Out of Bounds

First of all I know none of you give even the smallest fuck about 1986’s Out of Bounds, an action thriller starring Anthony Michael Hall (Halloween Kills) and Jenny Wright (The Lawnmower Man).  Second of all I know your time is precious and wasting it on this dumb bullshit will be at best a mild regret.  But I must convey how absurdly strange this picture is.  The safest approach might be what I did with another humdinger of a viewer, Ricochet, which is to rattle off bullet points.  It not only parallels the disconnected nature of the film but is also probably the most efficient method (again, thinking of you treasured reader).  Oooookay:

• We should do a brief plot synopsis, right?  Daryl (Hall) (hah, sounds like the guy from the pop outfit Hall & Oates) travels from Podunk, Iowa to the City of Angels (LA) to stay with his brother but his bag gets mixed up at the airport for one with a lot of heroin stashed in it.  The bad guy wants his drugs back so he kills the brother and his wife causing Daryl to go on the run.  He hooks up with a lady named Dizz (Wright) who he met on the plane ride over and the two scamper all over town trying to find/evade the bad guys and the cops.
• When Daryl discovers his brother’s corpse he grabs a gun he finds on the ground (his brother’s?  the killer’s?  I dunno).  At that moment some poor innocent bastard walks in to let the brother know his septic tank is overflowing.  He spots the gun, the two tussle and Daryl shoots and kills him!!!  I repeat, this wasn’t a villainous character of any stripe.  Just some guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• The cops spot Daryl shortly after fleeing the scene so he hops on the back of a motorcycle, holds a gun to the driver’s head and the two blast away on a wild bike/cop car chase.  Afterward the driver believes Daryl is innocent and commends him for evading the cops.
• In a precursor to Pulp Fiction Dizz works at a kitschy restaurant where they serve menu items such as Buddy Holly burgers and Elvis Presley shakes.
• Dizz is one of the most aggressively 80’s characters I’ve ever seen.  It’s difficult to describe her appearance but she has sort of a bleached tumbleweed for hair, caked on makeup, wears black ripped stockings and in one part an eye piercingly neon yellow super glossy raincoat.  She drives a pink convertible with a zebra skin interior and lives in a multi-colored, mish mosh style house filled with images and trinkets of penguins.
• Hall attempts a soft southerny/mid-westerny accent with disappointing results.
  
• Hall’s hair is distracting.  He sports a borderline mullet that looks unbelievably greasy like he hasn’t washed it in weeks.  Gross.
• I have no fucking clue what Daryl and Dizz are ever doing.  All throughout the film they meet up with the bad guy as if to make a deal of some sort but then they immediately run from him upon first sight.  The same happens with the cops.  They call the police, cops arrive, they run.  Look, I saw this sucker stone cold sober but can’t tell you for the life of me what the protagonists’ goals are or how any of the plot points make any logical sense.  If Daryl is seeking to prove his innocence regarding his brother’s murder then he’s shitting the bed really hard and nasty on that.
• Admittedly the only reason I put this movie on is because I had read that power pop royalty Tommy Keene was in it.  And in fact he does perform “Run Now” in the background at a club where Daryl and Dizz set a meet up with the villain.  It’s an unceremonious affair but still cool to see Tommy in his heyday slingin’ his trademark Telecaster ‘n’ all in an actual movie.  His biggest album, Songs from the Film (unrelated), dopped the same year so this was a promotional move.  Siouxsie and the Banshees also make an appearance at a different club earlier and get more of a spotlight.  Makes sense since they were already firmly established for about a decade at that point.
• The one big kick I got out of this thing is Jerry Levine has a role as a grimy slimy fast talking gregarious drug dealer/hustler guy.  This is almost the same exact character as Stiles from Teen Wolf that he played the previous year.  Therefore I am choosing to believe this IS Stiles and these two pictures take place in a shared universe.  Out of Bounds is so fucked anyway I would’ve welcomed werewolves into the scenario.
• Finally, Meat Loaf shows up for a quick minute as a drug runner pilot who abruptly gets shot during take off.  At one point I spotted someone wearing a Rocky Horror Picture Show shirt so I wonder if that was a coincidence.

As you can surmise this movie is baaaaaaaaad.  It’s not even that entertainingly bad either.  It just made me cranky because nothing adds up.  From the two random dudes going around killing people who we find out at the very end are rogue DEA agents to Daryl outwitting and out-brawling the pathetic villain at every turn.  I mean this asshole simply has some of the worst luck of all time.  Like to the point where I felt a little sorry for him by the end (kinda like the bad guy in The Net).

And because of Daryl’s utter idiocy and reluctance to turn himself him and clear his name he either directly or indirectly causes the deaths of a number of folks and ruins the lives of countless others.  By the time the credits roll he’s committed many crimes he didn’t need to (including murder!) and the cops let him walk away with his arm slung over Dizz as if to say “wow that was a crazy misadventure wasn’t it?”  Arrest him!

I would not recommend Out of Bounds.  The title says it all, leave it there.