Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #152 Marine Issue (1987)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

As you are undoubtedly aware, I am a little behind in writing about Kitaen’s filmography. I try to write about one Kitaen movie and Gayheart movie a month but I have not written about Kitaen’s cinematic oeuvre since an October 14th entry on Witchboard. 

Needless to say, this lapse has NOT gone unnoticed. I’m being doxxed pretty hardcore by crazed Tawny Kitaen super-fans apoplectic that I’ve seemingly abandoned my sacred quest to watch and write about every movie the disgraced video vixen has made. 

I am, frankly, tired of people threatening my family because I’ve gone two whole months between Kitaen movies, particularly since I have what seems to me at least a very valid reason for falling behind.

The 1987 thriller Marine Issue, AKA Instant Justice, the next movie on my list for Kitaen, is not available through streaming in anywhere. It’s not available on DVD or Blu-Ray either, no doubt due to an overwhelming lack of interest in this title in particular and Kitaen’s film career in general. 

So in order to watch and write about Marine Issue I needed to go to the somewhat elaborate step of spending eighty-three dollars on a 2002 thirteen inch Magnavox TV/VCR combo so that I could watch Marine Issue and continue my leisurely ramble through Kitaen’s work. 

Getting serious Maniac Cop vibes here.

Writing about Kitaen and Gayheart’s movies and TV projects for the same much appreciated, exceedingly generous patron was a weird, random and fascinatingly obscure endeavor to begin with. Watching one of these stinkers on antiquated technology I hadn’t  used in decades made it even more ingratiatingly bizarre. 

It’s not encouraging that my Marine Issue viewing experience peaked before the movie even began. That’s because the aggressively undistinguished Michael Pare vehicle is preceded by trailers for two infinitely more memorable action movies: the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling camp treasure Over the Top and the seminal mismatched buddy cop classic Lethal Weapon. 

Oh, but I wish my assignment was to watch either of those movies rather than a low-budget bloodbath so generic it might as well come in a brown paper bag marked “Action Movie!”

Marine Issue was an early project for Michael Pare, who made an indelible mark on cult film with three of his earliest movies: the 1983 rock and roll melodrama Eddie & the Cruisers, Walter Hill and Jim Steinman’s 1984 rock and roll action melodrama Streets of Fire and finally the 1984 time-travel science fiction epic The Philadelphia Experiment. 

All three were heavily hyped and found sizable, appreciative cults on home video and cable television. Eddie and the Cruisers and The Philadelphia Experiment even spawned sequels. 

Each of Pare’s big star-making vehicles eventually found audiences yet individually and collectively they failed to make Pare a star, though it did give him enough cultural cachet to function as a mascot in the movies of Uwe Boll, who sort of adopted him as a good luck charm in a career characterized by alternating currents of great and terrible luck. 

Pare’s wooden performance in Marine Issue suggests that the reason Pare failed to become a star is because, as an action hero he fucking sucks. Pare combines the worst of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and Sylvester Stallone as Sgt. Scott Youngblood. 

Like Dirty Harry, Pare’s hard-ass Marine is a glowering sociopath who kills without remorse. Like Stallone, delivering dialogue comes so unnaturally to Pare that it seems physically painful for him to speak words in an affectless monotone. 

So much violence! So much hair!

Marine Issue opens with Sgt. Youngblood in his element, running alongside an important diplomat he’s protecting. When our stone-faced hero succeeds in preventing an assassination he’s rewarded with a Marine issue gun that one of his Marine buddies sneaks into his luggage as a practical joke before the personality-free officer goes to Madrid to look for the degenerates who murdered his party girl younger sister Kim (Lynda Bridges). 

In Spain, Kim has fallen in with the wrong crowd, associating with the kind of no goodniks who shove your face into big piles of cocaine if they think you’re not behaving in appropriately debauched fashion. 

In a deeply cliched quest for vengeance, the revenge-crazed Marine hits the streets in search of the men responsible for his younger sister’s brutal demise: Patrick Bateman-style yuppie scum Dutch (Scott Del Amo) and kingpin Silke (boxer Eddie Avoth).

This is how we did a “screen shot” back in the old days.

He’s aided in his quest by a pair of expatriate Americans: photographer Jake (Peter Crook) and sex worker Virginia (Kitaen), who knew Kim and is part of the seedy, sordid underworld responsible for her death. 

Marine Issue was marketed as a Pare/Kitaen vehicle, which is not entirely, or even remotely accurate. Then again, its various video boxes also pitched as an exciting movie audiences might enjoy, which is even more inaccurate. 

Kitaen only really figures prominently in the third act, although she’s introduced early on as a woman who would be breathtakingly beautiful if it were not for her hair. Kitaen will always be synonymous with hair metal but that’s no excuse for her character’s giant tower of helmet hair and weird little rat tale. 

Kitaen is a famously sexy woman, something the film goes out of its way to conceal by giving her the worst hairstyle in the world and costumes like a shapeless peach dress that goes all the way down to her ankles. 

Hair so big you can’t even keep it in frame!

Late in the third act Sgt. Youngblood stops scowling and killing anonymous heavies just long enough to make out with a fully clothed Kitaen in a shower. It’s not a sexy scene by any stretch of the imagination and Kitaen’s role in movies like this is pretty much just to be sexy. But the water does cause Kitaen’s hair helmet to dissolve into something less distractingly ugly, which I certainly appreciated. 

Like Kitaen, Spain is beautiful but you would never know it from the way it is filmed here. The filmmakers inexplicably choose to avoid any gorgeous scenery in favor of shooting the movie overwhelmingly in grungy bars and empty streets at night.

Nothing in Marine Issue is remotely convincing with the exception of a supporting performance by the great Charles Napier as a higher-up in the Marines cursed and blessed to have to deal with a Marine who plays by his own rules but also, somewhat perplexingly, also goes out of his way to also follow the stringent rules of the Marines and the American military. 

He has fun!

Napier lends his usual gravity and conviction to a thankless role that’s nevertheless the film’s sole redeeming facet. It felt weird watching Marine Issue on video but it felt appropriate as well. 

This did not deserve to make the leap to DVD or Blu-Ray. It does not merit being licensed to Amazon or shown for free on Youtube. It deserves to live and die on an outdated format like VHS.

I have seldom, if ever, worked harder to see less of a movie but I am glad that I now possess the awesome power of the video cassette recorder. 

Will it be a game-changer for this site and my career? God I hope so, because I DESPERATELY need things to improve or I’ll end up like Kitaen and Pare, wondering what in the hell happened to a career that once radiated such promise. 

I already feel that way, but also like Pare and Kitaen I hopefully have an Elvis 68 Special-level comeback lurking just around the corner that will give meaning and purpose to all those years spent wandering in a professional wilderness.

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