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• Last Update: April 14, 2012, at 02:05 PM
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Sloth love Goonies!!

People wear eyeglasses to help them see more clearly. Well, I suppose Elton John's are intended less for improving his visual acuity and more for the task of entrenching gay stereotypes, but it doesn't matter; a good statistical sample ultimately smooths over random, isolated extremes. My glasses, at least, help compensate for the fact that my eyes are incapable of distinguishing the difference between prey and predator at anything more than 5 paces. So for me they serve as a sort of buffer against natural selection, preventing me from walking into an early death by mistaking, say, a voracious tiger for the potato bar at Wendy's.

But there's another sort of glasses people wear, a sort which serve almost exactly the opposite purpose. A type which adds a soft focus and a warm, glowing tint to vision rather than infusing sight with the crisp clarity of reality - a type of glasses known as Nostalgia. But the reason Nostalgia's lenses function so differently from eyeglasses is because they don't exist to better people's lives. Instead, they serve as human blinders to aid the propagation of a strange creature known as Pop Culture.

Pop Culture is a recently evolved organism that relies on mass media as a vector for its parasitic growth. Like a wasp applying a numbing toxin before laying a batch of eggs in its living prey, Pop Culture insinuates itself in the minds of its victims using Nostalgia as an anaesthetic and then breeds, compelling its victim to aid its reproduction in the form of tsotchkes, knick-knacks and paraphenalia. And Pop Culture contaminates its carriers irrevocably; just look at the Internet and the way in which a medium created for the advancement of educational and military communication was subverted into a domain of popular ephemera in a matter of years. And now the Internet itself serves not only as a host for Pop Culture, but as a vector as well, infecting other forms of media with Net-spawned pollutants such as Ghost in the Shell and All Your Base.

Pop Culture can be traced back centuries, even millennia, but the most recent mutation was first seen in America and Britain in the 1950s in the form of ironic, iconic paintings by people like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Sadly, this means that all Americans born after the release of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" have been born with high level of PCP (Pop Culture Progesterone, the primary chemical compound in Nostalgia) in their bloodstreams and therefore have no natural defense against the lenses of Nostalgia. So ingrained in the lives of America's youth is Pop Culture that even the mental shielding afforded by cynicism and sarcasm can easily be subverted to strengthen the monster's grip. A quick survey of the Internet should prove as much: myriad young adult nerdlings sneer derisively at everything except the meaningless drivel with which they grew up. If you know what to look for, it's all rather terrifying.

I explain all of this not by way of clever introduction for a positive review of a bad movie, since I may never actually get around to the review. No, this is a cinematic cliché: picture the hapless innocent caught in the grip of some horrifying power; knowing he's doomed to die he musters the last of his strength and freewill and turns slowly to Our Hero and silently forms words of warning that steer the protagonist in the right direction so that the main character can avoid the same dire fate and save the day. It's too late for me, here, but not for you. Press Back on your browser toolbar and save yourself now, or else Pop Culture, like the neon-tinted incubus it is, will make you its next victim.

For it's only through Nostalgia's strange alchemical process (which transmutes childhood acceptance into bucolic bliss) that movies like The Goonies are capable of surviving across the ages. Certainly there's nothing of merit in the movie itself: a collection of crass jokes, embarrassing stereotypes, shamefully earnest speeches and a bizarre combination of enough disparate plot elements to make Star Wars Episode I look cohesive. But The Goonies survives through a trick of temporal reality: it was first released when twenty-somethings - the people whose Personal Self-congratulatory Indulgence comprises the bulk of influential personal websites (for the time being, anyway) - were of that age when mediocrity shines like gold and mindless stupidity appears brilliant. It's an age which most people leave behind in stages as they proceed through high school. But the poison elixir of Nostalgia slowly taints adult judgment to create a sort of double standard which enables the afflicted to recognize contemporary bad movies but blinds them to the failings of those they adored in the ignorant innocence of youth.

So. The Goonies is a Steven Spielberg childhood fantasy given shape by Richard Donner - the man who continued to beat work out of the Lethal Weapon series long after the ol' grey mare was ready to be put to pasture. More to the point, the man who has been given the Crazy Taxi movie license. If this mere fact alone doesn't set off a warning klaxon in your brain, I envy your blissfully sheltered life.

Stir into this recipe for disaster the following ingredients:

• A family of small-time crooks (they're Italian, which of course explains why they stick together as a family), the youngest sibling of which is a horrible mutant monstrosity who also happens to be remarkably good-natured;
• A rich snobby family about to tear down half of a city to make a golf course. The movie pulls no punches in turning them into shallow, superficial bad guys whom it later humiliates, because rich people are, you know, evil;
• An asthmatic lad with a butch big brother and a little too much gullibility when it comes to tall tales;
• Corey Feldman with some impressively feathered hair, a Prince "Purple Rain" T-shirt, a very classy Members Only jacket and a vulgar mouth that makes me suspect he probably wasn't featured in Lisa Simpson's "Harmless Boys Named Corey" magazine;
• A group of pirates who managed to rig the most impressive series of traps and tricks ever devised yet somehow never managed to figure out how to escape from a thin-walled cave;
• A brainy and poorly-coifed teenaged girl and a ditzy blonde cheerleading teenaged girl who would hate each other in real life but form a bond of womanhood through kissing boys 5 years their juniors;
• A fat Jewish kid who manages to be embody more repugnant anti-obesity bigotry than Fat Chicks in Party Hats ever dared to dream;
• An Asian kid who refers to himself in third-person and happens to invent all sorts of zany inventions (remember the Bubble Economy, when the Japanese could do no wrong? Me too); and
• Pepsi cases, Swenson's ice cream, Domino's Pizza, Baby Ruth candy bars and no shame whatsoever about hawking them.

The resulting concoction is terrible, yet oddly compelling - like a bacon-and-chocolate fondue, you're revulsed both emotionally and intellectually, yet you can't stop yourself from taking just a little more until suddenly you're finished with the whole thing. At least the Goonies isn't fattening, and you probably won't want to vomit afterwards (unless Chunk's confession about fake puke at the movie theatre really affects you), but you'll feel every bit as guilty for weeks afterwards.

Still, it could be worse: some of the more questionable scenes which had been restored in various reissues of the film (most notably the stupid, stupid dancing octopus scene) were removed and isolated safely in the vacuum chamber of the "Extra Footage" section for this DVD edition. Even so, The Goonies is anything but a great film, and it's probably a mistake to claim anything otherwise. Yet I cannot in good conscience bring myself to give the movie a poor rating. Thus I too am contributing to the spread of the film's Nostalgic contagion. To make matters worse, there's even talk of a sequel, to help spread the infestation to a new generation.

Don't let it happen to you, kids. Be sure to die before you turn twenty - it's the only way to be safe.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum...

The Goonies isn't exactly the pinnacle of creative achievement in the motion picture arts, but you'd be forgiven for thinking so after watching Cyndi Lauper's mortifyingly awful 2-part music video epic featuring two different mixes of the Goonies theme song. I like Cyndi and all, and this particular mid-80s electro pop funk confection is certainly an enjoyable tune, but the bizarre combination of 80s MTV fashion, pro wrestling superstars and budget cinematography being paraded about in a manner most shameless fuse together to create one of the most mind-numbingly terrible creations ever commited to celluloid.

Probably the only thing that needs to be said here to explain the absolute badness of this video is that it begins with an 80s WWF skit which reinterprets the plot of The Goonies via the 80s WWF's own brand of tacky apparel, bigoted xenophobia and tendency to move the camera entirely too close to loud overweight men screaming at one another. Which is to say, essentially like modern pro wrestling, but with more neon.

Still, mere language fails to describe how completely wrong this video is. Words like "execrable" and "soul-destroying" bubble to the top of my mind like hopeful bits of meat in a boiling stew, but none of them can express the scope of this video's wretchedness in much the same way that it's impossible to draw a full-scale picture of an elephant on a sheet of notebook paper. Things really get bad in the second half of the video when the camera lingers a little too long on the underaged cast of the movie manacled into bondage and Cyndi Lauper becomes victim of a gruesome tenctacle scene. Now I know why the original Goonies game came out in Japan only - this video must have achieved some sort of iconic status among certain unsavory creative types, inspiring 15 years' worth of obscene anime. By the time this 8 minute exercise in video torment ends with ill-advised rear shots of André the Giant wearing entirely too-short shorts, the whole tragic affair reaches a sort of Zen plateau of wrongness where the pain ceases and your mind is peacefully gripped by a tranquil desire to die.

Hopefully by way of apology for inflicting this upon us, Warner will allow Goonies DVD owners to download some of Cyndi's more tasteful work, such as the melancholy "Time After Time." Even the garish excesses of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" seem restrained and tasteful after this crime against humanity. Recommended for... no one, actually. I can't think of anyone I hate enough to force to suffer through this video.