Dudes

'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!

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)

This movie is fun. And it's great in that it is remarkably fun, as opposed to "about anything." If you can take it in context of "Punk-Western" as a "rock" movie and a western the bar is not set incredibly high to begin with, and this clears the hurdle with ease in merging two genres that usually droop into the exploitation movie quality level. Penelope Spheeris's prior works: Decline of Western Civilization and Suburbia were genuine and earnest portraits of punk-rock music, the first from a documentary perspective of the performers, and the second from the subjective fictional live of the fans of the genre. this is an attempt to launch these concepts into the language of mainstream genre cinema and succeeds better than adequately. Admirably, exceptionally, debate and quibble about the adjective. no matter what. this is approximately 1 1/2 hors of fun movie watching with that little extra to think about. And I occasionally entertain the bizarre notion of building a religion around Daredelvis. If one respects a youth culture as an anthropological phenomenon, tis film shines out as the "punk" take on westerns almost in the way that "LITTLE BIG MAN' was a 60's hippie western

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.

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