Zombos Says: This cult classic is survivable with pizza and alcohol.
We were sitting in Zombos’s study. Outside, the November winds blew the balding tree limbs to and fro. Paul Hollstenwall was visiting and brought along Neon Maniacs. The Hollstenwalls live at 0004 Gravestart Lane, a few minutes’ walk from the mansion. Not far enough, if you ask me. We usually get the League of Reluctant Reviewers to handle his kind of movies, but sometimes he wiggles himself into the mansion, and like an infestation, is hard to eradicate. We usually have to placate him to wiggle him out. But it does take effort and is often exhausting. So, to understate things, it’s always a lively and interesting time when Paul visits us.
And it’s always a dreadful time too. His taste in under and overdone, and quirky, movie-making is boundless, and he always manages to find yet another headscratcher movie that’s worse than the previous one he’s cursed us to watch. I don’t know; maybe it is just me, or maybe there was a Donnie Darko kind of time crimp in the mid-1980s because some pretty weird horror movies came out then. Once you’ve seen Video Dead 1987, Spookies 1986, and this dive bomber, you should be awarded the official Cult Horror Classic (But We Are Not Sure Why) Survivor Award. To be fair, the director had to deal with a four-month shutdown due to financing issues. When the production jolted to life again, changes had to be made with the lesser money allocated, and good, well planned, intentions were shown the door as necessary changes were dealt with.
I poured the coffee and white sambuca, and popped the DVD into the player. Chef Machiavelli had crafted his wonderful pizza diavolo to take the sting out of our ordeal to come. We settled into the cushions as the movie came to life.
When the world is ruled by violence, and the souls of mankind fades, the children’s path shall be darkened by the souls of the neon maniacs,” intones the narrator as the movie starts.
“What does that mean?” asked Zombos.
Paul and I shrugged. Perhaps that art-house blend of words was just too deep for us. “Let’s wait and see if the movie explains it,” I recommended.
“What are those, trading cards?” asked Zombos, leaning closer to the largest smart television commercially available to get a better look. He was weird like that.
“Yeah, cool-looking, aren’t they?” said Paul. “Wouldn’t it be great if they had statistics on the back for each of the neon maniacs, like baseball cards?”
“How do monsters from hell that no one knows about get printed trading cards?” asked Zombos. He stared at Paul and took a big gulp of sambuca.
The first scene is an odd one. A fisherman on the Golden Gate Bridge heads home for the night. He passes a big metal door beneath the bridge and finds a bunch of Tarot-like cards lying in a bleached-white cattle skull. Each card depicts a neon maniac. Yes, it’s all rather goofy. He stoops to look at them. The massive door behind him opens quietly. An axe wielding and deformed neon maniac sneaks up and stands over him while he looks at the axe wielding and deformed neon maniac’s trading card.
Cut to the axe going up, coming down, and the fisherman will fish no more. “Well, that’s one stat for you, Paul,” I said. I reached for the liner notes on the DVD case hoping to find an explanation for the significance of using trading cards. Nope. Nothing.
Perhaps director Joseph Mangine and writer Marc Patrick Carducci were aiming for a marketing tie-in with neon maniac trading cards? See the movie then go crazy trading maniacs with your friends! Trading cards were big in the 1980s, especially the non-sport variety. I read more of the sparse liner notes searching for answers.
…it’s the neon maniacs, a group of ruthless, outrageously attired and made-up killers who emerge from beneath the Golden Gate Bridge to wreak havoc on helpless teenagers [and fisherman too, apparently]. Where the Maniacs come from is never explained, nor why they live so close to San Francisco Bay, considering that water…is the only thing that can harm them.
So not only are they hideously deformed and fashion-phobic, they’re brain-dead too. My favorite quote is “and the producer now says, ‘It was a much better script than a movie…’ ”
Great. I turned my attention, reluctantly, back to the movie. The incongruous lounge music didn’t raise my hopes of it getting better. Carducci also wrote Pumpkinhead, episodes for Tales From the Darkside, and the 1990 TV movie Buried Alive. Mangine had better luck as cinematographer for Alligator and Squirm.
“My god, they look like the Village People,” said Zombos.
“Yes, they do, don’t they, like in some twisted sense of horror-hell,” replied Paul. “Pretty imaginative, don’t you think?”
Zombos and I both looked at our watches. I tried to excuse myself a few times, but Zombos would have none of that. He likes to see me squirm.
We were back to twenty questions in a short time.
“Where did that midget dinosaur with one eye in the middle of its head come from?” asked Zombos.
Paul and I shrugged our shoulders. “Pets to the inter-dimensional neon maniacs who visit our world to drag back the people they kill to their dimension?” I supposed. Zombos stared back. At least he finally stopped asking silly questions and quietly watched this silly movie.
After teenagers are slaughtered in a park, the cops of course do not believe the lone survivor, Natalie (a fairly comatose Leilani Sarelle). She goes home. After watching her friends get beheaded, hung, and mutilated by the village people from hell, she puts on a bathing suit—in the middle of the night and all alone—and goes for a relaxing dip in the backyard pool.
All near-victims in horror movies should have Olympic-sized pools in their backyards so they can relax after their near-death traumas.
Not to beat this to death, much, but, just so we are clear on this, she is alone and it is the middle of the night, and right after her friends having been horribly mutilated and killed by outrageously dressed and deformed monster-freaks appearing out of nowhere. Me, you, and any rational person would think along the lines of ‘if they could appear in the park, they could even appear for a pool party.’ Clearly Natalie is no smarter than these neon maniacs.
And why the hell are they called “neon’ anyway? They don’t glow. They don’t even disco down! Speaking of which, that reminds me of my time as a clown tying balloon animals for coked-out patrons at the Limelight in New York City. I used this high, squeaky voice and the big favorite was balloon hats. Now that was a wild…oh, sorry. Back to the movie.
One of them, the hairy caveman (I used to enjoy watching television’s Land of the Lost) lurks in the bushes watching her. He almost busts a move, but it begins to rain so he runs away. End of suspense; a close shave with hairy poolside death avoided, to be sure.
“Wait, this is the best part,” said Paul with enthusiasm. We weren’t enthused.
Cue the introduction of the stereotypically spoiled and precocious movie adolescent who was also a budding horror director, sticking her nose into the mystery of the missing teenagers because that is what precocious rich adolescents with cameras do in movies. After Spielberg and Lucas shook things up, rich kids with cinema-blood started popping up all over the screen. Or maybe it was just the white sambuca talking. If so, I needed it to talk louder as the movie dragged on.
This rich kid, Paula (Donna Locke), is fun to watch as she exudes that I-told-you- so and I- know-better- because-I am-rich-and-can-afford-all-this-camera-equipment style of cocky acting. With her baseball cap daringly tilted to one side and her starry-eyed determinism, I was hoping she would square off against the midget dinosaur and poke its eye out. Or get eaten. I’d settle for either one at that point.
She is also way smarter than the police as precocious adolescents in movies must always be wiser and smarter than their years where elders are concerned. She is smart enough to find the obvious green goop trail the maniacs leave behind. Only she is smart enough to follow this plain as daylight muck trail to the big metal doors under the bridge. No trading cards or cattle skull this time, just lots of dead white pigeons in front of the doors.
If any movie ever cried out for expository explanation, THIS is the one.
Mentally putting the green goop and dead white pigeons together, Paula comes back later that night with her really expensive video equipment to shoot night scenes without a light source. She’s that good. She hides behind bushes near the metal doors. Soon the neon maniacs leave their hiding place, only to be turned back by the oncoming rain. One of them trips into a puddle of water and starts bubbling, so now she knows their weakness!
She hurries home. A neon maniac goes after her while she is sleeping. Being precocious and clever, she’s prepared with a bucket of water and a water pistol. How the maniac knew where she lived is not explained. The rain had driven them back inside, so none of them could have followed her either. In the Fangoria article Fang Preview: Neon Maniacs, issue 47, Carducci explains the scene with the neon maniac noticing her and following her home. None of that shows up in the edited movie. Unless I’m hallucinating. At this point, anything is possible. I swear I even saw a a tangent universe tube-wave stretching between me, Zombos, and Paul, just like in Donnie Darko, and the Neon Maniacs movie as a far-off time slip that I was being sucked into. Man, coffee and sambuca is awesome.
I stared at my watch, willing the minute hand to move faster. It didn’t work. Time travel never works when you need it the most.
The next day, Paula, Natalie, and the requisite handsome but nerdy boyfriend realize everyone is in danger, especially all teenagers of course, and they quickly devise a plan to arm all High Schoolers with water pistols at the Sock Hop versus Alice Cooper wannabees band contest taking place later that night. They give everyone a water pistol but forget to tell anyone when to use them. The neon maniacs show up on the dance floor to do the mashing-body hustle, panic ensues, and bodies are sliced, diced, and julienned in short order.
After much thought and dismemberment, Paula finally notices the big fire hose hanging on the wall and puts it to good use, dousing the maniacs until they scatter.
That should have ended the movie easily, but since some minutes were left to fill with incongruous action, Natalie and her boyfriend run up a few flights of stairs to the locked Principal’s Office. And, of course, can’t get in. Meanwhile, a graphic-grue humor scene with the neon maniac surgeon operating on a chloroformed night guard suddenly stands out in this otherwise gore-light movie. I will give credit where credit is due. The scene is as awesome as coffee and white sambuca.
Now back to Natalie and her boyfriend and that locked office problem: no problem, they decide to make out instead.
“Wonderful story logic there,” commented Zombos. “Coloring books show more plotting coherence.”
Now that would be an idea! A Neon Maniacs Coloring Book with neon color crayons.
“This is a funny scene,” said Paul. “The kids convince the police to carry squirt guns and go after the monsters.”
The police, in a 1950s Blob-styled these-kids-are-crazy-but-what-the-hell-we’ve-got-no other-choice frame of mind, along with the fire department, converge in front of the metal doors underneath Golden Gate Bridge. Water pistols and fire-hoses at the ready, they open the doors and search the surprisingly small storage garage the neon maniacs hang out in. Nothing is found except for an old ambulance and the kids are derisively told to get the hell out of there. They do.
The chubby obtuse detective in charge (obnoxious and obtuse detectives are best overweight in movies and television so we can enjoy their demise more easily) heads back into the garage after everyone leaves. Sure. Why not? We need a closer. Without his water pistol.
Weird, colorful, lights and odd sounds coming from the derelict ambulance attract his attention. He opens the ambulance’s doors and pokes his head in. Bad move.
Neon Maniacs is so clumsily awful it’s very enjoyable to watch with friends, a few beers, and low expectations. Sadly, there is no disco dancing or neon lights involved, and a trading card set was never issued. Or coloring book for that matter. We finally got Paul to leave, bringing our primary universe back into its appropriate trajectory. Though, I still see someone in a giant ratty rabbit costume now and them, so I’m laying off the coffee and sambuca for a spell.