The T&A comedy had its theatrical moment in the early 80s, when Animal House and Porky’s kicked down the door and a flash flood of imitators followed like Revenge of the Nerds, Private School, Private Resort, Spring Break, Hot Dog… The Movie. The list is as long as a baby’s arm.
By the back half of the decade that wave had receded from multiplexes and washed up on video store shelves, where it kept quietly churning through the 90s with the likes of Bikini Carwash Company, Last Resort or Buford’s Beach Bunnies. Rentals for sleepovers and late nights when you had the TV to yourself.
Round Trip to Heaven was released sometime in 1992 and was produced by Saban Entertainment a year before they brought Power Rangers to American television. In fact co-writer Shuki Levy co-created the franchise and wrote the theme tune. Alan Roberts directed, a softcore circuit lifer who’d been at this since The Sexpert in ’72.
For the still uninitiated, two cousins borrow a Rolls Royce from the garage where one of them works, head to Palm Springs chasing a bikini contest, and discover too late there’s a briefcase of stolen cash in the trunk.
The cousins are Corey Feldman and Zach Galligan, reunited eight years after Gremlins, with Feldman playing a mechanic who moonlights as a party clown named Boingo, while Ray Sharkey plays the gangster chasing the money, summoning that coiled Wiseguy intensity – sadly just a year before he died. Julie McCullough plays her signature girl next door, not long removed from Growing Pains after Kirk Cameron, through the miracle of handheld bananas, found religion and got her written out. Because she posed for Playboy. In 1986.
That sound you heard on Sep 27, 1989 was a million teenage boys crying. Or maybe that was just me.
Round Trip to Heaven is the Gremlins reunion that somehow never gets mentioned. I caught it on cable around ’95, half-asleep and half hung-over, and spent years convinced I’d dreamed the whole thing.
-Pop