Buzz Drainpipe Reviews: JULY JOYRIDE at Maverick City Theater

Mall Rats, Space Cadets & Suburban Freak Signals, or, Four Films in Search of a Quarter Slot

By Buzz Drainpipe
Filed from the sticky aisle between adolescence and prophecy 🕹️📡

I arrived at Maverick City Theater at 6:19 PM, which is to say early enough to see the lobby before it had fully decided what decade it belonged to. This is important. A lobby before doors is a stage before the actors come out, a kitchen before the knives start chopping, a church before the parishioners bring in their private weather.

The carpet had that strange galaxy pattern all aging theaters seem to grow naturally, as though spilled cola and foot traffic eventually evolve into astronomy. Near the concession stand, someone had set up three arcade cabinets, two of which worked and one of which had achieved a higher spiritual plane by refusing all inputs. The staff had placed a handwritten sign on it: OUT OF ORDER, BUT STILL LOVED. That was the evening’s first perfect review.

Above us, the marquee screamed in pink and yellow lightning:

JULY JOYRIDE
Mall Rats, Space Cadets & Suburban Freak Signals

A Gideon Void Repertory Event.

That phrase, “repertory event,” can mean many things. Sometimes it means a cleanly curated series with historical notes and polite applause. Sometimes it means a programmer found a theme and built a careful bridge across cinema history. In this case, it meant someone had driven a stolen golf cart through the ruins of the American mall, crashed it into an arcade, discovered a wormhole behind the change machine, and called it programming.

The lineup was ridiculous. It was also correct.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure at 7.
O.C. and Stiggs at 9.
The Last Starfighter at 11.
Joysticks at 12:45.

A softer curator would have made the night too neat. A coward would have paired Bill & Ted with more friendly goofball cinema, then tucked everyone into bed before the edges got sticky. A scholar with a bad tie might have placed The Last Starfighter in a symposium about early digital effects and youth fantasy. A grindhouse gremlin would have simply run Joysticks at midnight and called it a day.

Gideon Void did something better. He built a crooked little antenna tower out of films that all understand the same secret: adolescence is not a life stage. It is a pirate radio frequency. You either tune into it or you spend the rest of your life calling the cops on the sound.

7:00 PM: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

The evening began with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a movie so sweet-natured it feels less written than remembered by a golden retriever who once passed freshman history by accident. I mean that as praise, luminous praise, praise wearing sunglasses indoors.

There is an easy mistake people make with Bill & Ted. They treat it as a dumb comedy that accidentally became wise. Wrong. It is wise because it understands dumbness as a social technology. Bill and Ted are not stupid in the soul. They are open. Their minds are not empty rooms, they are unlocked garages. Strange visitors can enter. Napoleon can wander in. Socrates can get dragged to the mall. Joan of Arc can discover aerobics. The whole film is built around the idea that history is not a museum but a sleepover where everyone brought the wrong clothes.

Watching it with a theater crowd in 2026 produced an interesting ripple. The movie’s optimism no longer feels naive. It feels almost radical, a bright cassette tape hurled through a grim little algorithmic window. “Be excellent to each other” has become such a dorm-room phrase that one forgets how cleanly it lands inside the movie itself. It is not branding there. It is an ethic. It is the sacred rule of two boys who have no power except their refusal to become cruel.

And cruelty matters on this bill. It stalks the next film. It waits in the parking lot revving its engine.

But before that, Bill & Ted gave us mall culture not as commerce, but as cosmology. The mall in this movie is a democratic cathedral of nonsense. Historical figures roam through retail architecture, not to cheapen history, but to reveal that history was always made of human beings who would absolutely lose their minds in a sporting goods store. This is a film where the past is not dead, just under-socialized.

By the end, the room was warm. Not sentimental, exactly. Charged. The first film had opened the channel.

Then the vintage trailers ran, and the night began to shed its first skin.

9:00 PM: O.C. and Stiggs

Putting O.C. and Stiggs after Bill & Ted is the programming equivalent of handing someone a snow cone, then pushing them into a swimming pool full of roofing nails.

I admire the decision tremendously.

Here is the thing about O.C. and Stiggs: it is not lovable in the normal sense. It is not a rescued puppy. It is a raccoon in a yacht club. It has teeth. It has pockets full of fireworks. It knows where your parents hide the liquor. It does not want to be rehabilitated by tasteful appreciation.

Robert Altman, wandering into teen comedy territory, did not make a teen comedy so much as a hostile weather system wearing one. The movie is a prank call stretched to feature length, except the prank call is coming from inside the country club, inside the suburb, inside the family unit, inside the skull of a culture that has confused prosperity with virtue.

After the generous cosmic sweetness of Bill & Ted, O.C. and Stiggs felt like a corrective toxin. Bill and Ted move through the world with radical friendliness. O.C. and Stiggs move through the world like antibodies attacking a fake civilization. Their target is not adulthood exactly, but a particular adult lie: the polished suburban performance of decency that requires constant little acts of spiritual rot to maintain.

The audience did not laugh at every joke. Good. Some films should not behave like vending machines. Some laughs should arrive late, wearing work boots. There were moments when the room became unsure whether it was watching comedy, satire, sabotage, or a home movie made by the worst boys in the neighborhood after discovering class warfare and beer on the same afternoon.

That uncertainty is the film’s engine.

The best parts of O.C. and Stiggs feel almost found, as if Altman left the camera running while American adolescence escaped containment. It is messy in the way a garage is messy, not because no one cares, but because every object contains a previous unfinished idea. You can feel a whole culture of teen rebellion, magazine vulgarity, anti-Reagan static, National Lampoon fumes, and Altman’s own distrust of clean surfaces colliding in real time.

On this bill, the film played like the ugly cousin of Bill & Ted. Both films are about young men who reject the world handed to them. But Bill and Ted reject it by imagining a kinder future. O.C. and Stiggs reject it by throwing a brick through the present.

Two routes out of the same cul-de-sac.

One says: let’s form a band and save humanity.
The other says: your patio furniture is guilty.

Both may be necessary.

By the end of O.C. and Stiggs, the theater had changed. The families with younger kids had either left or entered a rare educational crisis. The lobby felt stranger during the break. The arcade cabinets glowed with more menace. Someone spilled a cherry soda near the men’s room and no one cleaned it immediately, which gave the whole place the feel of a small municipal collapse.

Perfect.

11:00 PM: The Last Starfighter

Then came The Last Starfighter, and the night looked upward.

This is where the program revealed its hidden architecture. Until then, July Joyride might have seemed like a survey of youth comedy and suburban delinquency. But The Last Starfighter turned the key. Suddenly the arcade was not just a hangout, not just a refuge, not just a commercial trap full of bleeps and sticky buttons. The arcade was a testing ground. A shrine. A recruitment office for the impossible.

There are films that age by becoming quaint, and films that age by becoming more nakedly themselves. The Last Starfighter belongs to the second group. Its early computer imagery no longer convinces the eye in the way it once hoped to, but that hardly matters. In fact, the visible seams now make the movie more tender. The digital spaceships look like they were dreamed by a calculator that had just learned courage. They are not realistic, but they are sincere, and sincerity has become an endangered special effect.

Alex Rogan, stuck in a trailer park and quietly suffocating under the ceiling of limited expectation, is one of cinema’s great arcade prophets. He plays a game, masters it, and discovers that the game was watching him back. This remains a powerful fantasy because it flatters a very specific adolescent hope: that your private obsession is secretly evidence. That the thing everyone dismisses as wasted time is actually training. That somewhere beyond the visible world, somebody understands what your hands have been learning.

This is the arcade version of the sword in the stone.

And on a July night at Maverick City Theater, after Bill & Ted and O.C. and Stiggs, the film felt almost mythic. Bill and Ted find destiny through friendship. O.C. and Stiggs create meaning through attack. Alex Rogan is found by destiny because he has been practicing for it without knowing.

That is the great arcade dream. The quarter is a prayer. The high score is a flare sent into the dark.

What moved me most this time was not the fantasy of escape, but the sadness underneath it. Alex does not simply want adventure. He wants permission to be more than the coordinates assigned to him. The film’s sweetness comes from the fact that it grants him that permission without sneering at where he came from. The trailer park is not treated as garbage. It is treated as a place where longing has learned to keep quiet.

There were cheers, naturally. There always are with The Last Starfighter. It has that old matinee machinery. But the room also grew still in certain moments. Maybe everyone was tired by then. Maybe the hour helped. At 11 PM, the brain begins taking emotional inventory. The day loosens. Memory starts walking around without a badge.

For me, the movie opened a trapdoor. I started thinking about all the games, records, paperbacks, late-night broadcasts, and half-broken machines that raised people who were not being watched closely by anyone else. I thought about how much American childhood has been supervised by devices no adult respected. Arcade cabinets. Cable TV. VHS tapes. Demo discs. Cheap guitars. Public library computers. Things that blinked. Things that hummed. Things that waited.

A lesser culture calls these distractions.

A better one recognizes them as transmitters.

12:45 AM: Joysticks

And then, at 12:45 AM, after the sweetness, the sabotage, and the cosmic summons, came Joysticks, rolling into the room like a shopping cart full of beer cans and loose Atari cartridges.

Here we must be honest. Joysticks is not a good movie by most respectable systems of measurement. Fortunately, respectable systems of measurement are often where joy goes to be embalmed.

Joysticks is vulgar, frantic, dumb, bright, sweaty, and proud of itself in a way that borders on civic disorder. It is an arcade sex comedy from a period when American cinema occasionally behaved as though the invention of video games had caused everyone below the age of twenty-five to lose access to furniture, shame, and long-term planning.

It is also, in the context of this marathon, the perfect final film.

Not because it tops the others. It does not. Not because it deepens them. It refuses depth the way a duck refuses pants. Its value is more chemical. By 12:45 AM, the theater had become a different organism. People were slumped, sugared, over-caffeinated, feral in small harmless ways. The audience was no longer asking cinema to be elegant. It wanted noise, color, stupidity, velocity. It wanted the sensation of being sixteen in a room that smelled like popcorn oil and electrical dust.

Joysticks understands the arcade as pure social chaos. Not a portal, as in The Last Starfighter. Not a mall-adjacent stage for historical goofiness, as in Bill & Ted. Not a battleground against suburban hypocrisy, as in O.C. and Stiggs. Here the arcade is a hormonal commons, a little republic of buttons, denim, competition, and bad decisions.

The plot, such as it is, concerns efforts to shut down the local arcade because it is corrupting the youth. This is one of those premises that seems absurd until you remember that adults have spent the last century trying to shut down whatever young people enjoy most. Pinball, comic books, rock and roll, Dungeons & Dragons, video games, horror movies, rap tapes, skateboarding, the internet, phones, screens, fun itself, sometimes just chairs placed too close together.

The adult fear is always the same: what if the kids build a world we cannot supervise?

Joysticks answers: they will, and it will be sticky.

By the final stretch, the room had surrendered. People laughed in bursts, groaned affectionately, applauded things that may not legally qualify as jokes. The film did not end the evening so much as deflate it, sending us wobbling out into the night with the dignity of punctured pool toys.

And somehow, that was right.

The Bill as Secret Autobiography

What made July Joyride work was not nostalgia, though nostalgia was certainly in the room, wearing a windbreaker and drinking a large soda. The night worked because the four films formed a loose map of youth under late twentieth-century American conditions.

First: friendship as salvation.
Second: rebellion as vandal opera.
Third: play as hidden training.
Fourth: the arcade as anarchic public square.

The marathon understood that “teen movies” are rarely just about teenagers. They are about borders. Who gets to define seriousness. Who gets to control space. Who gets believed when they say the world is too small. Who gets dismissed until they accidentally save the universe, humiliate the rich, pass history, or defend the arcade from some beige tyrant with a clipboard soul.

That is why the poster’s tagline, “Be excellent. Play again. Leave before the adults arrive,” is funnier and sharper than it first appears. The adults are not merely parents. They are the forces of closure. They are the people who arrive with fluorescent lights and liability forms. They are the ones who end the sleepover, unplug the cabinet, turn off the lobby neon, and say, with terrible confidence, that this was all a waste of time.

But nothing at July Joyride felt wasted.

Even the weak spots had use. Especially the weak spots. A perfect marathon is not a row of masterpieces. That is a museum corridor. A real marathon needs texture, tonal whiplash, questionable snacks, one film that makes you unexpectedly emotional, one film that behaves badly, and one film that forces you to ask whether your standards are moral principles or just furniture you inherited from tedious people.

This bill had all of that.

It had the bright humanism of Bill & Ted.
It had the sun-poisoned class-war cartoon of O.C. and Stiggs.
It had the cosmic yearning of The Last Starfighter.
It had the quarter-slot trash carnival of Joysticks.

It had, in other words, a theory.

Not a clean theory. Thank God. Clean theories are for people who alphabetize their dreams. This was a theory with nacho cheese on its sleeve. A theory that had been grounded for mouthing off. A theory with a fake ID and a surprisingly good heart.

The Maverick City Effect

I should also say this: Maverick City Theater mattered. A bill like this cannot survive in a blank room. You need a place with some scuff in it. You need walls that have absorbed laughter, failed dates, bad prints, midnight arguments, and the low-grade panic of teenagers realizing they have missed the last bus.

The theater seemed to know what it was hosting. The trailers were not just decoration. They were calibration. They tuned the room to the proper frequency. By the time the features rolled, the audience had been softened, cracked open, and lightly carbonated.

There was also something beautiful about watching these films communally instead of alone at home, where the remote control sits there like a tiny executioner. At home, boredom can kill a movie in twelve seconds. In a theater, boredom has to negotiate with the room. It has to sit there and become texture. It has to either transform into patience or reveal itself as your own private deficiency.

That is especially useful with films like O.C. and Stiggs and Joysticks, which do not always reward isolated viewing. They need witnesses. They need groans, coughs, stray laughter, the sound of people deciding whether they are offended, amused, tired, or spiritually sticky.

Cinema was not built only for reverence. Sometimes it was built for being trapped together with a bad idea until the bad idea starts glowing.

Final Dispatch from the Parking Lot

When I left, it was past 2 AM. The air had that post-marathon unreality, when the world outside the theater looks underwritten. Cars sat in the lot like sleeping animals. The mall sign in the distance buzzed with a faint electric sadness. Someone nearby was quoting Bill & Ted badly but with conviction. A couple stood near the curb arguing about whether The Last Starfighter was secretly the best film of the night. A man in a denim vest said, to no one in particular, “Altman was out of his mind,” then nodded as though receiving confirmation from the moon.

I looked back at the marquee.

JULY JOYRIDE.

A fine title. A joyride is theft, escape, motion, pleasure, poor judgment, and temporary freedom. It is not a road trip. It does not have an itinerary. It ends when the gas runs out or someone hears sirens. That is exactly what this marathon captured: the borrowed-car feeling of youth, the brief holy interval when the night belongs to you because no one has noticed it missing yet.

Gideon Void Repertory did not present four films. It opened a side door in the civic machinery and let us run around inside for seven hours.

By the end, we had not learned a lesson. Better than that. We had recovered a signal.

A mall signal.
A space signal.
A suburban freak signal.
A little busted neon telegram from the era when the future still had carpeted floors and cost twenty-five cents to begin.

Grade: A sticky, radiant A-
Programmer’s note: Inspired lunacy.
Best in show: The Last Starfighter, by a photon.
Most necessary disruption: O.C. and Stiggs.
Most spiritually useful object: the broken arcade cabinet in the lobby.
Exit wisdom: Be excellent, yes. But also keep quarters in your pocket.

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