Wounds Of Love: Ten Reasons I’ve Seen Tuff Turf Over 100 Times

By Less Lee Moore

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If you’ve never seen Tuff Turf, the 1985 film starring James Spader and Kim Richards, then this list of reasons I’ve watched the movie over 100 times might pique your curiosity and prompt you to watch it. Maybe not over 100 times, but at least once. If you have seen the movie, this list will probably be at best, comical, and at worst, puzzling. Hopefully, however, this list will explain why I was thrilled when this movie was released on a (markedly bare bones) DVD a few years back. It meant that my original, recorded-from-HBO VHS tape could finally get a break.

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10. The Setting

Tuff Turf takes place in some unnamed suburb of Southern California. IMDB lists the filming locations as Culver City and Los Angeles, but from the looks of things, it was at least partially filmed in Reseda (if you’ve never been to Reseda, think about where Daniel lived in The Karate Kid and allow your imagination to run wild). When I first saw Tuff Turf, I was at my grandma’s friend’s house. She was babysitting my sister and me and took us along with her to play cards. The friend put HBO on and voila! There was Tuff Turf, which had come out in theaters the year before. Little did I know that within about a year, I would move to the equally-boring Southern California suburb of Simi Valley. There is a sign in the background of one scene that mentions Canoga Park, another So Cal suburb. Canoga Park High School is famous for being one film location used in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Poor Tuff Turf got stuck with Reseda instead.

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9. The Story

I had just recently seen Rebel Without A Cause, so the idea of a hot young WASP moving to a new town and causing trouble with the local high school troublemakers was vastly appealing to me. (Plus, James Dean was dead, while James Spader was still very much alive and likely to appear in more movies.) As banal as it might seem, teenagers like that storyline. This is why it gets used over and over again. Granted, Tuff Turf isn’t as high quality as Rebel Without A Cause, but in 1985, I took what I could get. In addition, Spader’s character, Morgan Hiller, was well-read and smart, something which was not really explored in Rebel, but which was hugely appealing to me, the well-read, smart, yet woefully geeky and boyfriend-less 15-year-old.

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8. The Fashion

James Spader’s wardrobe looks like what a rebellious rich kid would wear, while Frankie (Kim Richards) and her girlfriends apparently all shopped at Wet Seal, Contempo Casuals, or Stuart’s (before it got “classed up” a few years later). In Tuff Turf, it’s all about ankle socks with pumps, chains, braided headbands, fishnets, and roach clips. There is a scene where Frankie is trying to find the least-slutty outfit in her closet while simultaneously attempting to create a sophisticated-yet-innocent makeup look to impress Morgan’s parents. She’s got pages from a magazine tacked to her bedroom mirror, pages which I recognized from an issue of Teen Magazine I actually owned at one point in time.

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7. The End Credits

One of the features that sets Tuff Turf apart from and above other teen movies of the time and what solidifies it as my personal favorite, is the end credits sequence, in which Morgan, Frankie, Jimmy (Robert Downey, Jr.), and Ronnie go to the Club 60s to celebrate. (No spoilers here!) Jack Mack and the Heart Attack sing “So Tuff” and everyone seems to be sincerely having an awesome time. They all get on the stage and mime trumpet playing with the band, in a cute bit of what I hope was impromptu joie de vivre. Although Club 60s is probably an actual bar, and not some incredibly forward-thinking teen hangout, one can just assume they had a particularly liberal door policy.

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6. The Dancing

My mother started dancing when she was about four years old and then quickly went on to perform in dance troupes, teach dance, and manage a dancing school with her childhood dancer friend. So from birth I was well-versed in tap, ballet, and jazz, not to mention musicals. Even though I had stopped taking classes the year before, a decade of dance lessons wasn’t going to evaporate from my blood overnight. Unlike its ’80s teen movie peers, Tuff Turf has lots of choreographed dancing, including one particularly amusing, slightly bizarre, and extended sequence in an abandoned warehouse while the Jim Carroll Band is playing. What’s really crazy is that after we moved to So Cal, my sister took dance classes from one of the extras in that scene. I’m sad to report that the dancing in the Club 60s scene with Kim Richards was performed by a body double (shades of Flashdance). It’s fairly obvious as Kim’s Crystal Gayle-length tresses were nearly impossible to duplicate and the double is wearing a crimped, blonde wig. However, it doesn’t make that scene any less dynamic.

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5. The (Bad) Acting

Considering the material he had to work with, James Spader is remarkably good as Morgan, or at least remarkably convincing. Kim Richards is somewhat less so, although she’s cute enough to make Morgan’s obsession with her believable. Olivia Barash (Repo Man) plays Frankie’s horny friend Ronnie and Vidal Sassoon’s daughter Catya plays Feather. (Catya would die in 2002 of a drug-overdose-induced heart attack. She was 33.) Frankie’s sleazy, creepy, 40-year-old teenager boyfriend Nick Hauser is portrayed by Paul Mones, who had appeared in Streets Of Fire the year before and then basically went nowhere after Tuff Turf. It’s kind of a shame, since he plays a sleazy creep so well. I’m not sure how the filmmakers expected us to believe that frizzy-haired Claudette Nevins (Page Hiller) and scraggly Matt Clark (Stuart Hiller) could produce a son as strikingly handsome as James Spader, but that’s Hollywood for you.

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4. The Music

I can thank Tuff Turf for introducing me to “Green Onions,” by Booker T. and the M.G.s as well as Jim Carroll. The two Carroll tunes featured in the warehouse dance scene are “Voices” and “It’s Too Late,” the latter of which references Sharon Tate and blowjobs. Whoa! I’ve always loved Carroll’s look in this movie (which is extremely reminiscent of that other red-haired musician I like whose name is Jim) and his brief snippet of dialogue, uttered in his amazing and authentic Noo Yawk accent: “Connecticut? What’d you do for fun back there?” Also notable is the fact that Robert Downey, Jr. plays drums in the band. The other Jim Carroll song in the movie’s soundtrack is the iconic “People Who Died,” which I would hear often on L.A.’s KROQ when I moved to Simi Valley a year or so later.

I should also mention the multiple performances of Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, a supremely cheesy bluesy bar band that I had actually heard of before I saw Tuff Turf. They are the house band at Club 60s and look as though they are all permanently 55 years old. The song playing during the opening credits, and one that is echoed throughout the score, is the surprisingly great “Love Hates,” written by Jonathan Elias and performed by Marianne Faithfull. Elias, who is a well-known composer and producer, apparently co-wrote “I Do What I Do,” the John Taylor-sung song from the 9½ Weeks soundtrack. You know, the one where John sings like Ethel Merman?

No discussion of the Tuff Turf soundtrack would be complete without a discussion of “I Walk The Night,” which Morgan sings to Frankie in the country club scene. Unfortunately, this song does not appear on the soundtrack (which I have on vinyl and which is scratched up enough to indicate the many hours I have spent listening to it). And what’s worse is that the end credits only list Jonathan Elias as the songwriter, with no performer credit whatsoever. I can’t find proof of whether or not James Spader actually sings the song, but in a perfect world he does. How can you top lines like, “We lick our wounds as light rips through the night?” Answer: You can’t.

The Surfin’ Dead review of Tuff Turf (which is great, by the way) includes a link to a downloadable MP3 of “We Walk The Night.” Listen if you dare!

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3. The (Cheesy) Dialogue

Two of the most (unintentionally) hilarious scenes in the movie (which have provided endless in-jokes for my sister and me) are when Daddy Hiller gives Morgan a pep talk after Nick and his gang buddies beat the crap out of him. “Cut out all that self-pitying crap! I don’t want you to be Brian, I want you to be you!” The speech ends with some fairly useless hippy dippy claptrap:

Right now, you do what you… really wanna do. Do whatever it is that you know is right. That you believe in. That’s all. And feel good about it! Look, son. Life isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a mystery to be lived. So live it.

The other scene includes Morgan’s brother, the Brian referenced above, who is played by the almost unbearably wooden and dorky Bill Beyers. You’ve never heard of this guy for a reason. His self-righteous spiel after Morgan starts a fight with Mommy Hiller is the stuff of which bad acting classes are made. It’s not even listed on IMDB’s “Memorable Quotes” for the movie, which is regrettable, because it’s easily the best bit of bad dialogue in the whole movie.

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Nick gets lots of bad dialogue himself, though. I’m particularly fond of, “Oh yeah, if I ever catch you near Frankie again, I’ll take you out so fast, you won’t even have time to spit.” (This is one of many bits that I frequently quote in my daily life, regardless of whether or not other people have a clue as to what I’m on about. In fact, Tuff Turf may be the most-quoted movie of mine, not in terms of frequency, but in terms of the fact that I have almost the entire script memorized and can quote it whenever I get the urge.)

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2. Robert Downey, Jr.

I’ve shied away from mentioning Downey until now because his performance as Jimmy is an integral part of why I love Tuff Turf so much that it has to be Reason Two. I’ve often wondered what in the hell the guy would do if he wasn’t an actor; his wit, charm, and magnetism are overwhelming onscreen in just about everything he’s ever done. He’s just a natural. I don’t know for sure that his dialogue here is mostly adlibbed, but in certain parts of the movie (like the country club scene) it seems so. He absolutely steals the show. Tuff Turf and Weird Science kept me faithful that he would one day stop dicking around with drugs and courtrooms (a perfect example of how his natural charm has swayed others) and get back down to business.

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1. James Spader

When I was a teen, I just wanted to find a guy like Morgan Hiller: the sexy, smart rebel with a heart of gold. And a spade tattoo. And washboard abs. I can’t recall if I saw Tuff Turf on cable before or after Pretty In Pink came out in 1986, but at any rate, it started a massive James Spader crush that continued for years and years. Not all of his movies are top notch (The New Kids, for example) but when he’s good he’s really good. Besides being hopelessly beautiful, there’s something charismatic, something mysterious about him that comes through in every role he plays (okay, maybe not in Mannequin). He just commands attention. And then there’s the voice. It’s like velvet. I’ve seen most of his movies by now but Tuff Turf remains my favorite (with Secretary as a close, close second). And when he went on to win so many awards for his outstanding portrayal of Alan Shore on Boston Legal, I was thrilled that others were finally taking notice of what I’d been seeing all along.