Punk Vacation

Well... I like bad movies. So this isn't exactly the worst bad movie I've ever seen. It's sort of entertaining, at least, to laugh at a bit. But as for the "punk" part of "Punk Vacation"... uh, don't look here for punk rock stuff. This ain't no "Suburbia," not even "Class of 1984." At least those movies had actual punk bands perform in them, but "Punk Vacation" has a sort of mock-punk soundtrack and a bunch of pseudo-punkish people with bad makeup and studded wristbands. At least at one point the punks try to start a revolution by shooting all the cops in the small desert town they're "vacationing" in. Too bad they're stopped thanks to the "Predator"-style booby traps laid by the wily, sexy deputy. Good for a laugh as to what clueless Hollywood types think "punk" is all about.

This movie changed my life. It has a compelling story line with excellent acting. The director's vision takes the viewer on an endless adventure that will make you laugh, cry, and jump out of your seat.The movie takes fight club and Big and mixes them up into the best kind of movie soup you have ever slurped. I challenge anyone on the face of the earth and beyond to find a more heartbreakingly good story than this.Chris Gaw made this movie what it is with his soul patch and corny jokes keeping everyone going.If you love punks.....and love them more when they are on vacation, you will love Punk Vacation.Please go out and purchase this movie.

A quaint, sleepy California farming community is the weekend destination for a savage gang of ridiculously over-the-top big city "punkers". An elderly fellow ends up dead the very moment these hoodwinks come rolling into town, and his distraught daughter vows bloody vengeance. Before long, every goat-ropin' hee-haw hayseeder in town is facing-off against the no-good poseur-punk delinquents.

A laggard little squirt of "direct-to-video" trash, made more-or-less endurable by a small serving of unpremeditated chuckles. That said, it still stands as one of the more honorable releases from the knuckleheads at notorious Rae-Don Video.

The wardrobe supervisor for this flick apparently drew inspiration from the "punked-out" guest-villains of 80s-era cop shows, and their comically overaccessorized punk pastiche of heavy chains, tattered fishnet, and glitter-spritzed hair moussed-up into something vaguely redolent of a mohawk(Vivienne Westwood meets Sid and Marty Krofft?). These misrepresentational Vaudevillian caricatures are always spuriously amusing, but it's not enough to save PUNK VACATION from face-down ignominy.

3.5/10...tolerable, though not nearly as much fun as I wanted it to be.

My review was written in May 1990 after watching the movie on Raedon video cassette.

Despite a couple of twists on the gender and tone of the genre, "Punk Vacation" degenerates into a routine action pic. Bearing a 1987 copyright, it's a current direct-to-video release.

A group of punk-styled youths passes through a small town on their motorcycles and the townsfolk form a posse to fight the. This basic plot line from "The Wild One" through dozens of '60s biker pics has the novelty of a coed gang led by a woman, tough but lovely (under her declasse makeup) Roxanne Rogers.

Film's mood, especially its diary, is tongue-in-cheek. But director Stanley Lewis lets things slip into cornball fights in the woods in the final reels. Finale is different, with a shootout between Rogers and heroine Sandra Bogan instead of the usual macho display.

Cast is subpar and low-budget lensing includes some woefully inadequate faking, such as a rocking care in the studio for a driving scene. Louis Waldon, who starred in several Andy Warhol films, plays the sheriff.

A movie like "Punk Vacation" is in some ways difficult to rate, and in some ways even more difficult to describe. Made with what was obviously an extremely low budget, the movie is quite often shoddy in nature. Linking footage is missing, plot points are quite often vague to completely incomprehensible, the characters are more often than not thinly written, and production values are next to non existent. Normally all of this would make a movie really bad and easy to dismiss. But it's directed in a very weird manner that gets you curious enough to stay with it until the end credits. There's more often than not a surreal feeling at times, a bizarre feeling like the filmmakers were making things up as they went along. It seems at times to be made by individuals who only had a vague understanding of normal human behaviour and how a story should be plotted out. While I don't think I can give the movie a general recommendation, I think there is a small minority who might find the movie strange and incompetent enough to be worth their while. If what I have told about the movie intrigues you, it might be up your alley.