Review: The New Kids
Blu-ray: The New Kids (1985)
Directed by Wes Craven’s mate and horror producer/director/writer Sean S. Cunningham, The New Kids is a quintessentially 80’s film.
When Abby (Lori Loughlin) and Loren McWilliams (Shannon Presby) parents (a very brief appearance fromTom Atkins) are killed in an accident, they are forced to move in with their uncle who runs a petrol station and ..sort of fun fair… in a small town in Florida.
Now Loren and Abby have been trained by their dad (who was in the military – ah yes, you know where this is going) to be superfit, to fight, and most of all to be good and supremely confident. They are real goody goodies and don’t have any trouble in becoming the most popular kids in their new school.
Beautiful Abby who looks like a bigger eyebrowed Laura Brannigan and Loren who is definitely in his early 30s and should have left high school years before, make friends and are the most popular kids on campus immediately. But oh dear, they get noticed….enter the bad ‘kids’ who are also too old to be in school. But cast that aside for the leader of the bad kids is Dutra (awesome bad guy name) a peroxide and sexy as fuck James Spader, he’s really evil, he stares, and feels genuinely threatening. His performance, superior acting ability and palpable ‘rapeiness’, give the scenes he appears in a sense of genuine threat.
Well you can guess the plot. Dutra hates Loren but wants to ‘date’ (rape) Abbey, lots of fighting and chasing about, some animal torture and a big finish involving death by petrol station.
HUGELY enjoyable nonsense and a film I have not had the pleasure of seeing before. Worth buying just to see ‘The Spader’, who in all truth looks like he just walked straight out of Streets of Fire, which is high praise indeed.
Brand New Extras
- Interview with director Sean S. Cunningham
- Interview with writer Stephen Gyllenhaal
- Commentary with film critics Sean Hogan and Jasper Sharp
- Limited edition booklet: Includes ‘80s Gang Violence Movies and The New Kids by Jon Towlson and Pushing the Envelope: Sean Cunningham by Barry Forshaw
The New Kids is released on 29th June 2020.
Review by Tina from a disc kindly supplied by 101 Films.
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