Theme Song: This soundtrack is ridiculous. It’s like a who’s who of mid-80s radio: Madonna, Don Henley, Dio, Berlin, Journey, Hagar, Speedwagon. Most of these songs are used multiple times in the movie:
“Only The Young” by Journey seems to be the main title theme and plays 3 times, but “Lunatic Fringe” by Red Rider is literally played though every training montage, totaling 6 times. Not to be outdone, “Crazy For You” by Madonna plays 8 times, mostly during romantic sequences, and including a scene at a bar where Madonna appears on stage singing the song.
Social Context: Another sport-centric, coming-of-age, by-the-numbers, winning-focused, ’80s movie that glosses over eating and obsessive-compulsive disorders in favor of blaring soundtrack drops.
Summary: Super-horny teen Louden Swain (Matthew Modine) abruptly decides to go down from his current wrestling weight class of 190 pounds to 168 pounds so he can take on a guy named Shute. We’re supposed to ignore that Shute looks insanely more muscular than Modine’s gawky frame.
Swain’s other friend Kuch (Michael Schoeffling) makes a superfluous comparison of Swain’s attempt to lose 20 pounds to the Native American vision quest ritual which seems a bit of an overreach.
Then Carla (Linda Fiorentino), an artist drifter shows up and Swain and his dad (Ronnie Cox) take her in. Swain then turns into a massive sweaty pervert. He’s constantly running around in a rubber suit to lose weight, never eating, talking about his erection, looking at medical encyclopedia pictures of vaginas, etc. He even gets so sexually frustrated at one point that he pushes Carla onto a bed and tries to dry hump her which inexplicably makes her fall in love with him.
Then he announces he wants to be a gynecologist because he “wants to be able to see inside women.” Despite all this, and after passing out a bunch and getting bloody noses all the time, he is able to finally bed Carla and win the wrestling match because this is an ’80s movie.
Collegiate wrestling fans will find a lot to enjoy here as many training montages and practice sessions, with various licks from “Lunatic Fringe”, pepper the runtime. But overall, Modine’s sweaty, awkward, bonered-up, bloody-nosed nerdiness is off-putting and makes him hard to root for.
Worth Mentioning:
– Forrest Whittaker appears in a small role as a wrestling teammate.
– Filmed in and around Spokane, Washington.
– The amount of A&R promotion that went into this soundtrack is insane. Though not all songs were exclusively for the movie, almost every song was released as a single at some point, and eBay is flooded with promotional flats from in-store displays.
– J.C. Quinn (On The Yard) delivers an excellent performance as a cook at Swain’s job, giving an emotional monologue and also saying “cooze” in reference to female genitalia.
Poster and Box Art: An overly romance-focused photo that doesn’t do a lot to engage. Soundtrack aside, it seems there may have been some struggles with the marketing of Vision Quest. None of the commercial-release posters focused on the wrestling angle and perhaps leaned a little too far into the romance side of things.
Foreign release posters were also re-titled “Crazy For You” to capitalize on the success of the featured Madonna song. The home video release played into the wrestling a little more, but still missed the mark.
