep in mind, she's the one this ruse was meant to fool. If I were Danning, I'd immediately accuse her of being part of the plot.

****** I'm not sure, but I think at one point the guy playing Blue calls the guy playing Bean "Blue."

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