Never Too Young To Die



A man stands on top of a building while various men and women with appalling hair cuts and badly torn clothes chant at him. The man is somewhat effeminate in both look and manner, and tells these chanting hoards of his plan to pollute a water supply with radioactive waste. I try and think about where I’ve seen that guy before. Something is missing from his plan however, the final information he needs is on a computer disc that has strangely gone missing. Something in the back of my mind starts to niggle me about that guy. A prisoner is brought forth and the man, no wait, hermaphrodite known as Velvet von Ragner interrogates her as to the whereabouts of the disc. She won’t talk however, and Ragner is enraged when he see the symbol on her earring, belonging to none other than the brilliant secret agent Drew Stargrove! Furious, and egged on by his minions, Ragner puts and end to the woman with ‘The Finger’. As the opening credits role, it finally clicks.

Holy shit! That was Gene Simmons!

The credits show our star, the son of the formerly mentioned Drew Stargrove, only his son has an even better Bad Movie Name, LANCE STARGROVE! All you need to do is hear that name you know this kid is different! Lance (John Stamos), like all heroic sporty types in movies, is friends with a nerd called Cliff who comes up with cool inventions like a flamethrower-type weapon, and bugging devices secreted in chewing gum. Cliff is incredibly annoying too, and you’ll be wishing Lance would be more like a REAL sporty type and beat the crap out of him instead. Lance is a gymnast and is preparing for a local gymnastics event at his college and hoping that this father, who is never there for his son for some reason (hmm……..) will be there to see him, perhaps finding encouragement from the care package his dad had sent to his dorm. I’d say he won’t be there however, as Drew Stargrove (holy shit! George Lazenby!!!!) is involved in a secret operation to infiltrate Velvet Von Ragner’s lair! Unfortunately for Drew, after being double-crossed by one of his fellow agents and then being hopelessly outnumbered by Ragner’s men, he falls to a shotgun blast from the dreaded multi-sexed one himself! As daddy is killed, Lance screws up his gymnastic display, clearly showing the breaking of the deep subconscious bond between father and son or something.

Lance discovers he was left a farm by his father, so he heads out on his motorcycle to take a look, and discovers not only the rather lovely Danja Deering, but also two of Ragner’s thugs! A battle ensues in a stable with one thug escaping while the other gets shot, and is then a little too close to a naked flame and a big box labelled ‘grenades’. Lance has no idea what the hell is going on and Danja is not forthcoming with information, so he follows her to a weird biker bar where Ragner is performing, looking like the inspiration for Hedwig and the Angry Inch only far, far more terrifying. At this point three questions sprang to mind:
1. Lance Stargrove turns up at the bar, which is populated with lots of scruffy and potentially violent people on nasty customised bikes, and he’s on a crappy-looking Japanese dirk bike, and is wearing one of those terrible 80’s suits that guys always wear in movies when they go to clubs. How the hell does Lance not get the holy hell beaten out of him?
2. Ragner appears on stage on his own, totally unarmed, and with no clear signs of protection or bodyguards, why didn’t that just go shoot the bastard? It would have saved a whole lot of time.
3. Why the hell would bikers be interested in watching Gene Simmons dressed as a woman anyway?
Anyway, Danja gets away from Lance again, but not before he’s planted a tracking device on her Corvette. Lance goes to meet Ragner in order to plant a bug in his dressing room, though its clear that Ragner knows who he is, finding the bug soon after and flushing it down the toilet. After a near catastrophe with an exploding motor cycle, he borrows one from Cliff and goes after Danja. This is pretty much where any logic this film might have had goes totally out of the window.

Cliff is furiously chasing Danja in her Corvette, when two of Ragner’s thugs appear and attack our hero with axes! Danja saves the clueless Lance once again, but they are soon ambushed by even more of Ragner’s minions, Danja is caught in a net and taken away. Lance regains consciousness back at his dad’s farm with two of his thugs hounding him to reveal the whereabouts of the disc (and if you can’t work out where the disc is by now you should be ashamed). The henchmen (holy shit! That’s Bobby Sixkiller from TV’s Renegade!) start throwing Lance around the house until enough is enough, and Lance invokes the heroic spirit of the Stargrove name, giving both men a good thrashing and sending them running back to their boss empty-handed. This doesn’t sit at all well with Ragner, as he really needed the disc so that his evil boffin sidekick (okay this is getting ridiculous now, HOLY SHIT THAT’S ROBERT ENGLUND!) could release the radioactive waste into the water supply. Quite frankly, it would serve the stupid town right if they did get poisoned, seeing as they have a reservoir on one side and seemingly toxic waste right on the other side. I mean that’s just asking for trouble. Lance and Cliff must rescue Danja, then go stop Ragner before he can regain the disc and kill the idiots in the city below!

I was expecting serious hurting with this movie, I really was. I’d deliberately avoided reading much about it so I would be fresh and unprepared by the horror which was to unfold before me. However, I had a blast watching this movie! It was so inane, so utterly devoid of a narrative, and Gene Simmons was so utterly ridiculous, I couldn’t help but just sit back and let it all sweep over me like some deranged tidal wave of insanity. Quite honestly, Gene Simmons as an evil hermaphrodite kept me watching, he was absolutely fantastic in what he obviously knew was a ludicrous role. He looks like a mutant Cher from an alternate reality, but he still manages to get in the usual Simmons big tongue and eye rolling trademarks, and he overacts to his heart’s content. Possibly more entertaining than he had any right to be, but lots of fun nevertheless. Former pop singer and Prince protégé Vanity played Danja Deering, and while she’s not the greatest of actresses, she’s extremely easy on the eye and looks to be having a lot of fun, even if she did have to kiss John Stamos. Its also fun for the movie buff looking for all the minor stars that crop up, I counted George Lazenby, Richmond Branscombe (Bobby Sixkiller), and Robert Englund making wacky cameos, did I miss anybody?

Its not all clear sailing however. Gene Simmons trying to French kiss John Stamos is an image I may never be able to get out of my mind, it was truly horrible and there’s no way poor Gene should have had to do it. There was also the aforementioned complete lack of logic involved, such as Lance’s transformation from clueless college kid to smarmy super spy. Their explanation for said transformation consisted of “he’s a Stargrove!” which is pretty much on par with Jet Jaguar being able to grow to 60 feet because he ‘reprogrammed himself’. There are also scenes that seem rushed together to further the plot, and you start to wonder if Gene Simmons dressed in gold and pink panties making pelvic thrusts at bikers had just made you pass out and miss some of the movie. The biggest problem with this movie though is John Stamos, who absolutely stinks. John is seemingly bereft of any sort of acting range, and just smarms his way through the movie and is irritating in the extreme, AND he got to get it on with Danja! Also, whoever wrote this thing didn’t seem to be able to decide what kind of movie it is. You see on the one hand it sounds like a kids movie – the teen son of a super spy must find his inner courage and live up to the legacy of his father, saving the day from the nasty adults. However on the other hand we have Gene Simmons playing Velvet von Ragner the shemale, who prances through the movie like a big multi-sexual glam rock nightmare and tries to kiss our hero whenever he gets the chance. You show that to your kids and they’ll be in and out of therapy for the rest of their miserable lives.

So what does that make the film? Must be a movie for big kids like myself who don’t mind the bizarre sexual ambiguity of the large bass player who stars in it. This movie is a great deal of fun, though I’m quite happy to give John Stamos ‘The Finger’.