Gas Pump Girls (1979)

June (Kirsten Baker) and her friends at Hometown High have just graduated, and look forward to spending one last summer hanging out with each other.  But when her Uncle Joe’s (Huntz Hall) gas station is ready to go out of business from a combination of Joe’s failing health and fierce competition from the more upscale Pyramid gas station directly across the street, June connives her buddies into pitching in and bringing the dingy, old gas station back to life.  Through the miracle of erections.

Joel Bender’s Gas Pump Girls (aka The Mechanic Girls) is a fairly typical teen sex romp that plays fast and loose enough with the standards of the genre to be slightly refreshing.  The girls, with the exception of one (January, played by Rikki Marin), are distinguished from one another.  There’s Plain Jane (Leslie King), the wallflower who barely speaks at all.  There’s April (Sandy Johnson), the sexual (but eager) innocent.  There’s Betty (Linda Lawrence) the busty, high maintenance brunette who knows all about manipulating men’s lechery to satisfy her material desires.  And, of course, there’s June, the energetic go-getter with a purpose.  

Their boyfriends (or boy toys, if you want), by contrast, are largely forgettable dullards who only prove Betty’s theories true (but, let’s face it, every guy in this movie does).  June’s beau Roger (Dennis Bowen) is the isolated case, as he genuinely wants to spend time with June, and is upset that he may never see her again after summer’s end.  The third group in this triangle are the local biker “gang” The Vultures, led by the Fonzarelli-lite Butch (Steve Bond).  The Vultures make Eric von Zipper’s Rat Pack look like The Satans.  They are juvenile delinquents only in the sense that they think they’re juvenile delinquents.  They don’t do much more than a little loitering, but this fits with the film’s breezy attitude.  

The other way that Gas Pump Girls stands out from others of its ilk is in the portrayal of its main theme.  Primarily, this is an underdog/save the rec center plot, but instead of a bunch of teens confronting some greedy land developer, here the conflict is with the esurient gas station owner across the way, Mr. Friendly (Dave Shelley).  It’s a socioeconomic struggle between a united working class and a soulless corporation, and we know it’s essentially soulless (outside of the mere fact that it’s a corporation in a movie) because they are homogenized and gentrified, as opposed to the creative, all-inclusive workers of Joe’s Super Duper.  The Pyramid goons conform to the standards of what’s expected of a gas station in generic terms, but Joe’s Super Duper provides an individualized, exciting gas-pumping experience (there’s even an extensive double entendre about the process [“Grab it, stick it in, squeeze it, and let it peter out”]).  Joe’s Super Duper is the new blood in the local gas pumping industry.  They are the rebirth of a dead business from out of the ashes, fueled (ahem) by youthful enthusiasm.  Why more full service (ahem, again) gas stations didn’t follow this film’s business model in real life, like bikini car washes, is beyond me.

Yet, even the film’s antagonists comply with the movie’s jaunty disposition.  Friendly mocks the girls, but aside from sending useless thugs Bruno and Moiv (Joe E. Ross and Mike Mazurki, respectively, and please note the ethnic spelling of Marv, just so you get the full picture) to intimidate June, things never get too personal for the upscale station owner.  Friendly is easily thwarted, even when he ups his game and gets the gas supply cut off to Joe’s pumps.  Further than this, when the youngsters go straight to Pyramid corporate headquarters (disguised as Arabs and belly dancers, naturally), the expectation is that corporate fat cat Mr. Smin (Jack Jozefson) will be even more heartless and venal than Friendly.  However, he’s one of the biggest pushovers for a sob story ever, and the whole thing is executed so as not to get in the way of the fun.

Another aspect of the film that I found intriguing is the notion of childhood’s end.  At the high school commencement, a practical joke by The Vultures leads to our female leads baring their boobs for all the audience to see.  The girls are all technically adults now, and though embarrassed at first, they are pretty hunky dory about it in the next scene in the same sense of discovering the joys of drinking alcohol and then discovering the joys of drinking alcohol legally in a bar.  As previously stated, Roger takes the inevitable departure of June from his life pretty hard.  He goes from playful flirting to stunned contemplation, though June seems okay with it all until she gets the phone call regarding her uncle’s health which perhaps reminds June of the transitory nature of life.  That said, June also gets a little song to sing to herself while hanging out at her uncle’s closed gas station which belies her original nonchalance (curiously, the only song any character in the film sings, and it made me suspect this was actually a musical; it isn’t).  Its title is All Of My Friends, and it includes the lines, “Just gimme all of my friends, and I’ll be happy again,” “bring ‘em back home, where you know they belong,” and most importantly, “I’m lonely.”  It’s half-lament, half-retrouvaille for long held friendships that are slowly dispersing.  The kids’ entire business escapade is a final fling for them to both solidify and begin letting go of their relationships.  Even The Vultures’ sudden sense of community spirit appears to stem from their connection to these teens specifically and their realization that soon they won’t be around to prank and harass (plus, the age divide between them and active high school kids is only widening, so these may be the last high school kids with which they can partake in their particular brand of mischief without just being creepy).  The film, then, is a last hurrah for youth, as well as being a call to seize the opportunity to do something, have some fun, and maybe use your body to sell some petroleum products.  And that’s the big take away; the film is an ultra-casual ode to youth.  As a dyed in the wool nostalgist, it works in spades for me.  For as much as the film is a snapshot of the West Coast in the late Seventies (something I never tire of seeing), its message applies to youth (American and otherwise) on the whole: Grab it, stick it in, squeeze it, and let it peter out.

MVT:  The film’s innocent joie de vivre joined with its slightly melancholic undercurrent.  

Make or Break:  The locker room scene, wherein the girls talk about how they feel about what happened and how they view the world.

Score:  6.75/10

Revenge Is My Destiny (1971)

And then there was the time I stabbed myself in the eye.  I was prying the top hinge cap off a refrigerator with a flat screwdriver when the driver slipped off the cap, slid right past my glasses, and jammed straight into my eye.  If you have ever met me, I bet you couldn’t tell which one it is could you?  That’s because I didn’t lose the eye, thankfully; just put a nice ding in it (unlike proto-Snake-Plissken Ross Archer [Christopher Robinson] in Joseph Adler’s Revenge Is My Destiny).  My optometrist gave me eye drops.  Hooray.  

Those who do manual labor on a regular basis can attest to the myriad injuries (minor and not-so-minor) that one can and will incur no matter how careful one is, leaving one with a certain stunned stoicism immediately afterward (“well, that happened”).  The question then becomes, “do I go to the ER for this one?”  My general rule of thumb is, unless I stand to die and/or lose an appendage, that’s not necessary.  Many is the time I’ve had to wrap gashed open knuckles with about a half roll of paper towels and electrical tape to get the wound to seal and prevent me from bleeding out all over a person’s appliance.  The judicious application of hydrogen peroxide and a well-stocked bandage supply carry the rest of the day.  I don’t think this necessarily makes me a hard ass (I think I’m quite the opposite), but maybe it’s somewhat hereditary.  One of my brothers has been known to stitch himself up after rugby injuries and even took a Dremel to his teeth to make them flat across (don’t ask).  Then again, maybe this aversion is all born out of fear.  After all, you know what you have with a limb split open at home.  You never know what the hell will happen to you in a hospital (especially our local one, but that’s a whole other issue).

After having it out with some Viet Cong, Ross is injured by mortar fire and captured (we get to see up to the injury portion in the prologue).  One year later he returns home, a newly-eyepatched man, only to find his wife Angela (Elisa Ingram) gone and go-go dancer Ellie (Patricia Rainier) taking up her space in his houseboat (which is more like just a boat on which Ross happens to live).  Driven by a burning hatred, Ross scours the Florida underbelly and begins to turn up much more than he anticipated.

Like so many movies that came out in the wake of disillusionment that ended the Sixties, Adler’s is also about the damage done by war generally and the atrocities of the Vietnam War specifically.  The VC at the film’s open have no problems shelling peasants, clearly marking them in cinematic terms as bad guys.  However, the tables are turned and evened in short order when Ross drowns an enemy combatant only to discover it was a woman.  For when this film was produced, I’m sure this twist was pretty shocking, and it is certainly emphasized to the audience in the dramatic use of music.  Seconds later, Ross is injured.  He is punished not only for killing a woman (in a time of war, granted) but also for partaking in the war in the first place, and the two together make him worthy of being sanctioned.  

Once back in America Ross is still filled with hate, only now it’s aimed at his wife who, from what we’re told, basically just dropped off the face of the Earth while Ross was in a POW camp (the VC woman is a stand-in for Angela and Ross’s subconscious [and conscious] desire to hurt her).  The loss of his eye is the physical toll of his choices, but the scars of war travel deeper in Ross.  We get the distinct impression he was something of a prick even before Vietnam.  His experiences overseas didn’t change him so much as augment him.  It is the actions he takes pursuing his wife which will determine the arc of his destiny.  These two, in fact, have a strong love/hate relationship, and this is what draws them to each other (“Can I get in touch with you?”  “You’re just begging me to break your neck, aren’t you?”).  This is also why Ross may have a tryst with Ellie, but he can never have a long term relationship with her.  She’s too nice.  There’s nothing about her to hate, so the hate Ross would need in order to love her would never be sustainable.  

The search for Angela is Ross’ search for completion.  They are two halves of a whole, both of which are kind of shitty.  This is highlighted in the beach footage.  Early on, we see Ross in silhouette running into golden surf.  Later, Ross and Angela are shown at a beach from the same angle, only now it is at night.  Later still, Ross and Angela’s story will come full circle, and this will also occur on a moonlit beach.  Water as a rebirth motif is strong in the film.  Ross wants to wash away what he was before he came back from Vietnam (especially the “sin” he committed against the VC woman despite this being something Ross craved at that moment), though it’s pure yearning at this point.  His relationship with Angela is reborn at the ocean.  His fate is resolved at the ocean.  He lives on a boat, and he wants to find himself abroad, wandering the ocean.  Sonny Crockett could probably learn a thing or two from Ross Archer.

All that said, I think the film is mistitled, quite frankly.  Revenge in Revenge Is My Destiny is not focused on strenuously.  If anything, this is a gritty, pulp action story, straight out of a men’s adventure magazine.  There are convolutions on top of convolutions in the plotting.  They do connect up by the end, but the route they take to do so is circuitous.  The script is something to which I think Ellroy, Lansdale, Thompson, or Westlake would be proud to have their name attached.  Oh, it has its share of problems.  There is the facility of low budget filmmaking that spans plot holes for the sake of putting film in the can and footage on the screen, most noticeable in the fact that it feels a lot like two film plots pushed together.  The pacing could be tightened up some.  But there is a charm at work here, and there are some decent action scenes that give a nice dose of value to the production.  Part of me is surprised to not hear this film discussed more among crime and cult movie circles, and that’s a shame because it certainly warrants some attention.  Hopefully this little review will help get it some.  Okay, even I laughed at that one a little bit.

MVT:  The film has an unassuming, forthright attitude which fits it like a new pair of lifting gloves.  This is stripped down, almost raw storytelling which isn’t hurt by its shortcomings; it is enhanced by them, in my opinion.

Make Or Break:  The opening scene in Vietnam is impressive.  It clearly was made on the cheap, but the action has a nice sense of scale, and it is blocked out solidly, so we know what is happening at all times.    Lots of films from this era and of this ilk don’t even give you that much.

Score:  6.75/10