“Crazy? You want crazy? Oh, I’ll show you crazy.”

Drake’s rating: Santa’s Funland: The most dangerous place on Earth

Drake’s review: We all know Sean S. Cunningham for his involvement with Friday the 13th, of course, and as the director of the raucous comedy Spring Break. But man cannot live by teen comedy and slasher hit alone, and so it came to be that Cunningham took a detour from the gold-paved road of success and took a side jaunt down the dirty, dusty path that led to this skeevy little flick.

An ill-advised combination of hicksploitation and teen drama, The New Kids sees Loren and his sister Abby lose their parents and travel to a small town in Florida to live with their Uncle Charlie, an eccentric sort who owns a run-down little theme park called Santa’s Funland.* All goes well at first as the kids help their aunt and uncle fix up the park, but it’s not long before they cross paths with Eddie Dutra (James Spader, Mannequin), the local high school drug kingpin and all-around unpleasant jerk of a human being. To make matters worse, Eddie has a gang of Southern stereotypes at his beck and call, and they go from being annoying idiots to life-threatening menaces in near-record time.

Predictably, Eddie takes an unhealthy interest in Abby, doesn’t react well at all to the subsequent rejection, and launches into a campaign of terror that ends in a violent showdown at the theme park. Cue accidental electrocutions, fatal falls, and decapitation by roller coaster.

Cunningham is a fairly heavy-handed director, and that sometimes works in his favor. Friday the 13th, for example, wears its influences on its sleeve and then dives into the early slasher genre with both feet with nary a thought about subtlety or nuance. And that works well for the movie that it is. But he takes a similar path here with a flick that requires a much defter touch to heighten the teen drama before it begins wallowing in the more exploitative elements with wild abandon. Instead, this is an ABC Afterschool Special as directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Which does sound pretty cool until you realize that this isn’t Straw Dogs-era Peckinpah, but instead the Peckinpah behind Convoy and The Osterman Weekend.

So the audience is left out in the cold, since there’s very little to emotionally tie them to the characters. Loren and Abby (Lori Loughlin, Secret Admirer) are given a military brat background to excuse their lack of sentiment surrounding their parents’ deaths, and to give Cunningham an easy out as well. After all, why waste time building characters and giving them emotional depth? There’s a showdown at Santa’s Funland to get to!

Spader’s Eddie Dutra suffers a similar fate, although his role is so shallow that he should have grown a mustache to twirl as he laid out his evil plans.

The New Kids has a few decent moments but it’s a hard one to recommend** as I’m not even sure who the target audience was. Maybe Cunningham thought that he could launch a series of teen revenge flicks in the same way as he did the F13 franchise. The film’s ending certainly hints at the possibility of more mayhem to come, but it had a limited release and was quickly pulled from theaters, which leads me to believe that the distributors were just as confused by the film as audiences were.

So, don’t bother looking for a lost cult classic here. There are some bits and pieces that work independently of the rest, but The New Kids never really finds its footing to gel into a satisfying whole. You won’t miss much if you give this one a skip.

Well, you’ll miss James Spader’s shaky Southern accent, but that’s actually a good thing.

*One can only wonder if the jolly old elf settled in the Sunshine State after his adventures with the Ice Cream Bunny.

**And to be fair, I’m reviewing this one after also watching & reviewing Tuff Turf, which has a similar theme but is a much better movie.

Intermission!

• Opening the film with a slo-mo training montage.
• Hey, Tom Atkins is in this!
• Oh. Never mind.
• Hey, a young Eric Stoltz!
• It’s probably best if you don’t get too attached to the bunny.
• Hat Guy does not know the first thing about firearms safety.
• That is one sad little roller coaster.
• Fake bunny! Noooooo!!!
• Flashback to the previous training montage melding into a new training montage. This flick is all about the training montages.
• The Ferris Wheel has claimed its first victim. I’m assuming. Honestly, that thing looks so rickety that I’m not unconvinced it already has a body count.
• This is one dangerous theme park. I don’t know how it could ever get insured.
• Uh-oh, the (probably unnamed) little brother of one of Eddie’s (possibly named but I’m really not sure which one it was) gang members has murder in his eyes.