The Vice Movie Club - Bad Ronald

For the latest VICE Movie Club, I invited a new gaggle of artists, directors, and cine-pals to submit their thoughts on Bad Ronald, an oddball thriller that smartly answers the question, "What if a delusional art dude secretly painted and lived inside the walls of your childhood home?" Originally broadcast on ABC in 1974, the film avoids the bad seed slasher trappings implied by its title, using network restrictions and a milk-and-cookies sleepy couch charm to its advantage. When Ronald Wilby, a friendly, awkward high school kid, kills a girl, his overbearing, doting mother enacts a plan to slyly block off a restroom in their two-story home. There Ronald can hide from the cops and the world and be served homecooked meals and motherly advice. Perhaps forever so.

When she dies, however, a new nuclear family soon moves in, leaving Ronald to live out his adolescence alone while painting Atranta, an elaborate, Henry Dargerish regal fantasyland, upon his limited wall-space. With Ronald's penchant for peepholes and trapdoors and his knack for carefully rummaging the fridge and diary of his invaders, the film's tone can kinda-maybe be labeled Afterschool De Palma, although many of the contributors below would probably agree it's much weirder and radder still.

TOBACCO - MUSICIAN (MANIAC MEAT; FUCKED UP FRIENDS)
The kill scene is pretty good. I like how kids used to kill kids in movies. This film was made for TV and it really felt like it. But otherwise, it's a pretty awesome premise for a movie, and I can't say I've seen anything like it. What I'd like is for a visionary like Michael Bay to come in and really slime fuck this story into 2011. I can see it working really well as a remake, but Michael Bay just needs to cram his crusty shingle dick into the right script to make it sparkle. So the remake is gonna be badass. The original's cool too, though. Actually, thinking about it more, I really loved this movie. It was always moving and never wasted any time. The music was kind of like M*A*S*H, so that was good too. No holes to be poked.

TIM LEAGUE - CEO/FOUNDER (THE ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE)
Bad Ronald transcends a low-budget and a bit of overacting to become a genuinely creepy, tight little film. While I ultimately craved more intensity from the climax, Bad Ronald is one of the best made-for-TV horror films ever. The book (by Jack Vance, from which the film was adapted) apparently gets very dark and violent, and I could clearly feel the director yearning to intensify the action were he not so hampered by the content guidelines of 1970s network TV. But despite a few minor warts, I really love this movie. Take my praise with a caveat though. Being a bit of a nerd myself, I have a soft spot for geek protagonists so that probably bolsters my enthusiasm.

From the first scene featuring Ronald's lonely birthday dinner with Mom, you know he probably hangs out in the chess club more often than the locker room. He's an awkward loser, but his nerdiness is never overplayed. And apart from the STUPID FUCKING DECISION to bury his first manslaughter victim, Ronald's unfortunate situation, and eventual descent into madness, is pretty believable. You have to loathe Ronald because he's a super creeper. At the same time, you have sympathy for the kid. I must say, though, Ronald was living exclusively in a bathroom for several months and you can almost smell him through the screen towards the end.

MOLLY SODA - ARTIST

Oh Ronald, you never get a break. Girls don't like you and you accidentally killed like two people. Accidents happen, it's OK. Yeah, your mom's a little crazy, but it's a secret blessing that she left to go to the hospital and died… now you can focus on your art. Girls like artists. I'd totally let you live in a secret room in my house and paint pictures of me. I can't believe that blonde chick didn't wanna run away with you. She just doesn't get you like I do.

THOMAS DE NAPOLI - MUSIC VIDEO DIRECTOR (DAS RACIST - "WHO'S THAT BROOOWN?")
When I was growing up in the 80s I was terrified of being kidnapped. I was convinced that all of the following things were absolutely true: Everyone driving a panel van was a kidnapper; kidnappers tried to trick children into their cars by wearing silicone masks that looked exactly like the child's parents; kidnappers stalked department stores holding chloroform soaked rags just waiting for kids to get separated from their moms. This intense paranoia was created and fed by countless made-for-TV movies and after-school specials about "stranger danger." I say all this because had I grown up in the 70s and seen a Movie of the Week like Bad Ronald, whereby it's fully plausible for a psychopath to live inside the walls of your family's home, I would have been even more traumatized. I also would have camped out in my backyard until college. This made me think about how there were some pretty fucked up movies in the 70s. Then I thought about Human Centipede. And that made me think that we're living in truly scary times.

I feel like I haven't sold Bad Ronald hard enough, so here are a list of my favorite moments: Before going to bed, Dabney Coleman's character does 60 sit-ups… and pounds a tall boy (of beer)*; a random extra in a high school pool party scene has a fully receding hairline and a thick mustache; Ronald is totally psyched that he got a toolbox for his 16th birthday. "It's got everything!"

*Just to clarify, Dabney Coleman did not have sex with a guy in this movie.

TODD STRAUSS-SCHULSON - DIRECTOR (A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR CHRISTMAS; DIE HARDLY WORKING)
I'm writing this right after watching Bad Ronald alone in bed at 2 AM, and I'm embarrassed to say that I'm straight-up creeped out. This feels like the first time I saw Sleepaway Camp as a kid, the movie where the infamous last shot reveals that the female killer is actually a boy with a penis. There's a freeze frame and some violins, and it pretty much ruined summer camp for me forever. Well, this Movie of the Week from 1976 just did the same thing to me, only it ruined… well, I guess it ruined living in a house… so that's an inconvenient new phobia.

Bad Ronald is basically the reverse of Panic Room where a titular dork (who really isn't THAT bad) lives in subterfuge in a hidden room in a big house after accidentally killing a neighborhood girl. The set up is pretty plausible. To keep Ronald out of jail his kookoo bananas mother hides him there, but when she dies he's stuck in this tiny room forever. As I'm writing this I keep hearing creaks and footsteps and I'm pretty sure there is a nerd in my walls staring at me… right now. NERD WHAT DO YOU WANT! WHAT DO YOU NEED! I CAN HELP YOU! JUST STOP CREEPING ON ME! Making matters even worse, Scott Jacoby, who plays Ronald, is the uncanny doppelganger of a young Steven Spielberg.

Fucking shit! I just heard a scratching sound and a pop! Is Spielberg up in my walls? Is he pissed at me for hating Crystal Skull and the final 30 minutes of A.I.? I think I'm having a panic attack… all I can hope is that this melatonin kicks in soon.

JILLIAN MAYER - ACTOR/DIRECTOR ("I AM YOUR GRANDMA"; "LIFE & FREAKY TIMES OF UNCLE LUKE")
Nerd Goya + Authentic D&D Wizard = Bad Ronald. I loved his symbolically rich graffiti (e.g. "Mother, Mother, Mother" and "A Broken Heart"). Maybe when Ronald's older he can display a rendering of an 8-ball and other cliche temporary tattoo art in his studio apartment. Can someone please explain to me how this donkey teen expects to become a doctor when he can't figure out how to leave his house in the middle of the night? Common sense. I guess most viewers dismiss that on the grounds that Ronald is certified bonkers and that his mom was creepy. Alright. Alright. But after the new family moves in, did he flush all of his BMs when they were gone or what? Or was he drawing princes and princesses with them? Face it, he never went to the bathroom once. Flushing toilet water would have so given him away. But I did love that he was an egg stealer. Sandwiches or pasta just isn't as weird. On a production note, I hope no one (the boom operator) was fired when that microphone dropped into a shot in the pantry. It's all good man, I make mistakes too.

THE OUTLAW VERN - FILM CRITIC - AUTHOR (SEAGALOGY)
I gotta blame this on Ronald's mom. She doesn't seem as cruel as Carrie White's mom, but at least Carrie was able to get out there in the world and date. Ronald's mom just makes really poor decisions. Why does she want to hide her kid in a bathroom? It would be better for him to man up and go on trial for manslaughter than to convince the entire neighborhood he's a killer on the loose. "Oh well, he ran away. I guess that's the end of that."

This reminds me of movies made a little later on, like 1982's Mazes and Monsters with Tom Hanks, where you were supposed to be afraid of your kids going crazy from playing Dungeons & Dragons. Ronald is dangerous because he fantasizes about Prince Norbert and the Evil Duke too much. He's living in his head. Not enough human contact. Which is why when he tries to talk to a girl he accidentally busts her head open on a rock. Also made me think about Harry Potter living under those stairs in his uncle's house. Maybe Harry's not a magical wizard at all, maybe he accidentally killed a girl and that's why they keep him cooped up. All that Hogwarts shit is a delusion.

My favorite part is the first time Ronald is alone in his secret bathroom hideout. He looks around and he sort of has this half-smile of pride, like it's his first apartment. Finally something to call his own. Finally he's a man.

MATTHEW CARON - MUSIC VIDEO DIRECTOR (FRIENDS - "FRIEND CRUSH") - MISHKA NYC
It's a stretch to say that Bad Ronald had any influence on Taxi Driver, but the two films seem intrinsically linked to me. They are both undeniably products of the same age and neuroses. Ronald Wilby is a sort of teenage suburban cousin to Travis Bickle, a loner caught up in tragic circumstances. Tucked away in a crawlspace behind his mother's kitchen pantry, he fearfully observes the world through a series of peepholes. He passes his days there writing and illustrating the story of a mythical kingdom called Atranta, where he rules as a benevolent king responsible for protecting a blonde princess. And as with Bickle, there's trouble in store for the unlucky blonde fated to wind up in his path.

In Taxi Driver, Cybill Shephard's blonde, Betsy, uses lyrics from a Kris Kristofferson song to describe Travis: "A prophet, a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction… a walking contradiction." The description fits Ronald too: he is simultaneously a prisoner, a king, a victim, a neighborhood boogieman, and a protector of princesses. In addition to fair princesses, Ronald and Travis also mark peripheral male characters in their orbit as dark scapegoats for everything that is wrong: Travis fixes upon Senator Charles Palatine as the architect of the world's ills. Ronald fixates on a neighborhood boy who has perpetuated the neighborhood myth of Bad Ronald to Ronald's beloved princess, casting him out as an evil duke. Once their adversaries are identified, nothing short of total destruction will suffice, and it is at this stage that Ronald and Travis ignite into monstrous harbingers of real life Bad Ronalds in the vein of John Hinckley Jr. and Mark David Chapman.

Ronald's final emergence from his personal prison is as intense and terrifying a spectacle as a mid-70s Movie of The Week is capable of producing. And it may be more upsetting than the bloody grand finale of Taxi Driver, in that the objects of Ronald Wilby's murderous rage are other kids, rather than Lower East Side lowlifes. "All my life needed was a sense of some place to go," confides Travis Bickle soon after he is introduced, and it's clear that Ronald Wilby's got the same problem: he's God's lonely kid.

HUNTER STEPHENSON

The title of the film passes judgement on Ronald before viewers see a single frame, and purposely or not, you spend the entirety of the film deciding if he is, in fact, "Bad." Not to spoil the conclusion, but it's a hazy feeling between viewers being relieved for the family and bummed out, albeit memorably so, for all the characters. The actor who played Ronald, Scott Jacoby, deserves more props for the role than he received. He's not portraying a proto-nerd or troubled youth like those seen in films before or since. This is his own thing; especially when Ronald's seen noshing. Whether he's teething an apple while his mother lists punishments he'll recieve if he doesn't go into hiding (symbolism much?), or scarfing a candybar like it's a deep realization of "Damn, I'm fucked!" while the family he'll never have discusses him as an urban legend over dinner—that stuff's all pretty illuminating.

The lonely kid of a divorced couple with an absent father we never see, a cheaper pull on viewer sympathy would have been to make Ronald's mother a typical hair-bun conservative psycho. The onset of empty nest syndrome turns her into a borderline nutter, sure. But a hardworking mom who doesn't narc her kid out always gets points, and she's a clever broad at that. There's some sweet imagery in Ronald and his mother sharing their conspiratorial meals with his secret entrance open in the pantry, his mom sitting just outside. And the way their conversations fade with Ronald slowly closing the entrance door, gradually seeing less and less of his mom and her of him, is brilliant as a weird metaphor for young adulthood. An equally welcome creative decision was to forgo the temptation to make the new family that moves in a cardboard lot of happiness, the opposite of Ronald's. They all seem miffed and unfulfilled. A shot of them having breakfast, shown via peephole Ronald-vision, reminded me of the snarky cover of Zeppelin's Presence. I'll also note that Jacoby went on to play a similarly dorky, inventive kid in 1976's The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, a totally unrelated, perfect bookend to Ronald. That film starred an eerie-precocious 14-year-old Jodie Foster as a girl who creates a complex facade (re: murder) in order to live alone after her father dies. Jacoby's character, basically Good Ronald, assists and protects her. But Bad is better.