Grab onto your joystick and jerk and jiggle away with the video game junkies of Greydon Clark’s JOYSTICKS, a 1980s R-rated sex comedy receiving its thirtieth anniversary release courtesy of Scorpion Releasing.

On his first day on the job at River City’s newly-opened video arcade, geeky virgin Eugene (Leif Green, GREASE 2) has his pants stolen by Lola (Kym Malin, WEIRD SCIENCE) and (Kim G. Michel), the groupies of studly arcade owner Jefferson Bailey (Scott McGinnis, WACKO). He also has run-ins with arcade junkie Dorfus (Jim Greenleaf, EVILSPEAK), as well as King Vidiot (Jonathan Gries, FRIGHT NIGHT PART 2) and his punk subjects. It’s not all fun and games at Jeff’s arcade, however, because wealthy Joseph Rutter (Joe Don Baker, THE LIVING DAYLIGHT) is trying to shut down the arcade when he discovers that his sixteen-year-old daughter Patsy (Corinne Bohrer, ZAPPED!) can’t stay away from the place. When Jeff and company prove too smart for Rutter’s lamebrain nephews Arnie (John Diehl, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) and Max (John Volstad, LEPRECHAUN), Rutter steps up his assault by appealing to the media and the mayor (Logan Ramsey, who had previously appeared opposite Baker in WALKING TALL) with charges of depravity and harm to minors (with a bought-off King Vidiot as his number one exhibit). When it all comes down to a video game challenge, and Rutter takes Dorfus out of the picture, Eugene will have to help Jeff face his inner demons and grab the joystick.

Although light on actual sex for an R-rated sex comedy, JOYSTICKS fully exploits the jiggly possibilities of tightly-clad and bare women suggestively jerking the video game joysticks (all to the tunes of Ray Knehnetsky, including a truly godawful yet catchy theme song). A game of strip arcade allows for more jiggling bare breasts in close-up, and Baker – who seems to be having a good time with his arms full of topless chicks – as Rutter adds some S&M accoutrement to joint in typically conservative prurient embellishment when he describes the unwholesome atmosphere of the arcade to the mayor’s panel (which starts with a MUSIC MAN “…there’s trouble in River City” homage). Greenleaf’s slovenly Dorkus – who the director admits is patterned after John Belushi’s ANIMAL HOUSE character – provides the bodily-function humor throughout with “The Dorfus Maneuver”, Rutter’s wife (cartoon voice actress Morgan Lofting) is, of course, a repressed nympho, and Bohrer’s “valley girl” is amusing yet often incomprehensible. Gries’ goes over-the-top King Vidiot (yet still manages to be overshadowed by Baker), but his beef with Jeff isn’t particularly well-delineated. Diehl and Volstad do the best they can with thin roles, but their work gets caught up in antics of the glut of bumbling sidekick characters on both sides (Clark also throws in a video-game-possessed monk and an extra doing a Curly-impression for no particular reason). The trauma that has prevented Jeff from playing video games is a bit lame, or at least lamely recollected (and I’m not sure whether that was intentional or not), and his training for the final challenge of course takes the form of a ROCKY-esque montage (not so much funny in its content as the fact that all of this is supposed to have taken place in fifteen minutes). Indeed, the film is so glutted with teen comedy and movie parody elements that getting Eugene laid almost becomes an afterthought (in fact, his central character falls by the wayside for much of the running time). Singer/actress Becky LeBeau (BIKINI DRIVE-IN) and Playboy Playmate Lynda Wiesmeier (EVIL TOWN) are among the arcade’s patrons.

JOYSTICKS was announced as a DVD release by Media Blasters as part of their Guilty Pleasures line in 2006, but that release was cancelled presumably due to rights issues. Liberation Entertainment put out a DVD the same year, and that one actually did make it to the streets before being pulled. Scorpion’s thirtieth anniversary dual-layer disc (the film was shot in the fall of 1982, so it’s technically the thirtieth anniversary) features an attractive, progressive, anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1) transfer is boldly colorful from the yellow credits lettering to the neon of the video games and the garish décor of the video arcade. The Dolby Digital 2.0 mono audio is clean and reasonably boisterous for a film of this budget. Director Greydon Clark goes solo for an audio commentary track and a video interview. Clark reveals that the original title was VIDEO MADNESS (which is still quoted in the dialogue), but he decided that JOYSTICK would be more suggestive; indeed, it proved too suggestive for distributor Jensen Farley (who distributed Clark’s previous film WACKO), so they compromised on the plural form (neither the film’s theme song or film’s dialogue are subtle about the title’s double meaning). Clark actually got permission to use the munching Pacman animated transition between scenes (which seems like it would cost more than film's budget nowadays). Clark also points out bit parts by collaborators Candy Castillo (ANGEL’S BRIGADE) and Michael Starita (executive producer of THE RETURN and WACKO), as well as the contributions of art director Donn Geer (SATAN’S CHEERLEADERS) and cinematographer Nicholas Von Sternberg Jr. (UNINVITED). Although Clark provides a lot of background information on the film, he could have used a moderator since there is an increasing amount of dead space in the track as it continues. The spaces are mostly brief since he points out each actor or acquired prop as it appears onscreen, but a moderator might have prompted him for additional anecdotes to fill in these bits while addressing some of the details he points out on his own.