Wild Thing

Not a bad saturday afternoon cable flick. Probably based on the Tarzan mystique and infused with a little Batman - I got a kick out of seeing how a kid growing up in the streets builds his own weapons from junk he finds to overcome the bad guys and set the woman of his dreams free! Kathleen Quinlan pulls a Diane Fossey/Lois Lane and actually makes you want to save her too. Good music from the always interesting George S. Clinton who went on to do "Wild Things"!

It may be difficult for the young generation to imagine in the gentrified, Disneyfied 21st century, but New York City in the early 1980s was a desperate and awful place.

Times Square had been surrendered to the sex trade, the subways to street gangs, and the urban neighborhoods to hopeless, crumbling decay, as the rich majority and federal government made a conscious, overtly racist decision and effort to invest instead in the suburbs.

This awful situation gave rise to a curious genre of film set in a nightmarish contemporary Manhattan, populated by mulleted toughs harassing good citizens and engaging in choreographed knife fights in front of concrete walls sprayed with graffiti indistinct enough so as not to prevent a future network TV broadcast.

"The Warriors" may be the best known film in this category, but I argue "Wild Thing," though more obscure, is a gem that actually holds up better with time.

That's because it draws its conceit not just from its urban nightmare setting, but from Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic, "Tarzan."

After a young hippie couple is gunned down on a New York City side street, their infant child is taken in by a kindly homeless lady (Broadway veteran Betty Buckley).

The boy grows up wild in the Manhattan jungle just as Tarzan did in Africa, and becomes a legendary hero defending the innocent with his makeshift tools, like a bow-and-arrow and grappling hook.

The script by indie legend John Sayles is pure comic book pulp, with just enough social commentary to make you think.

The film is dark and dingy, but so was New York City then. So it works.

In fact, just about everything works in this forgotten treasure of a film.

When Wild Thing saves the day at the end (no spoiler there), and the kids on the street start chanting the Troggs' classic song, you'll be singing along, too. Trust me.

Hey, John Sayles wrote the screenplay -- that alone is a good reason to check out this little-remembered film. While other 80's films such as the Marc Singer classic "Beastmaster" and Christopher Lambert's "Greystoke" fit nicely into the hunky men in loincloths oeuvre, this one had a nice twist in that it gave the Tarzan legend a modern spin, and in addition threw in a sort of Robin Hood/Batman urban legend quality. All in all, an extremely interesting venture.

Well, it is different.

I complain about movies that make no sense. I complain about movies that simply repeat other movies. The 2nd is no problem with this flick.

It's goofy, it's just a B movie, and it's not very deep but, if you're in the mood for such a tale, set in a world not far from what goofballs of the '80s found popular to imagine homeless people & homeless life being like, constructed around its own superhero, then you may find this entertaining.

Quinlan and Davi can act. Ignore that Knapper thinks the way to play ingenuous is to appear unable to act. Don't look for deeper humor than a joke about sex "hurting" because of the associated noises of the participants. Unless you find low-life hoods, after committing a murder and fleeing, taking care to put on their seatbelts, to be funny. Quinlan deserved an Oscar for making us believe she was romantically attracted to the Wild Thing. Why was there no sequel?

from the message board: "It was a bit outdated of course" what???

Taking cues from Batman and Tarzan, and throwing in a little of The Warriors for good measure and then sprinkling a bit of The Crow on top, this is a thoroughly enjoyable vigilante fable set in a barely recognsible to modern eyes New York.