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Thrashin'
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| Year: |
1986
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Director: |
David Winters
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| Stars: |
Josh Brolin, Robert Rusler, Pamela Gidley, Brooke McCarter, Josh Richman, Brett Marx, David Wagner, Chuck McCann, Tony Alva, Mark Munski, Sherilyn Fenn, Gary Goodrich, Rocky Giordani, Steve Whittaker, Per Welinder, Mondo Beck, Jesse Martinez
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| Genre: |
Drama, Action, Romance |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Corey Webster (Josh Brolin) has just arrived in California with a goal: he wants to become a professional skateboarder. He has friends there and collecting his things he makes for their house near the beach where they are delighted to see him as they believe he is the best skater among the lot of them and are keen to see him enter whatever competition is around. However, their rivals, and the meanest skateboarders in the area, are the Daggers, led by Monk (Mark Munski) and they have no plans to relinquish their crown as the best of the best - indeed they will stop at nothing to ensure they will win. With Corey playing by the rules, does he have a chance against these cheaters?
Not, as you might have thought from that title, a feature length film based on Basil Fawlty hitting his unresponsive car with a tree branch, Thrashin' (note the dropped "g" - very street) was one of those sports movies that the nineteen-eighties threw up with some enthusiasm, except most of them were more or less exploitation flicks designed to cash in on the craze for whatever activity the young folks were getting up to at the time. Taking their cue from Sylvester Stallone's bombastic Rocky sequels, the screens of the world were littered with productions taking up the cause of ice hockey in Youngblood to bicycle racing in Rad, with various stops for volleyball or breakdancing in between.
Wait, was breakdancing a sport? Seems the Daggers, the skater's equivalent of the Hell's Angels, don't regard it as such, as they cast aspersions on some poor bloke bustin' moves on his roll of lino that this is yesterday's activity, as if to tell us in the audience that skateboards were where it was at for the hipster of the era. It was only 1986! Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo was still fresh in people's minds! Anyway, it's not as if Thrashin' was the first pop culture salvo in skateboardery, as Leif Garrett had opened the floodgates with his ingeniously titled Skateboard back in the late seventies, and there were sightings of the sport on film going back as far as the sixties, though by this point you could observe it had gone well and truly mainstream, at least enough to have a movie dedicated to it.
As for the plot, what you had was the old West Side Story, er, story yet again, unsurprising when the director David Winters had actually appeared in the big screen version a couple of decades before as a dancer, so he must have known a winner when he saw one and applied it to this. Our lovers from opposite sides of the tracks were Corey and Chrissy (Pamela Gidley, leaving modelling for an acting career), who happens to be the younger sister of Dagger Hook (Robert Rusler), and he is the main bad guy. What a to-do. Can Corey romance Chrissy without Hook finding out, or will her best pal (a face-painting Sherilyn Fenn) grass on her so events will come to a head in a burst of violence? Well, they did that, but not in a simple punch-up, as this had to utilise the skateboarding theme so you got a joust between the two characters while on their boards.
Which naturally looks perfectly sensible and in no way ridiculous and unnecessary. It was not such narrative foolishness catching the attention of Thrashin's fans, it was Hook's remarkable technique with the air guitar - no, not really, it was the action sequences where Winters assembled pro skaters to act as stand-ins for the actors, so if nothing else such scenes where the stunts get going were undeniably impressive, even if they were shot in such a way to conceal the performer's faces which resulted in some convoluted shots and tricks. But watch a simple bit where Corey's friends zoom along the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the film springs to life, generating a kinetic energy which makes up for the hackneyed, facile storyline, and entirely reasonable that fans of the sport should have taken this to their hearts. Of course, they still have to sit through a love scene which seems to take up most of the middle section among other creaky conventions of the form, but that's the price they had to pay. Watch out for the massive swear on the side of one ramp. Music by Barry Goldberg.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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