Indiscretion (2016)
Directed by John Stewart Muller
Written by Laura Boersma, John Stewart Muller
Produced by Laura Boersma, John Stewart Muller, Timothy Rhys, Thomas Beach, Gabe Lang, Alexandra Bentley, J.C. Cantu, Joseph Suarez, Dylan Matlock, Frederick Schroeder, Aric Avelino, Randy Newman, Keylee Sanders, Therese Beach, George Kevin Chapin, Karen Clark, Barbara Gallagher, Ron Gallagher, William Kyte, Jerry Lang, Joni Lang, Kevin Lynch, Kathleen S. Muller, Aaron Peterson, Susie Peterson
Starring Mira Sorvino, Christopher Backus, Cary Elwes, Katherine McNamara, LisaGay Hamilton, Shane Callahan, Melora Walters
For pleasure and political profit, a psychiatrist (Sorvino) unsatisfactorily wed to a maritally derelict, reputedly unfaithful New Orleanian councilman (Elwes) assesses, seduces, then manipulates an obsessively unstable sculptural bricoleur, whose ascendant repute exceeds his talent, to murder her husband so that she can undertake for his flagging senatorial campaign by exploiting popular sympathy to endorse a ticket of disarmament. That stratagem’s exposited by her dupe at the denouement of this garishly lit, positively prognosticable crime drama evidently occurring in Lifetime’s and Netflix’s parallel universe, where detectives don’t exist. Your complimentary spoiler isn’t half so much an affront as the conjoint investment by extravigesimal, moneyed barnacles to produce this dreck, which portrays as predictably as its plot marriage as a cell to be escaped, for the gratification of embittered housewives and monition of young, germinal careerists — an intimation that’s familiarly pernicious in mundane, contemporary agitprop. Like everyone else here, Sorvino and Backus (whose career’s initiation concurs with that of their marriage) are clearly grinding through the motions, generating exiguous eroticism during their characters’ fling, and even less interest while he’s loudly stalking her or romancing her gorgeous, gormless daughter (McNamara). As poorly plotted as thrillers come, it only deviates from convention at its unbelievable conclusion; as seedy bait for vicarious and disgruntled devil’s advocates, it’s as putrid as any of the effluent issued by Blumhouse.
Instead, watch Diabolique, Fatal Attraction or Obsessed.
Tag: CFS2017
Execrable: The Damned
The Damned, A.K.A. Gallows Hill (2013)
Directed by Víctor García
Written by Richard D’Ovidio, David Higgins
Produced by Peter Block, Andrea Chung, David Higgins, Richard D’Ovidio, Cristina Villar, Mauricio Ardila, Julián Giraldo
Starring Peter Facinelli, Sophia Myles, Nathalia Ramos, Sebastian Martínez, Carolina Guerra, Juan Pablo Gamboa, Gustavo Angarita, Julieta Salazar
Preteen girls might be rattled by this hackneyed horror’s witching-by-numbers, as drippy and dreary a contribution to the genre as any in the past decade. En route from Bogotá to Medellín, a flash flood and their everyday idiocy strand a photographer (Facinelli) and his fiancée (Myles), opportunistic sister-in-law (Guerra), irksome daughter (Ramos), and her boyfriend (Martínez) in Colombian backcountry, where they find shelter from an unceasing downpour in a hotel that’s been shuttered for nearly thirty-five years. Against warnings from its aged proprietor (Angarita), that aforementioned stupidity motivates them to free from his basement a suspiciously imprisoned girl (Salazar), along with the dead witch who’s possessed and preserved her. Despite a few bright ideas invested in D’Ovidio’s story and Asdrúbal Medina’s fastidiously fine production design, any hope for a single scare’s smothered by syrupy reminiscence, unconvincing CG, a sequence of exhausted cliches and Frederik Wiedmann’s hoary score, which reliably disturbs any emerging trace of spooky mood. Facinelli’s blandly adequate as a milksop who’s as senselessly unprepared for action as the rest of his party, and so a fit lead subject to García’s able, unremarkable direction. Were Ramos less obnoxious, and D’Ovidio’s and Higgins’ dialogue not so bathetic, this might’ve been mediocre.
Instead, watch either version of The Old Dark House.
Palatable: The Party
The Party (1968)
Directed by Blake Edwards
Written by Blake Edwards, Tom Waldman, Frank Waldman
Produced by Blake Edwards, Ken Wales, Walter Mirisch
Starring Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Gavin MacLeod, J. Edward McKinley, Denny Miller, Steve Franken, Fay McKenzie, Kathe Green, Allen Jung, Danielle De Metz, Linda Gaye Scott, Herbert Ellis, Sharron Kimberly, Frances Davis, Timothy Scott, Jean Carson
Tati meets the Marx Brothers meets Mad Magazine, then bombs after its opening night, which concurred with Martin Luther King’s assassination! Between Pink Panthers, Edwards and Sellers contrived this experimental extravaganza starring the comic genius in brownface as a cordial, calamitously clumsy Indian actor inadvertently invited to a soiree at the swankily hideous mansion of a studio executive (McKinley) whose war epic he’s accidentally wrecked, where he repeatedly makes an ass of himself and a shambles of nearly everything he touches. Goofy revelry and mishaps ensue his encounters with the stuffy harbinger and his wife (McKenzie), a progressively drunken cater waiter (Franken), one friendly, French actress (Longet) accompanying a lecherous producer (MacLeod), a raucous star of Westerns (Miller) flirting with a juicy Italian actress (De Metz), and a painted elephant adopted by the hosts’ sprightly daughter (Green), whose clamorous coterie further enlivens the party, as does a jazz band and a rumbustious, Russian ballet troupe. In wide static shots and drifting pans, slapstick stupidities partially improvised from Edwards’ and the Waldmans’ skeletal screenplay bump, bumble, stagger, stumble and crash in plotless luxury, as the gentle, inelegant Hindu and deliberately disorderly guests carouse with rising ruction to a riotously, redundantly sudsy culmination. Sensible viewers can safely ignore ludicrous leftists who liken Sellers’ silly yet sensitive creation of his lovably mansuete goofball to minstrel shows. A victim of critical misevaluation and unfortunate coincidence, this commercial washout deserves reappraisal as a tarnished comedic gem of late Old Hollywood and Edwards’ and Sellers’ most daring collaboration, shot observationally with understated craft on a stupendous set populated by character actors who don’t miss a beat. For such quality, and its commentary on the predatory predispositions of Tinseltown’s loathsome elites and the culture shock that redounds to half of its protagonists’ follies, this farce is a few cuts above.
Recommended for a double feature paired with A Shot in the Dark or Playtime.
Execrable: Hot Girls Wanted
Hot Girls Wanted (2015)
Directed by Jill Bauer, Ronna Gradus
Written by Brittany Huckabee
Produced by Jill Bauer, Ronna Gradus, Rashida Jones, Brittany Huckabee, Mary Anne Franks, Debby Herbenick, Bryant Paul, Daniel Raiffe, Kat Vecchio, Abigail Disney, Barbara Dobkin, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Chandra Jessee, Evan Krauss, Ann Lovell, Julie Parker Benello, Gini Reticker, Jacki Zehner
Starring Tressa Silguero, Riley Reynolds, Rachel Bernard, Kendall Plemons, Kelly Silguero, Emeterio Silguero, Ava Kelly, Lucy Tyler, Michelle Toomey, Ivan H. Itzkowitz III, Levi Cash, Tony D.
In this abhorrent age when exhibitionism and prostitution are selectively celebrated, nobody comes cheaper than an amateur pornstar, such as several vacuous vicenarians and teens (Silguero, Bernard, Tyler, Toomey, et aliae) by Craigslist procured, then housed in a Miamian residence by an oafish “talent agent” (Reynolds). These halfwitted harlots earn an average pittance of $800 per shoot (approximately $2,400-$4,000 weekly), yet pay steep vestural and medical costs while sustaining much more physical and emotional wear than moderately successful camgirls and models who’ve superior recompense. Bauer’s and Gradus’s sloppily shot documentary accidentally divulges these girls as opportunistically obscene yet gullibly gormless and remarkably self-centered, less victims than fungible, cretinous, covetous cogs who extenuate their degrading, entirely elective profession in a tired and contracting industry that competes with homemade pornography and relatively restrained streaming sluts by working cheap, disposable, superabundant talent. Somberly, suggestively depreciative intertitles cite statistical data regarding the popularity of amateur porn and its industry’s lack of regulation to provoke sheltered boomers and Xers, but provide no further context to the movie’s accurate postulation that the normalization of pornography proceeds from an urban cultural degeneracy, a condition to which this production owes its trashy trappings. Neither does it comparatively explore the myriad of lucrative online options for attractive young women of limited means and intelligence, only a few of which are scarcely mentioned. They have obliged budding hustlers if the filmmakers have deterred but a few hundred from participation in this especially sleazy, abusive, potentially injurious form of porn, as by their even-handed depiction of Silguero’s ordinarily short career, resultant maladies and retirement at the advice of her mother and spinelessly dithering boyfriend (Plemons). Akin to this flick’s other aforelisted, preposterously profuse productional parasites, that overt dearth of talent that Bauer, Gradus and especially Jones have evidenced in their piffling corporate careers has always been supplemented by their galling congenital privilege, which they agonize to arrogate to a patriarchy that hasn’t existed for decades. As heritors of nepotism and commissaries of a contemporary feminism that’s far more disposed to gainfully exploit the unfortunate indiscretion of poor and middle-class women and skew its consequences as “oppression” rather than empower them by promoting an embarrassment of available alternatives, they prove themselves specimens of their ignoble, incompetent, pietistical class. So few in their stratum care to grasp that the little people who whore themselves do so volitionally.
Instead, watch Escorts or Rocco.
Execrable: Je t’aime moi non plus
Je t’aime moi non plus (1976)
Written and directed by Serge Gainsbourg
Produced by Jacques-Eric Strauss, Claude Berri
Starring Joe Dallesandro, Jane Birkin, Hugues Quester, Nana Gainsbourg, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Gerard Depardieu
Ever the trailblazer, Gainsbourg baked cinema’s first great queer turkey years before that particular platter was served annually as Oscar bait. In a rural pseudo-America, the relationship of two strapping, gay garbagemen is disrupted when that twosome’s hunkier homo (Dallesandro) falls for a boyish gamine (Birkin) employed as the barmaid of a remote roadside cafe, to the chagrin and eventual, violent ire of his embattled boyfriend (Quester). Lest he deviate from wont, their transitory romance is consummated with shrieking sodomy, for which they’re ejected from several hotels. Trite (if not tame) by contemporary standards, Gainsbourg’s foul fiasco hasn’t much to recommend it save the considerable, concerted screen presence of its attractive stars. Alas, Quester is the only one among them who can actually act; the camera loves them both, but Little Joe is almost as stiffly unfit when dubbed as usual, and hasn’t any chemistry with the director’s scrawnily curveless mistress. Their adorable bull terrier Nana steals her every scene, mayhap because she’s spared any lines. As in all his pictures, some tackily gimmicky shots are sprinkled throughout elsewise technically sound direction, and ham-fisted symbolism abounds in most scenes, uttered often as daft dialogue verifying that Serge’s verbal verve was strictly lyric. Just as wearisome are his patently sham American trappings: a Mack truck, hamburgers, bluejeans and a rock band that performs during and after a horrific competition of dumpy ecdysiasts. Depardieu’s briefly squandered in the role of an addled equestrian, as is perennial nebbish Michel Blanc. Nearly a decade after its controversial release, voxless variants of Gainsbourg’s classic, celebrated, titular, trademark signature single serenade the leads as they kiss ineptly. Lingering shots of a dumpsite and a climax wherein Birkin and Dallesandro generate minimal erotic heat via anal intercourse in the bed of his garbage truck remind us what this movie is, and where it belongs.
Instead, watch Going Places.
Palatable: The Founder
The Founder (2017)
Directed by John Lee Hancock
Written by Robert Siegel
Produced by Jeremy Renner, Don Handfield, Aaron Ryder, Michael Sledd, Parry Creedon, Glen Basner, Holly Brown, Alison Cohen, David Glasser, David S. Greathouse, William D. Johnson, Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, Karen Lunder, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein
Starring Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch, B.J. Novak, Laura Dern, Linda Cardellini, Kate Kneeland, Patrick Wilson, Justin Randell Brooke, Griff Furst, Wilbur Fitzgerald, David de Vries, Andrew Benator, Cara Mantella
“The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.”
–Ray Kroc
In his own words: “I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced the best was ahead of me.” In the mid-’50s, aging salesman Ray Kroc (Keaton) itinerated interstate, struggling with sporadic success to peddle Prince Castle’s deluxe milkshake mixers to proprietors of drive-ins, whose sloppy refections and shoddy service courtesy of pretty, rollerskating carhops were insults added to every unsold injury. To satisfy a seemingly impossible order for eight such units in San Bernardino, he happened upon a modern miracle of a little eatery that prepared for lengthy queues cheap, savory, instantaneously prepared burgers, French fries and milkshakes by skilled, sanguine, sanitary staff indoors. A tour of this facility by its owners, designers and managers, Richard (Offerman) and Maurice (Lynch) McDonald, fascinates Kroc, as does their alacritous account over dinner of their career in the food service industry: thirty years of presentational and logistical trial and error developed with Mac’s procedural and mechanical inventions, Dick’s showmanship and their shared, reductive intent to eliminate troublesome conventions that resulted in a sedulously subtilized system that optimized both quality of service and product, and a quantity sufficient to satisfy every customer. The loquacious pitchman’s consequently obsessed with a vision to franchise this local invention of fast food; after selling himself and their own business recontextualized as a boldly branded national chain to the circumspect siblings, he contracts with them as a franchiser to succeed where they failed to maintain the cibarious homogeneity and competence of extraneous outlets. Forays into new markets prove remunerative, but frustrating for that recurrent qualitative slide and their menus’ regional drift, so the energetic Kroc replaces their managers with hungry, capable employees with whom he identifies, such as a hawker of Bibles (Benator) and a veteran of the Korean War (Franco Castan) who sells vacuum cleaners door to door. Despite his booming eastward growth, burgeoning eminence and obligation of his mortgaged house for capital, Kroc finds himself at a midwestern impasse and knee-deep in arrears for a deficit of revenue imputable to the restrictions of his contract, but a fortuitous encounter with financier Harry J. Sonneborn (Novak) introduces him to his shrewdest business partner, who convinces him to preveniently purchase prospective plots of his outlets and lease them to his franchisees via a corporation, to which he’s eventually appointed by Kroc as its first president and CEO. By virtue of this M.O., the franchise’s profits and expansion magnified twentyfold, but Kroc’s failing marriage to his neglected wife (Dern), invited designs on the spouse (Cardellini) of a successful restaurateur and multiple franchisee (Wilson) and loggerheads with the brothers McDonald reveal the chatty oligopolist’s amoral avaritia for limitless commerce.
Its intricate period detail and perfectly picked players sell Hancock’s congenially conventional biopic, which is faithful enough to substantially portray a personage who’s as much its antagonist as protagonist. Ever-squirrely Keaton mimics with slight amplification Kroc’s accent and mannerisms, enacting the roguish devil with fidelity to his characteristic brio and glimpses of his elusive sensitivity. Everyone else serves as his foil with buttoned-down bearings true to this staid era. Warhorses of many quirkily mundane roles, Offerman and Lynch look and feel genuine as the ingenuously principled craftsmen who pioneered the revolutionary model arrogated by their franchiser, and Novak’s icily mesmerizing as Sonneborn. Most fictive and biographic features are muddled by exposition and cutbacks, but thanks to Siegel’s accessible dialogue, Hancock’s demonstrative composition and Robert Frazen’s measured editing, these are the picture’s highlights: at a tennis court, Dick and Mac train their staff and gradually devise an ideal layout for their restaurant’s production line with chalked, commensurate diagrams; Sonneborn enkindles in the audience a glimmer of the same excitement and relief that Kroc must’ve felt when elaborating on the potential of the chain’s most significant single strategy; Kroc petitions synagogues, Shriners’ Halls and Masonic Lodges for investment with an exhaustively rehearsed sales talk eulogizing familial values. Siegel’s script often deviates from accuracy for dramatic purposes: neither was Kroc’s divorce from his first wife so suddenly announced, nor his feuds with the McDonalds quite so wroth, and Cardellini seems sexier behind a piano than an organ when she first entrances her future husband. Ultimately, both Kroc and the McDonalds personify phases of postwar prosperity — the former is an avatar of the tenacity and ambition that advanced the United States’ extraordinary industries in the twentieth century, and the latter typical of so many innovators whose creations facilitated it. Bombs are still as American as apple pie.
Recommended for a double feature paired with Sometimes a Great Notion.
Mediocre: Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night
Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night (1987)
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Written by Robby London, Barry O’Brien, Dennis O’Flaherty
Produced by Lou Scheimer, Erika Scheimer, Robby London, John Grusd
Starring Scott Grimes, Jonathan Harris, Don Knotts, Edward Asner, Frank Welker, William Windom, Tom Bosley, Rickie Lee Jones, Lana Beeson, James Earl Jones, Linda Gary
Flush with lucre in its twilight years for successful, crudely animated adaptations of He-Man, She-Ra and all those other Masters of the Universe, Filmation leapt late upon Disney’s coattails to exploit Carlo Collodi’s classic juvenile novel; as one might expect, the results are at best pedestrian, and at worst as shoddy as a theatrical cartoon comes. On his first human birthday, the transmuted tot (Grimes) offers to deliver a jeweled box crafted by Geppetto (Bosley) for a mayoral commission that represents the modest acme of the craftsman’s career; he’s fleeced forthwith of the handicraft by a procyonine diddler (Asner) and his fezzed, primate secondary (Welker), and during misadventures largely consequent of his many betises, the guileless stripling finds himself twice relignified by a ghoulishly sorcerous puppeteer (Windom) and his satanic master (Jones), despite the subvention of the foregoing finaglers, an arrogant, apian aviator (Harris) and a wooden glowworm (Knotts). Co-founder Sutherland concluded his directorial career with this apparently well-intentioned feature, which is but a slight qualitative cut above Filmation’s usual fare: uninspired character design and low framerates are partially counterbalanced by prettily painted backgrounds and foregrounds, and some fair photic effects, a few of which are imaginatively rotoscoped. Alas, this movie’s overplus of unfunny comic relief padding its runtime by temporization is likely only to amuse the smallest kids, who might well be traumatized by some of its nightmarish scenes. Charmlessly cloying but inoffensive, its vocal dream cast is the most notable distinction of a product marketed to kids who couldn’t be bothered to care.
Instead, watch Unico in the Island of Magic.
Palatable: Faults
Faults (2014)
Directed and written by Riley Stearns
Produced by Keith Calder, Jessica Calder, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Roxanne Benjamin, Chris Harding, Brian Joe
Starring Leland Orser, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Ellis, Beth Grant, Jon Gries, Lance Reddick
Few are so vulnerable or amenable than during a forlorn nadir, as that suffered by a disgraced expert (Orser) of cultic phenomena posterior to his career’s collapse: divorced, indebted, indigent, homeless and sleeping as often as not in his godforsaken AMC Pacer, the whilom celebrity hawks a piffling hardback feebly redolent of his prior bestseller when hosting lectures of waning attendance worsened by his peckishly petty personality. After one such seminar, an aging suburban couple (Ellis, Grant) approach him to abduct, sequestrate and deprogram their daughter, an ardent cultist (Winstead). What first seems an opportunity to reverse his fortunes by settling a debt to his brutish, onetime manager (Gries) spirals suddenly into an uncontrollable nightmare: the infamous doctor’s quietly beguiled as much by the resolve and allure of his kidnapped patient as her faith’s intrigue, while her father’s aggression intimates a paternal impropriety, destabilizing their apparent progress no less than a series of mystifying occurrences, all compounded by the pressuring presence of his creditor’s dire, dapper deputy (Reddick), who duns the bedeviled psychotherapist with veiled threats. Optimally static shots and slow zooms constitute most of Stearns’ first feature, which prepossesses at a leisurely pace wherein scarcely a penetrating, amusing or disconcerting moment’s wasted. Orser’s a seasoned character actor who deserves a lead now and again, and creates his shrewd, shallow, ruined pop psychologist at the brink of caricature, but pulls back for glimpses of insight and affirmations of his frailties and humanity. His exchanges with Winstead are as perfectly played as sharply scripted; clinician and subject gradually interchange, she leading by expounding her metaphysical convictions and aspirations, and emitting a sex appeal nearly imperceptible for its nicety. Most of the supporting players are as colorfully outstanding as costumes, sets and cars selected to lend this microproduction a fashion evocative of the early ’80s. Gries is especially memorable as the creepily effeminate professional photographer of domestic portraits, whose squeaky-clean idiolect, replete with minced oaths, contrasts with his violent temperament. A cameo whereby A.J. Bowen uncharacteristically overplays an aggrieved relative who confronts Orser’s fallen specialist at one of his pissant events should’ve been reshot entirely, and some humor during the picture’s first fifteen minutes falls flat. Otherwise, the Texan photographer turned filmmaker adroitly juggles comedy and drama with dashes of arcana all scrupulously shot, and tautly cut by one Sarah Beth Shapiro. Ironically, Stearns lost his leading ladylove to the Anglosphere’s greatest cult after Winstead divorced him in starkly hypergamous favor of a dimwitted, Scottish leading man, with whom she stridently signals her virtue to promote horrendous independent and studio productions to which she’s now committed. That’s a subject for another review or twelve; this penultimate picture in which her histrionic potential was tapped after transitioning to serious roles suggests what might’ve been, and potently portrays how privation of wealth, society and self-respect lays the mind supine to suggestion.
Palatable: XXY
XXY (2007)
Directed by Lucía Puenzo
Written by Sergio Bizzio, Lucía Puenzo
Produced by Luis Puenzo, José María Morales, Carla Pelligra, Fernando Sirianni, Fabienne Vonier
Starring Inés Efron, Ricardo Darín, Martín Piroyansky, Valeria Bertuccelli, Germán Palacios, Carolina Pelleritti, Guillermo Angelelli, Ailín Salas, Luciano Nóbile
Had this movie been produced but six or seven years ulterior, at the advent of a transmania aggressively propagandized by mass media outlets in the western hemisphere, it might not have enjoyed global distribution, for Puenzo’s straight, sympathetic treatment of the gynandromorphic condition belies every delusional jeremiad loudly publicized via social media by pre-op lunatics and a minority of legitimately transsexual exhibitionists fomented by this wholly calculated craze. At their home on the Uruguayan seashore, the family of a froward, adolescent androgyne (Efron) is, for an invitation by her mother (Bertuccelli), visited by an imperious, accomplished cosmetic surgeon (Palacios) with his wife (Pelleritti) and sensitive son (Piroyansky), whose fleeting friendship with the huffy hermaphrodite enables an unusual exploration of their inchoate sexuality. Otherwise, this visitation broaches the ineludible question of whether she’ll submit to sexual assignment after abjuring antiandrogens for weeks, an option that her father (Darín), a marine biologist, opposes in concern for her welfare. As directorial forays come, this adaptation of Bizzio’s short story finds Argentine cinema’s most fortunate daughter living up to her father’s reputation by capably balancing subjective compassion with the indisputable medical and social consequences of a fascinating chromosomal anomaly. Dialogue’s nearly as minimal here as in her future pictures, and tyros Efron and Piroyansky were as histrionically consummate as old stagers Darín, Palacios, Pelleritti, Bertuccelli, et al., all subtly expressive in complete characterizations, especially during gazing and glancing caesurae. Her composition and continuity are as professional as Puenzo’s direction of her cast; alas, Natasha Braier’s cinematography, which includes sweeping vistas of the southern cone’s seacoast and offing, is uglified by the applications of green and blue filters. Satisfyingly, Bizzio’s conclusion affirms biological primacy and deliberated discretion over suspect medical trends. Maybe nature’s irregularities aren’t always errors.
Efron and Salas were effectively recast in Puenzo’s second feature, The Fish Child.
Mediocre: License to Drive
License to Drive (1988)
Directed by Greg Beeman
Written by Neil Tolkin
Produced by John Davis, Andrew Licht, Jeffrey A. Mueller, Mack Bing
Starring Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, Michael Manasseri, Carol Kane, Richard Masur, Heather Graham, Nina Siemaszko, James Avery
Frolic and amatory ambitions of a gawky, gawking, suburban schlub (Haim) hinge on acquisition of but two desiderata:
- His grandfather’s mammoth, pickily preserved 1972 Cadillac, which he can’t borrow until he procures:
- His driver’s license
After passing his road test and dumbly flunking his computerized driving exam, he annexes the Brobdingnagian boat anyway to romance his lovely, lively objet du désir (Graham), and patronize a bouncy drive-in restaurant with his buddies, an unflappable dynamo (Feldman) and a nerdy amateur photographer (Manasseri). Household idiocy, teenage inexperience and goofy fortuities occasion an utterly uninsurable night of disorder and destruction for which the hapless highschooler’s entirely liable. As often on wheels as not, this second of the Coreys’ vehicles is probably their best, risibly scripted by Tolkin and careening by coordinator Joe Dunne’s surplus of sensational stunts at breathless celerity, from an opening that sends up the first sequel of A Nightmare on Elm Street to an amusingly ruinous conclusion. Their co-stars optimize as entertainingly as the blow-dried, daffy dyad, especially cuddly Masur and edacious, enceinte Kane, who satisfy their fans’ expectations as Haim’s parents. Only our era of fun produced performers as likably ludicrous as Haim and Feldman, or such unabashedly silly, thrilling comedies of a species that’s now all but extinct. Watch and enjoy without impedimentary sense.
Recommended for a double feature paired with Sex and the Single Girl, American Graffiti, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Adventures in Babysitting or Tommy Boy.