*originally posted may 12, 2017 - aka THE FIRST EVER*
Ok folks...new Friday feature: VHS of the week. This week we take a look at the 1985 film D.A.R.Y.L.
Here’s what happens: a stoic young boy in an Easter suit (think mini-Jared Kushner) is abandoned on a mountainside by a dude who then drives off the side of said mountain to elude capture by a scary helicopter-flying bad guys. Daryl goes to a group home where his case worker immediately sends him to live with Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap. Did all adoptions take mere hours in the 1980’s or was that only in the movies? Anyway, Daryl settles in with Tufnel and his wife and makes fast friends with a kid across the street named Turtle whose mom is totally the maid from Clue. No one seems to question the fact that Daryl is hella good at literally everything. Pole Position? Top score. Advanced mathematics? What else you got, teach? Little League? Move over Wade Boggs. Daryl plays insane amounts of little league. In fact, most of this movie is one long little league montage. Eventually Daryl’s “real” parents come shut the party down and bring the kid to some a non-specific military bunker. The Tufnel’s smell bullshit and follow the scent to the bunker where they learn that their boy wonder is not Daryl...but D.A.R.Y.L...a Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform! Buzunga! Worse still...the kid has been keeping it TOO real...so they are gonna power him down FOREVS!!! Real Dad grows a conscience and steals Daryl before he can shut him off. There is a car chase and Real Dad is shot and killed. It is sad. Daryl then steals a fighter jet ‘cuz there’s no better way to close out flick than with a fighter jet chase. Daryl parachutes into the water and dies because he is a computer and can’t get wet. Just like your iPhone, you dig? Luckily Fake Mom shoves the kid’s body into a bag of rice and several hours later he is right as rain. The Tufnel’s are stoked...Turtle is stoked...everyone is stoked! Cue Teddy Pendergrass song. The End.