MOE GOES WILDING WITH JOEY AND WINGS
Deception is often used in exploitation film to arouse a viewer’s interest in a particular movie; use someone who LOOKS like a big star or someone who has a similar name as a big star. The best way to go about this is to simply ask the big stars D grade brother or sister to work on your film. Whether it be Don Swayze, Chad McQueen, Frank Stallone, Joe Estavez or in this case Joey Travolta, the name makes the movie! Wilding is actually one of the best performances I’ve seen from a famous sibling. (Disclaimer: Frank Stallone always gives a great performance, ALWAYS!)
WILDING is a movie that for the most part makes NO SENSE. This seems to be a trend in the movies I watch, I wonder if maybe I should stop drinking…Yeah like that’s not gonna happen. Anyway, the paper thin flimsy plot revolves around a group of kids that go crazy and start “WILDING”! For the uninitiated, “Wilding” is when kids go crazy and destroy shit for the fun of it. An idea done best in 1968’s Just for the hell of it, a film with no story, no plot, no character development, just wanton destruction and chaos. A near perfect film.
During one of the kids freak out sessions they kill a rival “gang” member and rape/beat his girl. The LAPD is put on the case and it seems a similar incident went down in NYC. I guess Wilding is a national epidemic!! Actually it must have been because the year before WILDING came out a film called NIGHT OF THE WILDING came out and if ever there were a film I would yell at you to skip it’s that one. I’ll just say it’s one of the worst films I’ve ever seen and I wouldn’t force it on my worst enemy! Police officers, played by the amazing Wings Houser and the surprisingly good Joey Travolta, are put on the case. That’s just another way of saying Wings mumbles ALL of his lines and Joey cracks one liners, “EH-OHs” like Vinny Barberino and manages to actually make me laugh!
Tommy is a clean cut kid who decides that it’s not worth being a good kid and takes to a life of Wilding! His parents don’t know this and just assume he’s still co-captain of the football team, but really he’s off drinking with a low rent fake Asian/Native American guy we dubbed Lou “turquoise” Phillips and the whitest black guy you’ll ever seen. I give the black guy credit though, he does make one attempt to sound almost tough, but he still sounds like a slightly more matured Steve Urkel. One of my favorite moments is when we see the black guy’s lawyer and realize he looks just like TAY ZONDAY! (CHOCOLATE RAIN!) Tommy’s Bro Steve comes around to help his baby brother get out of the life and all hell breaks loose. Normally this is the part where I’d say “The climax is so insane you have to see it with your own eyes”, but in Wilding it’s pretty tame compared to some other shit that goes down in the movie and it’s merely a decent way to end the film. A period at the end of the sentence so to speak.
There are some great moments in Wilding that will have you on the floor. Wings tells a joke, it takes seemingly forever for him to deliver the punchline and when he’s done Travolta just looks at him and says “THAT JOKE SUCKED!” I laughed for a solid minute and a half after that. The delivery was brilliant and it was true, that fucking joke SUCKED! Though not really a “moment” as such, I did notice that I said “WHAT?!” an insane amount of times. I’m fairly certain that WILDING had one microphone and it was attached to the camera. There’s a moment when Tommy takes a woman hostage and grabs her phone, the back of the phone AND the battery pack in the phone fall out, but he proceeds to make a call like nothing happened, they even cut away and come back and it’s still gone and he GETS a magical call from the cops. They didn’t even try to hide the fact that the person “on the phone” is clearly standing next to the camera doing his “dubbing”.
At the end of the day WILDING is a ton of fun and definitely NOT to be confused with the Eric Estrada shitfest NIGHT OF THE WILDING. Grab some friends, turn it up real loud, pound a few and laugh at the silliness that is WILDING: THE CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE.
4 Magical Phones out of 5
Drink up! We’ve got movies to watch…
Moe
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