I Saw A Film!

In the 80s were launched all these kids having a great time films that served to remind us of the sort of lives my friends and I were not living, though, this film set nearby us on a fairly obscure but locally famous beach resort island seemed like a local story to a degree. I was 21 when this film was available to us, but I rarely found myself at the beach, instead I was working in a lace mill and a fast food restaurant not far away from places I’d never been to, featured, possibly, in this story. It’s got features redolent of beach blanket bingo films, a commonality of which would be trying to save some piece of real-estate from being sold to careless developers who, in this case, would snatch it from the soft, guitar-strumming, hands of Demi Moore.

And so our intrepid band of brothers, including Billy Murray’s youngest sibling Joel, John Cusack a forlorn loveless sap and 80s stalwart Curtis Armstrong (Better off Dead and Revenge of the Nerds) along with a slew of comic side actors from Rich Hall to Joe Flaherty to Bobcat Goldthwait as Egg Stork (who has to be exhausted all the time), chase the cuties, take part in a beachbag’s worth of childish gags (Murray’s youngest buried in sand under a chair with a fat kid sitting on it eating chili level stuff) and a lot of weirdly violent and nightmarish cartoon goofiness that Cusack is meant to be feeling out his future with on paper. The most obvious help he could have given Demi’s little singing act would have been to design her some decent flyers. Instead the fellows decide to try to win a ridiculous yacht race with a montage built boat with a sports car engine somehow chainsawed into it.

At some point in this film Goldthwait ends up in a Godzilla costume and manages to attack a miniature model beach resort being sold to William Hickey while dozens of screaming people run aimlessly around with their arms in the air. There’s also a rabid dolphin mechanism being used for a film being shot that manages to attack an antagonist with a crossbow, and you really get the feeling that Savage Steve Holland who created this circus of silliness really just did so spontaneously over a lot of coke. It’s not a bad film, it’s just a remarkably silly one, but then so are a slew of similar teen films going back into the 50s. At least this one isn’t really attempting to modify any behavior, it’s mostly, ultimately about camaraderie and the chance that within the enemy’s midst are good hearted people who recognize their compatriots are actually shitty.

This runs about 3 bucks on Prime and is fun for a glimpse at the 35 year old past for so many of these cute actors. Aspects of this film feel like Cheech and Chong should have been in it.