Wednesdays get weird when Late Shift at the Grindhouse hosts Ross Meyer, Joe Derderian, and Aaron Holmgren dig up low-budget b-movies, horror and gore-fests, and camp classics for your viewing pleasure. Buy your ticket and take a ride in our Time Machine! Punch in and earn a bonus! $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys and $3 small popcorn! PLUS -- special custom trash trailer reel curated by Ross with cheap swag and prize giveaways!

Joysticks (1983)

Directed by Greydon Clark (Without Warning)

Featuring: Joe Don Baker, Jonathan Gries

There's something going on at the local video arcade - something totally insane, outrageously hilarious, and very sexy.  This arcade is more fun than games.  

"Finally, a movie that beeps, buzzes, clangs, vibrates, and, above all, flashes.  Joysticks is a lot like the video arcades where it takes place; hyper-stimulating, loud, and bursting with characters that define the mid-'80s adolescent experience." - Mike "McBeardo" McPadden, Teen Movie Hell

"The arcade portrayed here is the ultimate melting pot of teen cliques.  They've got punks, hunks, sluts, Valley girls, nerds, and adults even.  If I learned only one thing from this movie, it's that video games bust down social walls." - Robin Bougie, Cinema Sewer

"When grownups outlaw fun, teenagers must become outlaws.  It's the cardinal rule of '80s teen comedies, and Joysticks is like a strategy guide for the life of fun." - Lars Nilsen, Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of The American Genre Film Archive

For a very brief time in the early 1980s, it seemed like arcades were going to replace churches, movie theaters, and parking lots as the number one destination for teen congregations. Horny and hopped up on hot dogs and sugary colas, they were drawn to the blip-bloop siren call of Ms. Pac-Man, Dig Dug and Burger Time. Joysticks takes this setting and makes it a battlefield in which terrified conservative parents battle high-scoring horn-dogs and rainbow-haired punks go toe-to-toe with beefy slobs for the title of "best of the best." This wild teen comedy is elevated to Olympian heights by its arcade setting, absurd premise, and most of all, a performance by Jon Gries (The Monster Squad) as scenery-chewing, button-mashing, punk patriarch King Vidiot.

Restoration courtesy of Multicom and American Genre Film Archive.

Battle local pinball wizards at our own video arcade, Spare Me Bowl, at the Revolution Brewing Pinball Tournament from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m. then see the battle for the future of the arcade on screen at 10:00 p.m.