Dudes

I steaming pile of bad movie making. Don't watch it

I love this film. Mostly for nostalgic reasons and seeing this in 1987 but with Cryer, Roebuck and a great badguy in Lee Ving. Not Spheeris best and plays like a Decline film entry. I had a good time revisiting it.

Three punkers begin a road trip from New York to California looking for "paradise", but encounter romance, violence and death on their way instead. Problem is that the characters are mainly unengaging, so it's hard to care about the outcome of their adventures. A pointless, frequently obnoxious film, with very little to recommend it. (*1/2)

Dudes is a fun albeit weirdly different movie. I didn't love it as much as Pepper Anne, but yeah - it's fun. From the opening with The Vandals to Lee Ving popping up as Cryer's nemesis, it never takes itself too seriously, even when it's taking itself too seriously. The plot is basically summed up in the Vandals tune "Urban Struggle" and P.A. above. Cryer and co. become disillusioned with the NY scene and head out west to see what lies out there. Run into Ving and his boys and things take a turn for the worse and then it's Cryer in Eastwood mode. Avenging angel.Anyway - take our words for it - Dudes is a semi-cult classic that's good for watching once every couple of years.

'Dudes' (1987) is a delightfully rowdy black road comedy that for some inexplicable reason remains relatively unheralded. And it is a cultural travesty that, Penelope Spheeris's endearingly ludicrous cow punk road comedy is still unavailable on a UK-friendly Blu? Jon Cryer, Daniel Roebuck and Flea decide that the life of a big apple punker is a stone-cold snooze, and in a prescient moment of drunken inspiration they decide that a road trip to California might demonstratively improve their dour, metropolitan ennui. A righteous bummer for them, but fortunately for the viewer, their riotously ramshackle exodus is amusingly fraught with all manner of improbable calamity. An especially memorable interlude is a violent encounter with some low-down desert skeezoids, headed by the murderous red neck, Missoula, vividly played with gleeful mania by ex-Fear vocalist, Lee 'Black Moon Rising' Ving.

'Dudes' is a thoroughly engaging, roughshod road-movie oddity that begs for rediscovery, due largely to the endearingly daft twin lead performances from Roebuck & Cryer, the exhilarating RAWK soundtrack, and playfully eccentric mise-en-scene by maestro, Penelope Spheeris. For me, the REAL clincher is when the divinely bickering punkers over-imbibe a bottle of lysergic snake juice, procured from amiable renaissance man, Daredelvis (Pete Wilcox) and suddenly Spheeris plunges us deep into squirrelly, Alex Cox territory wherein all manner of gonzoid western archetypes are purloined for our midnight movie edification! It's the film's flaws, mad energy, and joyful incongruities that make it such a winning VHS-era cult gem! And my vinyl soundtrack album featuring Keel's boisterous 'Rock N' Roll Outlaw' cover is something I shall, hopefully, never have to part with!