thePULSESummertime blues? We’ve got your cure
Hot flicks for rainy days
July 2004 – Who says there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues? Visit your local video store armed with this hot list of summer videos, and you’ll have fun fun fun ’til September takes your summer away.
Jaws (1975)
The ultimate beach blanket bloodbath. Steven Spielberg made this spectacular monster-movie based on Peter Benchley’s novel before he became a household name and it holds up nearly 30 years later as one of the tightest, tensest, most watchable American movies since Hitchcock’s heyday. Comely co-eds are meeting gruesome ends at the maw of a great white shark who is terrorizing the fictional island beach town of Amity on Martha’s Vineyard, and it’s up to Roy Schneider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw to stop him, after, of course, they get a bigger boat. Two fins up, just stay out of the sequel water.
Billabong Odyssey (2003)
The world’s best big-wave surfers scour the globe in search of The Ultimate Wave in this documentary. See also Step Into Liquid and documentarian Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer (1966) and The Endless Summer II (1994) – all odes to the never-ending quest for the perfect “60-second ride.” The Endless Summer II features the world’s only surfing Zulu and a gnarly soundtrack by guitar maven Gary Hoey. For more tubular surfing action, check out North Shore (1987) and the Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze actioner Point Break (1991), dude.
Surf Nazis Must Die (1987)
Surfing the wake of the Big Cali Quake is a gang of neo-Nazi punks, in this deliberately campy offering from B-trash producers Troma, makers of The Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1989) and the sicko fave The Toxic Avenger (1986).
The Inkwell (1994)
Director Matty Rich, who at age 19 stormed onto the indie scene with his powerful ‘hood drama Straight Out Of Brooklyn (1991), directed this superb comedic drama. The story takes place in 1976 on Martha’s Vineyard, and the title refers to a beach area frequented by Black bourgeoisie. In this refreshing look at a little-seen side of Black American, Larenz Tate (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) is a 16-year-old experiencing first love in this often-ignored treat.
One Crazy Summer (1986)
John Cusack and Demi Moore star in this fun no-brainer from Savage Steve Holland, who also directed Cusack in the hilarious Better Off Dead (1985). The affable Cusack plays a loafer and recent high school grad named “Hoops” who spends his summer in Nantucket and falls for Cassandra (Moore), a down-on-her-luck musician.
Blood Beach (1981)
Is it a spoof, or is it unintended, Ed Wood-styled hilarity? No matter, it’s still fun to watch, preferably if you tend to act out a la Mystery Science Theater 3000. Beach-goers become snack food for a subterranean carnivore in this silly romp, which is not to be confused with Tremors (1989) in which subterranean carnivores try to make snack food out of Kevin Bacon.
