When a top local businessman and his two bumbling nephews try to shut down the town’s only video arcade, arcade employees and patrons fight back.
As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I watched a lot of sex teen comedies that permeated throughout those decades, specifically the 1980s. Many of those movies still hold up well today, titles like “Bachelor Party,” the Porky’s trilogy, “Better Off Dead,” “Up the Creek,” and my favorite, “Meatballs,” but many, if not most, would have a difficult time being made in this day and age because a lot of today’s generation are easily offended by just about everything but the ’80s was a great time because, for the most part, nobody was hurt as a consequence of watching a film and everyone just had fun, something this generation could do a lot more with.
However, although the ’80s is remembered fondly today in TV shows and movies, such as “Stranger Things,” “The Goldbergs,” “Totally Killer,” and “The Iron Claw,” “Joysticks” is a cautionary tale that not everything set in the 1980s is remembered with great fondness.
The movie takes place in the most popular video arcade in town. Jefferson Bailey (Scott McGinnis) is the owner and runs the arcade with his friends Eugene (Leif Green) and McDorfus (Jim Greenleaf). When a local businessman, Joseph Rutter (Joe Don Baker), is convinced that the arcade is a den of sin and iniquity, he threatens to have it shut down, but Jefferson and his friends fight back and square off against him and his two bumbling nephews, resulting in a video game duel where there can only be one winner.
Director Greydon Clark stated he was in Austin, Texas, test screening his previous movie, “Wacko,” when he saw lines of kids waiting to play video games in the theater, and it gave him the idea to set his next movie in the world of video arcades. While the film is packed with 1980s pop culture references, they’re not enough to save the movie. Characters get embroiled in ludicrous situations, resulting in outrageous consequences, and while that pretty much sums up many 80s-themed films, it fails to deliver here. The story is messy and riotous, and the characters are totally unbelievable. I understand that my critique of this film as a teenager and as a man in my early fifties would recalibrate very differently, but I can’t critique this film from a teenage perspective anymore, only where I am now.
I saw “Joysticks” when I was 12 years old in 1984 when I was still living back in Ireland, and I remember distinctly not liking it very much back then, so my younger self and older self are in unison. I can still watch ’80s sex teen comedies and have fun with them, but as I stated earlier, not every teen movie made in the 1980s was good; just because it’s been forty years since its release doesn’t automatically give it “cult” status. It feels like the film was produced solely to profit from the video game craze at the time, and it worked, at least in that regard. It grossed $3,952,448 in the U.S. alone from a budget of $300,000, so the financiers were happy, but everyone else was not.
Bonus Features include:
- Original Theatrical Trailer
- Collectible 2-Sided Mini-Poster
- Reversible Artwork
- “Coin Slots” – “faux” trailer short written and directed by Newt Wallen and starring Mr. Lobo & Eric D. Wilkinson
- Interview with Director Greydon Clark
- Audio Commentary with Director Greydon Clark
- NEW! Fan commentary featuring MVD Rewind Collection’s Eric D. Wilkinson, Cereal at Midnight host Heath Holland, and Diabolik DVD’s Jesse Nelson
- Audio: LPCM 2.0 Mono
- 2K scan and restoration (in 2015) from 35mm film elements and presented in 1080p HD in 1.78:1 aspect ratio
- Limited Edition Slipcover (First Pressing Only)
Available on Blu-ray™ from MVD Rewind Collection February 20th
