Lost Angels (1989)

**

Adam Horovitz aka King Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys stars as a bratty Los Angeles teen rebelling against any and everything in his path. Tim Doolan is the young man’s name and each of his unloving mother, his absent father, his neanderthal half-brother, his lackadaisical girlfriend, and his wannabe vato friends are blatant idiots. As abundantly dumb as any of them, Tim gets tricked into admitting himself to a psychiatric ward upon being released from juvenile hall. Next thing he knows, he’s being forcibly strapped down to a bed by a team of psycho ward bouncers who inject him with get-right juice.

When Tim wakes up, none other than Donald Sutherland is there to persuade him to become a more functional junior member of society. It’s serious business, yet the whole time you can’t help thinking that suddenly Mike D and MCA are going to break through the doors to bust Ad Rock out of there. It’s actually kinda difficult as a fan of the Beasties to watch dude acting like such a kook, hanging out with blockheads, getting the shaft handed to him left and right. Horovitz’s acting is flimsy at best. You watch and you genuinely want him to pull it off, but he never fully succeeds at not having you think he’s going to start rhyming (and stealing) at any given moment.

Worse than that, there’s a sad girl in the hospital courtyard with Tim and the other troubled teens who smears her own poop on her stripped-naked body not just once during the course of the film, but twice. Evidently the makers of Lost Angels didn’t think that a single smeared poop scene would be enough. That should tell you all you need to know about the movie, in that it’s a frenzied spectacle that’s hard to look away from, no matter how much you know it to be a stinker.