No Surrender Cinema: The New Kids
Moving to a new town in the middle of your teen years can be a tough transition, especially when it’s due to both of your parents dying suddenly in a tragic accident. Now imagine that difficulty becoming magnified by advances of a slick psychopath and his band of trailer trash cretins! No Surrender Cinema heads down to sunny Florida to see what happens when high school life turns homicidal for a pair of siblings in The New Kids.
Loren (Shannon Presby, who played a school tough himself on a Diff’rent Strokes two-parter several years prior to this) and Abby (Lori Loughlin of Full House and RAD fame) are the teenaged children of Army hero “Mac” MacWilliams (played in a cameo by the legend himself, Tom Atkins). We get a glimpse of Mac’s fatherly ways during the opening credits, where he drags his children out of bed early in the morning for drills, and right off the bat we know that Loren and Abby haven’t been brought up to be pushovers. The bond between the MacWilliams kids and their parents is clearly a strong one, and one that is shattered almost as fast as The New Kids starts when Col. MacWilliams and his wife are killed in an accident while heading back from a ceremony where the Colonel received a Presidential Commendation. At their parents’ funeral, Loren and Abby are reunited with their estranged uncle Charlie, who offers the kids the opportunity to move in with him and their aunt down in Florida. Loren and Abby are on the next bus out, but when they arrive they see that things aren’t as glamorous as they may have hoped.
Dreams of sunny beaches and Disney are dashed when they realize they’re going to be stuck in the smallest of small towns, where their uncle is the owner of a gas station and a failing theme park called Santa’s Funland. Things seem to be going a bit better at school, where the kids have no problem making new friends (including a young Eric Stoltz as a boy with eyes for Abby)…that is until Eddie Dutra and his gang of goons lay eyes on Abby.
Dutra (James Spader) is bleached blonde and well dressed, a far cry from the folks he hangs out with, but is every bit as creepy. He and his band of inbreds decide that Abby will be the new target of their “affection”, meaning that Dutra bets one of his underlings, Gideon, as to which one will be the lucky guy to deflower her. Abby ends up having an unpleasant encounter with Dutra at the gas station, and then one in the school library that ends with Gideon hocking a loogie all over her computer screen. A few days later, Dutra approaches Abby again, and again doesn’t take the rejection too well. When he starts to curse her out, Loren stands up to him and tells him explicitly that he doesn’t like him. Dutra backs off, but to steal some wrestling terminology, we’ve now established a clear babyface/heel dynamic.
Abby and Loren do their best to settle in despite some disagreements over their uncle’s use of their inheritance; Abby thinks that Uncle Charlie might be taking advantage of the situation, while Loren considers it fair due to the fact that like it or not, this is their home now. All of that drama is merely background noise for the real matter at hand, that being that Dutra and his goon squad have decided to retaliate against the MacWilliams kids, first by vandalizing the property, then by keying Uncle Charlie’s prized Cadillac during a trip into town. That pisses off Loren enough for him to go vigilante on Dutra, but when he sneaks into Dutra’s house seeking revenge, the end result is rather homoerotic as opposed to action-packed. Having recently watched the documentary Scream, Queen! about actor Mark Patton’s experience filming A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, it made me wonder about the director’s reasoning for the way the scene in Dutra’s room was played out. I think it was to show that Loren was using a tactical strategy thanks to his military upbringing, but if that’s the case maybe Spader doing the scene in only a pair of blue Speedos may not have been the best choice.
Loren’s resilience to the bullies is admired by his new classmates, and helps him catch the eye of Karen, the sheriff’s daughter. What it does not do is deter Dutra and his boys from continuing to target Abby and Loren. One of the family’s rabbits is killed and tossed into the shower while Abby is washing up; Loren responds by beating the shit out of Dutra’s lackey Gideon in front of the whole school. This puts Loren on the receiving end of a beating in the boys room, and it’s enough to make Abby and Loren second guess coming to live with Uncle Charlie. However, the power of a MONTAGE~!, set to the opening theme and featuring flashbacks to when they would train with their father, pushes the kids (Loren especially) to persevere. Everything’s all hunky dory until the night of the school dance, when Dutra and co. kidnap Abby and attempt to gang rape her. Abby is able to evade her captors and flees on foot back to Santa’s Funland, only to find that Dutra, the goons, and their rabid pitbull have beaten her to it and now have Uncle Charlie captive. Dutra tries to rape Abby again only to be thwarted by Uncle Charlie, and the arrival of Loren onto the fairgrounds kicks off a battle that will see the theme park become the final resting place for a number of the remaining characters.
The New Kids is the perfect blend of everything that was clicking in Hollywood at the time of its release in 1985. You’ve got elements of horror (it helps when the director is Sean S. Cunningham, the man who brought us the Friday The 13th franchise), action, and teen melodrama and the film strikes a perfect balance to deliver some solid entertainment. Spader, who starred as a high school kid that went up against a crazed gang leader in Tuff Turf (which was released exactly one week prior to The New Kids) is especially good as Dutra, a completely vile villain complemented by Spader’s wiry figure. People aren’t afraid of him because he’s big and tough, they’re afraid of him because he’s 100% psycho, and that’s why he never travels without his hillbilly muscle. Although he’d end up with a career full of memorable villainous roles, Spader deserves all the credit for making Dutra into a presence as intimidating as Jason or Freddy just by being a remorseless scumbag.
The other aspect of The New Kids that I enjoyed was that Loren and Abby are never particularly scared, and keep pressing on even when a normal person might opt to distance themselves. Loren especially never waivers despite being on the physical end of the punishment, and it’s he who manages to MacGyver the fun park into a death trap once he realizes what’s going on. A rather cool fact about Shannon Presby, who played Loren, is that he left acting almost immediately after his star turn here, and is currently the Deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles! That’s right, he’s getting the big bucks to take down bad guys for a living! Colonel Mac Williams would be so proud!
I had always been a fan of The New Kids in my younger years, but I’ve really gained a better appreciation of it after a few rewatches in the past 5 or so years. This is another one of those films that I’d put in the “underrated/overlooked” category that so many films I like seem to fall into. It felt very similar to Bullies (a Canadian thriller that I reviewed here years back) in a lot of ways, but as much as I enjoyed Bullies this film is far superior. Though I’ve had this on a burned DVD for as long as I can remember, I was thrilled to find the Mill Creek Blu-ray (complete with 80’s VHS slipcase) during one of my Dollar Tree DVD runs a couple of years ago. I’ve probably watched it once or twice a year ever since, and every time I do I’m reminded as to why I enjoy it so much.
In order for you to enjoy The New Kids, you can currently find it streaming in full on YouTube, or you can purchase a copy of the aforementioned Blu-ray (trust me, it’s worth it). It also tends to pop up on Tubi from time to time if streaming is your thing. All I can say is this one gets the highest recommendation from me, so I encourage you to watch it however you prefer to watch it. The New Kids is going to be 40 years old next year, so I’m hoping this look back at it will help it get the love that it’s deserved all along.
