Hunk

Hunk
1984 – United States
Director – Lawrence Bassoff
BCI Eclipse Company, 2007, DVD
School Dazed 8 movie set

I’m not particularly fond of the word “hunk” except perhaps when used in a particular context by Elvis, but even then…In this case the context is hot dudes, with lots of money and muscles. Treated to a montage of the waxy leading man Hunk Golden (John Allen Nelson of Deathstalker 3 and Killer Klowns from Outer Space) getting ready to face another day of being well a hot rich muscular dude, it looks like this film is going to be a confused hodgepodge of hetero-sexual frustration and quasi-homo fantasy. How appropriate.

Hunk speeds off into the city to visit a high priced shrink Sunny to whom he unravels an unbelievable tale about an alternate personality named Bradley Brinkman a loser computer nerd. Brinkman was in trouble of losing his job for not writing good computer programs until he casually offers to sell his soul for a good program at which point the computer springs to life and writes “The Yuppie Program” on Brinkman’s behalf. When the program is a hit, Brinkman’s boss gives him six months off and a huge cash bonus which he uses to rent a dilapidated house on the swankiest yuppie beach in California in order to live among the people who most scorn him and maybe slip through the cracks until the cash runs out.


All his endeavors are a total failure until his fantasy woman O’Brien turns up at his house and promises to give him the life he wants for his soul. Thinking it a joke, he laughingly signs in blood, but that night, she returns and magically (no really, she just waves her hand in the air) makes his inflatable rubber torso bulge muscularly and the next day he wakes up a total hunk, named Hunk!


He enjoys the lifestyle for a while but eventually feels the need to clarify a few clauses of the contract with O’Brien where he discovers that come labor day weekend and the end of the summer he will be wreaking global suffering in the service of the Devil, one Doctor D. who reappears throughout the film appropriately dressed and fresh from such evil exploits.


Not so bad if you want to stay Hunk, but Bradley’s conscience is still alive and shrieking in there somewhere, and to top it all off, O’Brien has fallen in love with him.
Awww, even Doctor D. turns out to not be such a bad guy after all, and like a brown banana we can get soft and mushy all over eachother.

Disproportionately vanilla and loaded with all the same dead-horse-floggingly stupid cliches that made the 80’s an intolerable cesspool, Hunk nevertheless turned out to have a decent mean sarcastic streak that made this unappealing and unredeeming simpleton watchable; barely.

Not that I'd recommend the investment, alternate DVD and VHS covers.