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Dudes

1988, Movie, R, 89 mins

Dudes: Review

A modern-day western with punk-rock overtones, DUDES begins as three New York City punkers--Cryer, Roebuck (sporting a massive bleached-blond mohawk), and Flea--decide that they are fed up with the Big Apple and opt to give sunny Los Angeles a try. The trio sets out in Cryer's old Volkswagen bug and somewhere in the Southwest, while camping out among the bluffs and buttes in John Ford's beloved Monument Valley, is attacked by a band of vicious biker types led by Ving. After being robbed and tormented, the punkers try to escape the marauders, but Flea is caught and brutally murdered by Ving. Finding local law enforcement officials unsympathetic, Cryer and Roebuck, seething with anger and plagued by visions of a mythic cowboy on horseback, vow to take the law into their own hands and kill Ving. Director Spheeris almost pulls this off. Presented in a goofy, anything-goes manner, DUDES is a lot of fun at first but bogs down in a screenplay that relies on too many outrageous coincidences to keep the limited amount of action flowing. Spheeris pushes the spirit-of-the-West angle to the limit, wasting a great deal of screen time on the phantom cowboys and Indians, and the action scenes themselves also seem uninspired. The cast, however, does its best to make this silliness palatable. Ving, former leader of the now-defunct LA punk band Fear (which was featured in Spheeris's first film, the documentary THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION), makes a supremely evil villain, Flea is memorable as the doomed punker, and Roebuck (the hulking killer in RIVER'S EDGE) steals the film with all the best lines and lots of funny business. Cryer, unfortunately, isn't very convincing as the punker suddenly possessed by the "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" ethos and seems a bit lost. leave a comment