I was at the perfect age for the first wave of the 80’s videogame craze, so I had a few issues of magazines such as Video Games and Electronic Games. There was one memorable ad inside the back cover of one such periodical, selling a poster of a blonde woman wearing a cut-off top and what appears to be a bikini bottom. It’s hard to tell from what little we could see of it around the edges of the black circle allegedly put there by the censors.
That image sums up 1983’s Joysticks better than almost any review, or at least it would do so more concisely. This is Porky’s in a video arcade, with some other elements lifted from various properties and tropes of the time. There’s a nerd. There are valley girls. There’s a gross, sweaty guy who endlessly eats and farts. There’s a crusty old dean/mayor/high-society type who is trying to close the place where all the kids hang out.
This is the kind of 80’s film made by guys you would think had never had sex before. There’s a deeply juvenile mindset to the entire production, and especially as concerns how women are portrayed. I will not deny being an admirer of the female form, and having my own prurient fantasies, but even the opening credits left me embarrassed to be a guy, as the leering camera looks a young woman up and down as she plays a game. Even worse will be a later sequence where two women engage in a pointless “strip poker” affair, but with a video game used in lieu of rounds of cards. The camera actually stays on the breasts of one of them as they bounce up and down while she plays.
The soundtrack during that bit is a song I can only assume is titled “Shake It Around”, as those words are in the lyrics repeatedly. I wasn’t surprised the soundtrack is awful throughout this, but I was still dumbfounded by such tracks as the title song, which encourages everybody to play with their joysticks, and to jerk it to the right and to the left. Not only does that sound like a horrible way to achieve autoerotic satisfaction, but the song makes Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-A-Ling” a tad less embarrassing in comparison. For some reason, it made me consider what Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” would have been like if written by a lobotomized satyromaniac, which is the technical name for the male equivalent of a nymphomaniac. There, now you learned something today, from a review of a movie that won’t teach you anything of importance. Also, the soundtrack left me a bit less embarrassed for being nostalgic for the Pac-Man Fever album.
At least those women are clearly of legal age. Scott McGinnis, as the owner of the arcade, is also a magnet for girls I suspect are not of the age of majority, and I hope he wasn’t taking advantage of that. One of these is a valley girl played by Corinne Bohrer, who could pass for a teen despite being in her mid-twenties. Her bubbly performance is passable, even if I didn’t buy a second of her “gag me with a spoon” shtick.
Her father is played by Joe Don Baker, who doesn’t phone it in here, despite also looking like he would rather be anywhere else. He has two deeply irritating minions, nephews played by John Diehl and John Voldstad. The latter was one of the three Darryls from Newhart, though he bears an uncanny resemblance to Jered Hess (of Napoleon Dynamite fame) in this movie.
Curiously, the second billed is Leif Green, cast as somebody so impossibly nerdy that we first see him singing “Camptown Races” while on his way to his first day of work at the arcade. While en route, he gets pantsed by two women who might as well be credited as “Boobs” collectively, and who were in that inane Video Strip Poker scene. Arriving at work, he is made the laughingstock of the arcade, with McGinnis, his new boss, leading the way. This kind of behavior puts the audience in an odd spot, as we’re supposed to root for the bullies only because Baker, their nemesis, is an even bigger bully.
Human fart machine Jim Greenleaf is supposed to become a friend of Green, but he mostly seems to get him into various forms of trouble. In one scene, he actually encourages the nerd to violate Bohrer’s sleeping mother. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen, but I still feel I lost a bit of my soul watching this scene, as if I was an accomplice to a potential rape that was going to be played for laughs.
I was at least hoping footage of people playing the arcade cabinets would send me on a trip down memory lane, but the obvious set doesn’t feel like a real arcade of the time. There’s even a two-player arena, which would require two of whichever machine is being used in the competition. I suspect the filmmakers had caught a glimpse of period game show Starcade, and thought that was something a normal arcade would have. This particular setup uses floor-mounted joysticks which are several feet tall. There is no way an experienced gamer would be able to play with any real skill maneuvering such an awkward device. Maybe the girl who is always seen at the Space Dungeon machine was used to those, because her frantic miming at the controls is only how somebody actively having a stroke would behave. The poor thing is so confused that she doesn’t realize she hasn’t even started the game, as what we see over her shoulder is the attract screen, the loop of stuff a machine goes through when nobody is playing it.
As for those arcade games, glimpses we get of cabinets include Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Gorf, Defender, Millipede, Scramble, Jungle King and Satan’s Hollow. Many of those games were the product of Bally/Midway, whose participation in the film extended to using an animated Pac-Man for the transition wipe between some scenes. That this film is a hard R made this product placement almost as bizarre as Mad Magazine allowing their branding to be used for the same-rated Up the Academy.
Even for a sex-obsessed 80’s comedy, Joysticks is a horrible film. I don’t recall chuckling even once, and I’m not even sure 10-year-old me would have if I had seen it at the time. Even with the copious nudity, the whole endeavor feels like a bait-and-switch. And that makes it even more like that “censored” poster I mentioned in the opening paragraph. Decades later, after just a minute or two of internet sleuthing, I discovered what had been obscured: the rest of the woman’s bikini bottom, fully keeping her privates from being exposed. This movie, like that ad, is more proof that the fastest way to part a fool with their money is through their lust. And, like the poster that was being advertised, Joysticks will leave you unsatisfied.
Dir: Greydon Clark
Starring Joe Don Baker, Leif Green
Watched on MVD blu-ray