In the Netflix documentary about Charlie Sheen, there’s little mention that I can recollect of his 1985 movie The Boys Next Door. This was his first starring role in a feature film. His role in Red Dawn I would say is more of an ensemble.
Here he plays Bo Richards, your typical ne’er do well 18-year-old who just graduated from high school with not much of a future in front of him except for a job at the local factory. Even though he comes from a typical suburban home, Bo and his friend, Roy Alston (Maxwell Caulfield), are the outcast of their high school but you get the sense it’s one of those communities in California where the rich and wealthy are catered to and everyone else is forgotten.
Bo is given $200 from his grandparents for graduating. After crashing a graduation party with the “cool kids,” Bo and Roy take an impromptu trip to Los Angeles to spend the weekend before they have to take on real jobs. But their trip soon turns violent when they stop to gas up and Bo makes a simple mistake giving the clerk $2 instead of $6. Feeling the clerk, Shakir (Kurt Christian), who is of Middle-Eastern ancestry is trying to rip them off, Roy attacks him with a tire iron. Bo quickly grabs some cash and candy as Roy beats Shakir within an inch of his life.
The attack alerts Bo and Roy to the attention of local police as Dets. Ed Hanley (Hank Garrett) and the younger Mark Woods (Christopher McDonald) investigate it. Their actions soon get more malicious as they are in Venice Beach and Roy throws an empty beer bottle which hits an elderly woman on the head.
But things turn deadly when the two boys visit an all-male gay bar by mistake and get upset over the other patrons being attracted to them. Still, they manage to to take home a gay man, Chris (Paul C. Dancer), who seems attracted to Roy. This movie was written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, who would go on to work on The X-Files, and it’s directed by Penelope Spheeris who had directed The Decline of Western Civilization which was about the L.A. Punk Scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She handles the material with more resolve than a man director would.
I’m not saying that it’s not very violent. The movie had to go through many cuts to get an R rating and yet movies like Scarface and Rambo: First Blood Part II are more graphic in their violence. I think Spheeris, who would go on to direct comedies like Wayne’s World, in the 1990s, understands there is an odd relationship between Roy and Bo. I wouldn’t say they’re gay but they seem to have a closeness where they can reach each other’s minds.
We briefly see that Roy lives in a trailer with his father, who doesn’t care much about him, and drives a Plymouth Road Runner. He wears a black T-shirt and blue jeans looking like a greaser from a bygone era. Incidentally, he had appeared in Grease 2 with McDonald a few years earlier. I think Roy is frightened that he’s growing up and knows his friendship with Bo isn’t going to be the same again.
There’s a scene in which it appears that Roy has a hard time trying to read a note which implies he was probably just moved along through the school system. Bo seems to be smarter as he is admiring a computer at Chris’ home. Hey, it was 1985 and people were just starting to get them in their homes. Roy’s anger is lashing out realizing that he knows Bo will probably have a better marriage and family than him and even a better job.
The crazy part is that Bo is still ignorant in his own right that he thinks after all they’ve done, they can just go back to their home town even though their actions have police looking for them everywhere. The gullibility of Bo thinking this is just some little hell-raising that everyone will forget about shows how our society even 40-50 years was leading some people on to the belief they can get away with it just because they’re kids. The same “boys will be boys” mentality is still used today with grown men in their 20s, or even their 30s, are arrested for sexual assault or domestic violence.
As for Roy, I think he was just a ticking timebomb ready to explode. The movie opens with information on real-life serial killers. There is some inclination that Bo might have been able to lead a somewhat normal suburban life if he hadn’t befriended Roy. But as in most serial killers duos, there’s always a dominant and a submissive. When Bo catches the eye of an older woman, Angie Baker (Patti D’Arbanvile), Roy gets jealous and there result isn’t pleasant.
I wonder if Bret Easton Ellis watched this before he began to work on his controversial novel American Psycho. The characters in that book seem to be obsessed with consumerism and materialism that it’s caused the protagonist Patrick Bateman to become a serial killer or quite possibility fantasize about one. Roy and Patrick seem to be from the same mold. They’re stuck in a world they don’t know how to get out nor really want to leave because they’ll be out of their comfort zone.
Roy doesn’t like the community he grew up in but when he tours L.A., he grows tired of it too very easily. Bo seems to continue to go along until it’s too late and he realizes only one way to stop it all. There’s a similarity between Bo and Kit Carruthers, the character played by Sheen’s father, Martin, in Badlands. They’re both backed into a world of crime based on a set of circumstances they could’ve avoided if they had grown up in a different society.
Unfortunately the movie went mostly unnoticed when it was released 40 years ago. This is because it was released through New World Pictures during a difficult financial time. Sheen would go on to see his stardom rise over the next few years with Platoon, Lucas and Wall Street as well as his brief memorable role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 