Today’s Blast From The Past comes to us from 1990 and it’s a scary one.

In The Fourth Man, Peter Billingsley (yes, the kid from A Christmas Story) plays Joey Martelli, an insecure high schooler who thinks that he’ll be more attractive to girls if he becomes more like his best friend, friendly jock Steve Guarino (Vince Vaughn, making his film debut and already physically towering over everyone else in the cast).  With Steve’s encouragement, Joey tries out for the track team and, to everyone’s surprise, he makes it!

Joey is now an athlete.  He finally has friends.  Girls (including Nicole Eggert) are talking to him.  His father (Tim Rossovich) is finally proud of him.  But Joey soon discovers that staying on the track team is not an easy task.  His coach tells Joey that he has to pick up his speed.  Feeling desperate, Joey does what so many other television teenagers before him have done.  He starts taking steroids!  (Dramatic music cue!)  Soon, the kid from A Christmas Story is breaking out in pimples, throwing temper tantrums, and becoming a rage-fueled monster!  Joey only took the steroids because he wanted to be as cool as Steve but, unfortunatey, Joey learns too late that Steve’s success and popularity are not due to how big and strong he is but to the fact that he is played by a young Vince Vaughn.

(Myself, I was fortunate enough to go to a high school where the emphasis was placed more on the arts and intellectual pursuits than athletic success.  My school didn’t even have its own football field.  We had to share with the high school down the street!  Anyway, as a result, I don’t think knew anyone in high school who was abusing steroids and I never had to deal with anyone suddenly flying into a rage and punching a hole in a wall or any of the other stuff that always happens whenever anyone abuses steroids on television.)

The Fourth Man was written and directed by Joanna Lee, who is perhaps best known for playing Tanna the Alien in Ed Wood’s Plan Nine From Outer Space.  (Lee, it should be noted, had a very long and respected career as a writer and director of television dramas.  In many ways, she had the career that Ed Wood imagined that he would someday have.)  Along with Billingsley and Vaughn, the cast includes horror mainstay Adrienne Barbeau as Joey’s mother and football player-turned-horror-actor Lyle Alzado as a man who has his own history with steroids.  The film has good intentions and a good message about not taking shortcuts and being happy with who you are but I imagine that most people will just want to watch it to see Peter Billingsley descend into roid rage.  And I will say that, for all the film’s melodrama, there is something a little bit disturbing about watching fresh-faced Peter Billingsley turn into a physically aggressive bully.

From October of 1990 (and complete with the commercials than ran during the program’s first broadcast), here is The Fourth Man.