Steroid Pancakes for Breakfast

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Action flicks, a bad sex comedy, and strange twins.

TERROR SQUAD (1987)

The low budget action film Terror Squad was released in 1987, but I didn’t find out about its existence until 2025 – and when I did learn about it, I was shocked. How had this movie escaped me for almost forty years? It doesn’t make any sense that I wouldn’t have heard about it, and I say that because the movie was shot in Kokomo, Indiana, a city just sixty miles or so away from the town in Indiana that half of my family is from. Sixty miles from the place I would visit every year, often spending a full month there in the summer. Somebody at some point should have mentioned that an action movie had been filmed over in Kokomo... but they never did. I mean, sure, it’s not a great movie, but at least tell me about it!

Directed by producer Peter Maris from a screenplay by Chuck Rose (based on a story by Mark Verheiden), Terror Squad does get off to a great start. A group of Libyan terrorists attempt to attack a nuclear power plant in Indiana in retaliation for American bombing their home country, but this attempt at sabotage goes terribly wrong. When you see it in action, it’s no wonder that it didn’t work out, because it’s one of the most pathetic attempts at sabotage ever brought to film. That does work out for the viewer, though, because it kicks off an extended car chase, with the terrorists being pursued through the Indiana countryside and the city of Kokomo by the local police.

Kokomo gets a nice thank you in the end credits, and rightfully so. They let this production run wild! That car chase is full of destructive sequences, including moments that take down a water tower and a large smokestack, and it goes on for almost half of the movie’s 92 minute running time. There are even moments where the terrorists machine gun every Kokomo resident they see while riding through the streets. Maris appears to have had free reign in the city for a substantial amount of time, and the residents seem to have been glad to give it to him. During every action scene, you can spot a group of locals in the background, watching the filming.

Unfortunately, the chase sequence eventually ends. The terrorists seek shelter in the local high school and take a group of students who have been kept late for detention hostage, along with their teacher. (R.I.P. to the janitor.) Cops played by Chuck Connors and Ken Foree keep watch outside, trying to communicate with the terrorists and negotiate the release of the hostages – but Connors and Foree were both given next to nothing to do, and the half of the movie dealing with the hostage situation is a test of patience. At least there’s a last bit of crazy action at the end of the film.

I should have seen this movie nearly forty years ago, and I’m glad I finally did. The high school portion of it stinks, but that car chase is a hell of a sight to behold.

THE WRECKING CREW (2026)

I can’t help it. Every time I watch a tough guy action movie, I think about my late father and wonder what he would have thought of the movie. The guy was largely absent for big chunks of my life before he passed away eight and a half years ago, but when we were together, the enjoyment of movies was our common ground, and he preferred to watch action movies. The latest release to take me back to those days was the Prime Video movie The Wrecking Crew, which was directed by Ángel Manuel Soto from a script by Jonathan Tropper.

When elderly private investigator Walter Hale (Brian L. Keaulana) is killed in an apparent hit and run in Hawaii, it brings his two sons back together. The estranged half-brothers are Navy SEAL James (Dave Bautista) and irreverent, motorcycle-riding bad boy / suspended police detective Jonny (Jason Momoa), and both of them are reminiscent of characters that would have been featured in movies my father would have watched in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Given that some Yakuza thugs raided his house in Oklahoma soon after his father died, Jonny has a good idea that Walter was purposely murdered, so he sets out to investigate the death while he’s in Hawaii for the funeral – and local resident James also sets out to get to the bottom of what happened.

Soon enough, their separate investigations collide and put them in the crosshairs of more thugs, so the brothers team up to take down the villains that killed their dad. Along the way, they set aside their differences (after beat the hell out of each other, of course) and bond, coming to love each other as brothers again. This brings an element of heart to a movie that’s full of violence and vulgarity. They also interact with characters played by the likes of Claes Bang, Roimata Fox, Frankie Adams, Jacob Batalon, Branscombe Richmond, and Morena Baccarin.

The Wrecking Crew is a pretty cool action flick. It doesn’t reach the level of the old school classics, partially because of an overly juvenile sense of humor (I mean, Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black is prone to putting dick jokes in his scripts, but this movie takes them to a whole other level), and partially because it falls into the same trap many modern action movies do by featuring action sequences that are enhanced by too much CGI and goes too far with collateral damage that is surely causing the deaths of innocent bystanders, but nobody seems to care because it’s just random explosions and destruction. Modern action movies always lose me when they drift into this computer game mentality.

At 122 minutes, it’s also too damn long.

But some issues aside, the movie is a fun watch, and has some cool action, and does have a mystery at its core that’s reminiscent of something Shane Black might have written. I got some entertainment out of it, and my father probably would have, too.

JOY OF SEX (1984)

In 1972, scientist and physician Alex Comfort published the illustrated sex manual The Joy of Sex and, wanting to cash in on the title, Paramount Pictures quickly snapped up the film adaptation rights. But how do you turn a sex manual into a movie? That’s the question that kept the project in development hell for a decade. Finally, the studio turned to writer Kathleen Rowell and asked her to give them a script about a teenage girl wanting to lose her virginity against a deadline. Rowell brought her sister Joyce Salter and her brother-in-law John Salter in to write the script with her, and together they crafted a story about a young woman who goes to the doctor to have a mole examined, overhears a conversation, and leaves the doctor’s office convinced that she only has six weeks to live. And she does not want to die a virgin.

Valley Girl director Martha Coolidge was enlisted to bring that story to the screen. If Paramount didn’t get the movie into production within four months, they were going to lose the option on the book, so they rushed this one in front of the cameras, even though the script wasn’t quite what they were looking for and Coolidge was, by her own admission, not the right fit for the sort of gratuitous nudity-packed sex comedy Paramount was hoping to get out of this deal. As she explained, “It was actually a romance and certainly the women writers and I weren't the people to get a Porky's from. The movie wasn't what the execs thought it would be, they freaked, took me off the movie, cut it down, and tried to make the humor broader, which made it more disjointed.”

The finished film, which has a running time of 93 minutes, does come off as a half-baked mess. Even though Coolidge brought in Valley Girl cast members Michelle Meyrink (as the lead character, Leslie Hindenberg), Cameron Dye (as Leslie’s schoolmate Alan Holt), and Colleen Camp (as a cop who goes undercover in school), they weren’t able to recapture the magic of their earlier classic. From the story to the jokes, very little about Joy of Sex actually works. Not even supporting performances from Christopher Lloyd and Ernie Hudson can pull it out of the dumps.

This is a pretty bad movie... but what could Paramount have possible expected when they decided to make a movie out of a sex manual? Charles Grodin was the first writer to be hired, and he found the task so daunting they he wrote a script about a writer who has been hired to turn a sex manual into a movie. Paramount didn’t like that, so they brought in National Lampoon and John Hughes to work on a version that would have been a sketch comedy, a bunch of comedic vignettes about sexual situations. That version also crumbled, and they attempted to take part in the teen sex comedy boom of the early ‘80s. It was a swing and miss, resulting in one of the lamest sex comedies of the bunch.

Still, it’s an interesting curiosity to see how the director of Valley Girl could be handed a project that was a bad idea from the start and not manage to make something worthwhile out of it.

If you’re a fan of sex comedies, take a look at this one... and cringe.

ECHOES (2022)

Do you enjoy limited series thrillers that take the viewer on a dark and twisted ride? If so, you’ve probably seen the 2022 Netflix release Echoes by now... but just in case you haven’t, there’s no time like the present to catch up on it. I just recently caught up with the show myself.

Michelle Monaghan pulls double duty in this seven-episode show, created by Vanessa Gazy. She plays author Gina McCleary, who lives in Los Angeles, as well as her twin sister Leni, who still lives on a horse ranch in their small country hometown of Mt. Echo... and you’re never quite sure which character is which because Gina and Leni have had a deal for years where they switch lives, despite the fact that they both have husbands (Matt Bomer plays Leni’s rancher husband Jack, Daniel Sunjata plays Gina’s therapist husband Charlie Davenport) and Leni even has a young daughter. Every year on their birthday, Gina and Leni trade lives, and apparently the people around them have no idea.

Their questionable arrangement gets quite the shake-up when Leni (or was it Gina?) disappears one day – and soon, Gina (or is it Leni?) becomes convinced that her sister is planning to run off with her troubled ex, Jonathan Tucker as Dylan James.

While one sister works to thwart the plans of another sister in present day, flashbacks fill in the blanks of how and why Gina and Leni became so messed up. It’s an intriguing story, and it’s a shame that Netflix never ordered a second batch of episodes, because I would have gladly watched another season of Echoes. The show does have an ending, but it also left the door wide open for the story to continue.