Welcome to the final B-Movie Enema review for 2023!

In 1986, the same year his production company, Brooksfilm, made the fantastic remake of The Fly, Mel Brooks executive produced this week’s movie that is getting the review treatment – Solarbabies. Talk about the ups and downs within a single year. The movie didn’t just have Brooks producing and backing the movie the whole way through, it also had a score from three-time Oscar-winning composer, Maurice Jarre. In front of the camera, you see young stars like Jami Gertz, Jason Patric, Adrian Pasdar, James LeGros, and Lukas Haas. There were also more seasoned actors like Charles Durning and Sara Douglas. The movie had a fairly decent $25 million budget, but it all fell flat. It only grossed $1.6 million at the box office. It got horrific reviews.

So how did this all go wrong?

As Mel Brooks explained on an episode of How Did This Get Made? one of the writers, Douglas Anthony Metrov, was inspired by “guerrilla filmmaking” that was employed by other filmmakers like Abel Ferrara. So he wrote about 30 pages about some kids in the future. The treatment got a little attention and it eventually was passed around until it landed at Brooksfilm. Brooks, in particular, was impressed with Metrov’s idea and a 12-minute slideshow that featured kids playing the parts of this story he created.

Initially, Metrov was going to direct the film when Brooks granted a $5 million budget. However, when friends and colleagues of Brooks suggested it needed a much larger budget to actually make it, it ballooned to that $25 million number. Metrov was taken out of the director’s chair because he didn’t have any experience with large budget movies. In came Alan Johnson. Johnson only directed two films – this and Brooks’ 1983 comedy To Be or Not to Be. Johnson’s true trade was that of a choreographer.

Okay, so you have a young cast of people who looked good but had yet to really hit it big (aside from Haas previously appearing in the excellent Witness the year before), you had the backing of Mel Brooks, and you had a director. Things seemed to be going well until the scheduled start of production. Shooting was delayed by unexpected rain. Then the cast and Johnson had so many arguments on set that Brooks had to go out to the set and basically order the cast to get back to work or be fired. Johnson poorly shot the film, so it required more money for special effects. Some of the footage didn’t make a great deal of sense. Everything was a mess on the production side of the movie.

Brooks would ultimately sink a lot of his own money into this film’s production and it required him to take out more loans and seek more funding from investors to complete the film. Eventually, it came time to find a distributor. Keep in mind, Brooksfilm was mostly a production company. It was not a studio of its own. Brooks would produce films and then seek distribution. Worried he couldn’t sell the idea like Metrov could sell it to him, he cut together a ten-minute trailer that was sort of meant to make the movie have a little bit of a Star Wars feel to it. One of the first places to get a shot at the movie was Paramount. At the time, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg were running the studio. Eisner liked what he saw, but Katzenberg said no.

Eventually, MGM came along to release the film. Maybe it was that trailer that got the job done as MGM was being run at the time by Alan Ladd, Jr. who ran 20th Century Fox when Lucas was making Star Wars. Ultimately, all those issues caught up with the movie and it failed, pretty hard. Brooks said that it ultimately lost him $9 million of his own money. Over the decades with cable television, VHS, and DVD, Brooks claims he miraculously recouped all his money and it broke even with its budget.

But let’s see for ourselves. I’m going to admit something, my dear readers. It would seem I would have seen this movie at some point over the years. I watched a lot of TV in the 80s and 90s. I also rented a lot of movies at the video store. I never saw Solarbabies. I don’t even know if I knew anything about it until maybe the last seven or eight years. This is a new experience for me and I’m not sure I’m gonna like it, but I’m game to give it a shot!

Knowing this is a Brooksfilm production and how the title SOLARBABIES flies toward the screen with heroic music just makes me think this is Spaceballs. Okay… now that I have that out of the way, let’s actually talk about how this movie opens. You see, we’re so far into the future, or whatever, that there’s a new calendar to count the year and time. We’re told that the year is 41. Something called the Eco Protectorate controls everything. More specifically, they control all the remaining water on the planet. Considering water is pretty dang important for life, that means the Protectorate controls life too (at least by the calculations of our narrator). We learn the person speaking is the Warden of Orphanage Camp 43. Children are brought to these types of camps early on to be indoctrinated to serve the system. The Warden, Charles Durning, is not a huge fan of his job, but, well, the system must be served.

The Warden is a bit of a romantic in some ways. He dreams of how the Earth used to be with oceans, green fields, etc. He wonders if it will ever be that way again. Then, this story gets weird.

The Warden says there were tales of legend of something that could save the world. You see, there’s this thing that fell from the heavens called Bodhi. It has powers or something that will “free the waters once more”. But here’s the problem… Already we had a situation where there is a system on a broken husk of a world, right? That world has been taken over by an organization that can rule everything just by having the means to control the most important resource on this planet – water. The system indoctrinates people to keep them controllable for this system they’ve created.

That’s enough for this movie. Period. This additional thing about a magical space alien orb thingy that fell from the sky a whole bunch of years ago is superfluous. It’s almost like this movie didn’t know if it wanted to be Mad Max or Star Wars. Considering this is a 93-minute movie, it’s really hard to pull off both of these things with a first-time writer and a director whose only credit prior to this was a Mel Brooks comedy poking fun at Shakespeare. It begins to mix metaphors and ideas in a way that feels fine on the surface, but as soon as Charles Durning tells us about all these things, we’re forced to just kind of shrug at the movie and hope that we can keep up and everything works out in the end.

The first of the “Solarbabies” that we meet is Lukas Haas playing Daniel. He’s got nifty rollerskates that have headlights on them. He uses that to navigate the orphanage’s grounds to go to a shack where he starts up something of a generator. There is one clever thing done here to give us some insight into Daniel. With the generator rumbling away, he takes off what appear to be headphones, but, as he does, the sound goes away. Daniel is deaf. Okay, I can get behind that.

Anyway, he turns on the lights to a big outdoor arena-like area. A bunch of kids rollerskate out into the arena wearing something akin to futuristic hockey gear. This is a game the kids play here at the camp. It’s like hockey and lacrosse with a bumpy/spikey ball, but on rollerskates because… well, 80s. There’s a dude watching from overhead that has something that looks like a fucking falcon. Why he is not immediately looked into because he apparently commands fucking falcons I cannot say, but he’s there.

Our Hockey Captain America dude on the left in the picture above is the leader of our good guys, Jason (Jason Patric). He’s challenged by guys in dark green (therefore eeeeevil) future hockey pads to a game. I’m hoping beyond hope that they have a bitchin’ name for this sport, like Spikeball or Hockeycross or Stickdick or something. I have a legitimate concern that they are not going to be naming this at all.

The orphanage cops come and bust up the game. The players scatter while the coppers shoot at them with lasers. I am only mildly shocked that the future cops are the shoot-first kind. The head dude of the cops is Grock. He also seemingly sponsors the bad team of Spikeball players, the Scorpions. He tells their leader, Gavial, that the Scorpions are an extension of him. If the Solarbabies defeat the Scorpions, he appears defeated.

Okay… wait. You’re telling me that this movie has this whole dystopian future thing with no water, this alien orb thing that will restore Earth to what it once was, AND there’s a Karate Kid-like scenario with a team of shitty kids going up against the underdog good kids? Is this movie able to support all these plots? Color me dubious.

I do wish there was more of that game, though. That looked rad. Sometimes those made-up types of sport things in a movie is some of the most imaginative things in it. Think about Quidditch in Harry Potter. There’s a lot of imaginative things in those movies. My favorite thing is Quidditch. There are rules and all sorts of history and rivalry and what have you. So much so that it has to be just as deeply thought out and constructed as anything else in the larger narrative.

Anyway… Daniel eluded the fuzz by rollerskating into a mineshaft. There, he accidentally causes a mine car to crash through a boarded-up passage. He goes in and finds the Bodhi, a glowing orb. Interestingly, as Daniel holds Bodhi, he starts to realize something interesting is happening. He can hear. Bodhi fixed Daniel’s ears.

The next day, Jason is rather concerned. Daniel is nowhere to be found. There is a little concern over him being captured during the raid the night before. Daniel is simply still in his little room. He’s hidden Bodhi in his footlocker. Later, Grock confronts the Warden about the Solarbabies being seemingly “allowed” to escape. The Warden says it’s good for morale. Grock says they need to be punished. He also thinks their name is totally gay and that should be changed to something much cooler like the Cock Rockets. (I don’t know exactly about that last thing. He didn’t like their name so I’m assuming a fascist police chief would want something that sounds like a rock-hard rod jutting from their pants.)

We get back to that one dude with the fuckin’ falcon the night before. He’s Darstar, played by Adrian Pasdar. He draws a symbol in the dirt. Everyone around him thinks this looks like something pretty cool. He calls to him two crows. I think that’s probably what he had the night before too. The Scorpions come over to kick at his crows and mess up his symbol in the dirt. Their leader, Gavial, has a thing for Terra. I’m guessing he thinks he can win her over to the bad side because she’s actually maybe the toughest talker of the Solarbabies, but she just threatens to swing a shovel at his crotch.

Terra, like the Warden, daydreams of a world drenched again in water. She has a book of poems. In this world, anything that is not straight, rewritten nonfiction is contraband. She reads a poem about a rainstorm forming to replenish the world. The rest of the team thinks she’s silly, but thunder rolls and rumbles outside. Lightning strikes the inside of their room and it begins to rain. It stops rather suddenly. Shortly after, they realize that Daniel can hear without his “electric ears”.

Daniel explains that Bodhi can hear everything. It fixed his ears. It heard Terra reading the poem and gave them a little bit of a rainstorm – in their dormitory. It basically knows what people want most and provides it. Even when Daniel is asleep, Bodhi can hear him. It’s got some sentience too as it likes to be held.

Jason says they need to keep everything secret. If people know there’s a weird magic orb, they’re gonna be assholes about it. That also means that Daniel needs to keep pretending to be deaf.

The kids are called to All-Skate at the local rink. While they skate around and have fun, the intercom feeds them propaganda. Gavial pushes Daniel to the floor and then calls over to Jason to get his attention while he goes over to kiss Terra. Jason says if he so much as breathes on her again, he’ll break his neck.

Later, Jason talks to Bodhi about not knowing where he came from or where he’s going. Bodhi shows him a vision to basically give him a purpose. He shows him images of eco coppers and rollerskating teams and then a whole bunch of water. The rest of the Solarbabies come into the room and he just kind of plays off the whole conversation he was having with the sentient glowing ball.

Soon, the Solarbabies realize that Bodhi likes playing. Tug picks it up with his Hockeycross stick and passes it over to Jason. They go out to the arena and play around with it. When Jason hits it like a baseball, they learn that Bodhi can even explode itself into a bunch of glitter and reconstitute itself. After a couple games, the Solarbabies realize that Bodhi has a way of sharing its power with them so they can connect with it and each other.

However, there is trouble afoot. Previously, Darstar saw the Solarbabies with Bodhi. He seems to not necessarily be as bad as the Scorpions, but he’s not really up to any good either. While the rest of the Solarbabies are in class, Darstar snuck into their room, took Bodhi, and escaped. Daniel, knowing that it happened, took off after Darstar.

Terra is scared for Daniel being on the outside. She wants the Solarbabies to go after him. They vote unanimously to try to find Daniel. Grock tells the Warden that when he captures them, the law dictates that he will sentence them to surgical alteration. I’m not sure what that exactly means. I assume it’s probably some form of lobotomy? Metron mentioned that would be what waits for them if they get captured, but they don’t explain what that meant or what it was. Considering the Protectorate seems to only turn people into cops or military people, I have to assume it’s something that compels them to be more obedient and better citizens of the Protectorate?

They are found by the eco coppers, and manage to jump a bridge with a huge portion missing by basically rollerskating so fucking fast that they are able to jump this 30-foot gap.

We catch up with Darstar wandering through the desert. He comes across a group of people called the Chicani. I think they are supposedly a group of Native American-like folks who live in the desert in teepees and have dreamcatchers and whatnot. Darstar is taken to an elder of this group to show off Bodhi. The elder says that Bodhi isn’t exactly alive, it has will. It uses people for its own ends. The elder says some say it comes from the stars. One of the tribesmen wants to sell Bodhi to the Protectorate. However, Grock’s forces storm the camp and destroy it. Gavian even kills Darstar’s owl.

Daniel arrives at the destroyed Chicani camp where the Solarbabies catch up with them. They realize Darstar came this way too because they find his dead owl. Out of compassion, Terra buries the bird while Darstar watches. Back at Orphanage Camp 43, the tribesman who wanted to sell the orb to the Protectorate is tortured for information. The torture device runs on will and perception meaning that Grock tells the person on the device what is happening to their body and they experience it even if it’s not actually doing it to them.

Grock surmises that Bodhi is really the Sphere of Longines. Which, I suppose, is just Bodhi with a different name? Anyway, he goes to Shandray, played by Sarah Douglas from Superman II. She might just have the tools needed to destroy the sphere. After all, get rid of the sphere, the Protectorate remains in charge of the world. I must also assume that Grock and Shandray see this as a path to greater power within the system.

The Solarbabies arrive in Tiretown. There, everyone has some form of cultural appropriation. Some of the white guys there wear turbans. The Solarbabies wear rice paddy hats. They find Darstar and retrieve Bodhi. The Solarbabies start to argue about what they should do. It’s clear going back to the orphanage is not good. However, staying in the desert doesn’t seem livable. Tiretown seems to not be near the top of the list for anyone. One thing that is definitely true, there’s a little tattoo on Terra’s hand of a green symbol. They saw a cave painting of a man with a medallion with the same symbol. When she was at a vendor in Tiretown, a couple guys spotted her tattoo and gave each other knowing looks.

Now, something really stupid happens here. The Protectorate raids Tiretown. Okay, I would expect this. Somewhere along the way, Daniel accidentally drops Bodhi. Jason, realizing how fucking awesome Bodhi is, tells Daniel to forget about it and keep moving. WHAT?!? You know this thing has powers. You’ve all experienced them. You know this thing has something planned for everyone on the planet. Just leave it? Jason might just be an idiot. But what’s even dumber, the bag with Bodhi in it falls directly onto Tug’s feet. He just kicks it out of the way and keeps moving.

I’m not kidding when I say I feel like this is one of THE dumbest things I’ve seen in a movie. I get that the final act needs to be set up here. I get that this second act needs to end with the Solarbabies at their lowest point, but come on, man! In what world, past, present, or dystopian future, is it impossible for you to bend over, grab a bag, and still be able to rollerskate away from the bad guys? It’s not like it’s way the fuck over there on the other side of Tiretown. It’s right there in front of Daniel and resting on the top of Tug’s feet. He would TRIP over it as soon as he began skating in the same direction that Jason was escaping with Daniel. What’s he do? He kicks it out of his way then takes off behind his leader.

That’s some dumb shit, movie.

Granted, Darstar picks up the bag with Bodhi, but he’s instantly captured by the Protectorate goons. That’s not necessarily a guarantee if the good guys actually grabbed Bodhi in the course of escaping. At least Daniel comes up with the most vomit-inducing way to escape. They find giant tires (which, is something Tiretown has plenty of), stuff themselves inside the tires, and each roll down a hill and away from Tiretown. I guess good job to that?

In the chaos, Terra was separated from the Solarbabies. So when they see Tiretown literally explode, they just assume that Terra was exploded as well. The next day, the Solarbabies are captured by a pair of bounty hunters. As they drive toward the orphanage, a lone rollerskater in white approaches and sprays them with water. This is to lure them into an ambush. The ambush is to free the Solarbabies.

That lone figure leading the bounty hunters to their doom is Terra.

Terra takes the Solarbabies to a town with water and trees growing despite the world mostly being a desert. It’s a place that exists in secret. It’s why the Protectorate has not conquered them. The leader’s name is Greentree, Terra’s long-lost father. His people are the Eco Warriors. They fought the E-Police and the Eco Protectorate for years. When they found a place to call home and stay hidden from the Protectorate, they called it a victory by way of survival.

Terra wants to stay with her people, but Jason is unsatisfied with this being the end of their journey away from the orphanage. She tells Jason that their reason for leaving was to find Daniel. Now he’s safe and everything is peachy keen. Jason says that Bodhi has greater plans for everything. Terra reveals that Bodhi’s been taken to the Aqua Bunker, the place where the Protectorate controls water, and they plan to destroy Bodhi. The Solarbabies leave to penetrate the bunker and retrieve Bodhi.

Once the Solarbabies get into the bunker, they find the captured Darstar and free him to help. They get into the control room where our bad guys are trying to destroy Bodhi with their torture-loving robot. Daniel gets Bodhi after the orb repairs itself. When Shandray tries to grab Bodhi from Daniel, it hurts her to the point that she falls back into the controls and electrocutes herself. Then, Grock tries to capture and hold Daniel, but, for some reason, the torture-loving robot gets a hold of him and kills him before Gavial can shoot and deactivate the torture-loving robot.

I’m not entirely sure this is how you do a movie. A torture-loving robot killed one bad guy and the other just kind of stumbles backwards into a situation in which she’ll be electrocuted. That’s kind of silly. I digress. For some reason this Aqua Bunker is about to explode. It’s mostly made of water. How is it going to explode? Well, it just releases a bunch of water pressure that destroys the facility and allows a bunch of water to pour through a giant hole in the facility.

The Solarbabies rejoice in their victory. The biggest victory is that water is now free for everyone again. After demonstrating its abilities to restore balance between the upper class and the lower class, Bodhi dissipates and floats away. At first, they figure Bodhi just dissolved into nothing. Jason says reveals it’s floating all around them. They witness Bodhi reconstitute itself and fly off into the stars. Bodhi did leave behind the glowy-hand, connecting energy thing with the Solarbabies.

If I’m being just a little bit charitable, I can say Solarbabies has concepts that do work. It doesn’t especially look cheap or anything, so it does have some decent production value. Tiretown is interesting. The orphanage is interesting. The Chicani village is interesting. The problem is that it doesn’t stay in any one place for very long. It does come across as being a movie that is missing… something.

The narrative is coherent. There’s a goddamn magical orb that can speak to the Solarbabies and give them some semblance of a mission to protect it and keep it. The Protectorate wants to destroy it. Simple stuff. However, we only get a small taste of the larger world outside the orphanage. You can’t just have people out in the wide-open desert. That doesn’t make for a very interesting narrative. So they need to go to different places and meet different types of people. But almost as soon as a place or a person is introduced, the movie has to keep moving. Perhaps if this concept was adapted into a television series, you’d have a chance to see the inner workings of Tiretown or have the Solarbabies be wooed by the idea of staying with Greentree’s people. It wouldn’t need to rush through things to fit a 90-minute narrative.

However, there’s another issue here with that larger world. We’re told the kids are taken from their parents very young to be indoctrinated by the Protectorate. They are then turned into productive members of society. At first, I thought they were all turned into cops or military types. No, some of the Solarbabies could be a cop, or, as is the case with Metron, would likely get a cushy science job, or do something at Tiretown, etc. Okay, that makes some sense to me. However, if they are possibly being sent to different Protectorate-controlled towns/villages/whatever, then the Solarbabies would HAVE to know there is more outside the orphanage than what they’ve been told to keep them in the orphanage, which would be nothing. There is a line directly tied to an inference that there is nothing out in the larger world and they are caught up in the wonder of the larger world.

So… That begs the question: What exactly is the Protectorate doing? It seems like they lost their own narrative and we lost the movie’s narrative along the way.

Solarbabies, again, is not without something interesting. If not interesting, it has ideas of something to explore. It just can’t with the confines of its own runtime and limited ability to do exploration because the concept of the story is from someone who wasn’t really a seasoned movie writer at the time. In terms of the cast? Well, I think they’re fine. I think they are all playing typical teenage characters from the mid-80s. I can’t ding it too hard for that. It’s almost there, but it just doesn’t work in the long run.

That does it for 2023, Enemaniacs! I think we did good work. We cross the 400 reviews threshold. We got past 50 episodes of B-Movie Enema: The Series! I did more Russ Meyer movies. I knocked some longtime targets off the list. We finished some series. I finally covered Space Mutiny. It’s been a good year.

2024 is going to be even better. In the year to come, we’ll get to review #450. I’ll be rolling out a new season of B-Movie Enema: The Series with 28 more episodes(!) starting in April. The new year starts next Friday as I do something I KNOW I’m going to regret. January 2024 is Steven Seagal Month at B-Movie Enema! Join me for the first turd of that crap caravan as I look at 2006’s Attack Force!

I will see everyone on the flip side and I hope everyone reading this has a happy and SAFE New Year!