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Because the Journal Gazette only promoted it with a small thumbnail notice, please enjoy the awesome full-sized ad for "Out of Bounds" from the July 25, 1986, Herald & Review, which looks a bit like "Search For Spock" if you squint. Collector's note for nerds: the soundtrack features a Night Ranger song you can't get anywhere else. Get after it.

READ: See previous "Throwback Machine" columns. Point your smartphone or tablet camera at this code and tap the link. 

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Whether it’s Luke Skywalker stuck on a moisture farm until the Death Star plans landed in his lap, Alex Rogan taking the controls of gunship in space after breaking the high score on the arcade game by the trailer park convenience store, or, as is the case in the final film for the Summer Movie Showcase, 1986’s “Out Of Bounds,” you’re Anthony Michael Hall perched atop an old tractor in an Iowa cornfield dreaming of making it out to L.A. to live with his successful older brother who made a break for Holly-weird years prior, there’s just something about a movie where hopeful young folks with destiny on their minds wonder if they’ll ever “get there.”

And he finally gets his chance when his family disintegrates out from under him while he’s packing a duffle bag and his mother bugs out for Missouri and his mopey father decides to just go “camping” indefinitely, and neither is seen again.

So it’s off to Los Angel-eeze, and Mr. Customs Man, don’t touch that duffel bag if you please because, due to a mix-up at baggage claim, it got swapped with an identical one full of over a million dollars in Colombian bam-bam. Now the bag’s rightful owner, a truly terrifying cat by the name of “Roy Gaddis,” played effectively by Jeff Kober, the satanic serial killer in a horror movie that I keep meaning to write about, isn’t too happy about being stuck with a bag full of socks.

The next morning our Hayseed Hero saunters into his brother’s lavish breakfast nook and discovers, in the movie’s only thrilling scene, that both his brother and his wife are dead after an overnight visit by Gaddis. Then, due to a contrivance I still don’t understand involving a random dude we’ve never been introduced to, who just wanders into the kitchen, suddenly he’s now wanted by the police too, instantly leading to a “that’s not how the world works” car chase that would have resulted in multiple fatalities and ends with the characters involved making a joke.

Yeah, it’s one of those movies, one of those “well-meaning doofus goes on a late-night big-city odyssey” genre, including films like “After Hours,” “Into the Night,” “Something Wild,” or my personal favorite, “Miracle Mile,” which is like this movie except replace the duffle bag of illicit goods with an incoming nuclear missile. And you know … as such, “Out of Bounds” has its moments, but it’s severely undone by a couple factors.

Unfortunately, the biggest of those is Anthony Michael Hall, a dude who’s place in the ‘80s canon as the prototypical loveable dork in “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Weird Science” is forever set in stone. But “Out of Bounds” was his first shot at a lead role, and his first thriller to boot, and well, it’s clear from his, let’s just say, “odd” performance here that he really wanted to make this his coming out as a lead man and not as the baby face he established himself as before.

While one can hardly blame him for that, delivering all his dialogue like he can’t breathe through his nose and with a weird “tough guy” head tilt you just know he practiced in the mirror makes him come off more like a punk, and not the cool kind.

By the halfway point this supposed “farm boy” is participating in the kind of Harrison Ford-style stunts that I’m not saying a kid fresh from the fields couldn’t pull off, but, well, I was just unable to pick a pen up off the floor without groaning real loud.

And speaking of punks (the cool kind), the just-starting-to-fade-away L.A. new wave club scene is far and away the highlight of this film, and accompanying soundtrack, as a hip Cyndi Lauper lookalike waitress escorts our hero to safety in her “network” of night life weirdos and you get to see rare onscreen appearances by Goth legends Siouxsie and the Banshees, performing one of their best songs, and power pop maestro Tommy Keene, performing a song of his that got me through my own “in over my head” social and academic moments in grad school, and who isn’t fazed at all when Hall and his waitress friend rush the stage to get away from the fight they just started by breaking beer bottles over Gaddis’s head. Makes sense, the song was called “Run Now.”

So as a thriller, it’s pretty junky; too many criminals, too many payphones, too many gruff detectives, too many confrontations in alleyways and abandoned buildings and not nearly enough reasons to care.

But goodness, if all those neon-lit clubs, fingerless gloves, cool shades, and spiked-haired night-crawlers grabbing greasy burgers at a food truck before checking out the next hip band didn’t make this particular country boy wish he could “get there,” back to that time when he might have caught this movie in the wee hours, while eating pizza rolls and organizing comic books, on USA’s Night Flight as part of a New Wave double feature with Diane Lane in “Ladies and Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains.”

Oh, and if you’re wondering why the movie’s called “Out of Bounds,” it’s what the typically gruff homicide detective accuses our hero of being all the way at the 52-minute mark. Funny thing. Hall’s next movie after this was the high school football comedy “Johnny Be Good.”

I wonder if there’s a scene in that movie where an overbearing coach accuses him of being “Side Out.” But that’s a different movie, for a summer yet to be, of course.

By the way, thank you to everyone for not sending me reminders that May isn’t quite summertime.

From the Nov. 22, 1992, Journal Gazette, this photo of Cosmic Blue Comics in Mattoon; where I spent virtually every Saturday afternoon for about two years. That small back room you see just off to the right of the Coca-Cola sign was where they kept the many, and I mean many, long-boxes of back issues. I still own my bagged copy of "Tales of the Beanworld" issue No. 1 that I found back there. Sadly, this location is now just a "greenspace".

Pictured, Shelbyville's Bob Murray from the June 2, 1982, Journal Gazette, displaying his dominance over the TRON arcade game at the "Carousel Time" arcade at the Cross County Mall, later to be the Aladdin's Castle, soon thereafter to be not a thing anymore. I spent just about every Saturday at that arcade, perhaps with that exact same haircut. No overalls, though. I was more of an "Ocean Pacific" kind of kid.

Pictured, from the Nov. 28, 1988, Journal Gazette, Icenogle's grocery store. Being from Cooks Mills, we didn't often shop at Icenogle's...but when we did, even as a kid, I knew it was the way a grocery store is supposed to be in a perfect world, and that's not just because they had wood floors, comic books on the magazine rack, or plenty, and I mean plenty, of trading cards in wax packs.

I had long since moved away from Cooks Mills by the time this Showcase item about Adam's Groceries ran in the June 13, 1998, Journal Gazette, but there was a time when I very well could have been one of those kids in that photo; for if it was summer, and you had a bike, and you lived in Cooks Mills, that's where you ended up. At last report, they still had Tab in the Pepsi-branded cooler in the back. I'm seriously considering asking my money guy if I could afford to reopen this place.

Pictured, from the July 16, 1987, Journal Gazette, this ad for Mister Music, formerly located in the Cross County Mall. I wasn't buying records at that age, but I would eventually, and that's where it all went down. If you don't think it sounds "cool" to hang out at a record store with your buddies on a Friday night, a piping-hot driver's license fresh in your wallet, you'd be right. But it's the best a geek like me could do. Wherever you are today, owners of Mister Music, please know that a Minutemen album I found in your cheap bin changed my life.

Portrait of the author as a young man, about to throw a guitar through a target at that year's Sound Source Music Guitar Throwing Contest, from the April 18, 1994, Journal Gazette. Check out my grunge-era hoodie, and yes...look carefully, those are Air Jordans you see on my feet. Addendum: despite what the cutline says, I did not win a guitar.

Pictured, clipped from the online archives at JG-TC.com, a photo from the April 18, 1994, Journal Gazette of Sound Source Music Guitar Throwing Contest winner, and current JG-TC staff writer, Clint Walker.

Here today, gone tomorrow, Vette's Teen Club, from the June 20, 1991, Journal Gazette. I wasn't "cool" enough to hang out at Vette's back in it's "heyday," and by "cool enough" I mean, "not proficient enough in parking lot fights." If only I could get a crack at it now.

FutureGen: The end of the beginning, and eventually, the beginning of the end, from the Dec. 19, 2007, JG-TC. I wish I had been paying more attention at the time. I probably should have been reading the newspaper.

"The Throwback Machine" is a weekly feature taking a look back at items of interest found in the JG-TC online archives. For questions, comments, suggestions, or his "Song of the Day" recommendation, contact him at cwalker@jg-tc.com.

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Never before has Pac-Man been misused as much as in this gross R-Rated "comedy" featured in this week's edition of Clint Walker's THROWBACK MACHINE!

Spend your dateless Saturdays watching murder-shows? Then you'll love this week's edition of Clint Walker's THROWBACK MACHINE!

Because the Journal Gazette only promoted it with a small thumbnail notice, please enjoy the awesome full-sized ad for "Out of Bounds" from the July 25, 1986, Herald & Review, which looks a bit like "Search For Spock" if you squint. Collector's note for nerds: the soundtrack features a Night Ranger song you can't get anywhere else. Get after it.

READ: See previous "Throwback Machine" columns. Point your smartphone or tablet camera at this code and tap the link. 

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