* "Fraternity Vacation." A comedy starring Stephen Geoffreys. Directed by James Frawley from a screenplay by Lindsay Harrison. Photographed by Paul Ryan. Music by Brad Fiedel. Running time: 89 minutes. A New World release.
* "Rappin'." A comedy with music staring Mario Van Peebles and Tasia Valenza. Directed by Joel Silberg from a screenplay by Robert Litz and Adam Friedman. Photographed by David Garfinkel. Music by Michael Linn. Running time: 92 minutes. A Cannon release.
* "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." A comedy with music starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt. Directed by Alan Metter from a screenplayby Amy Spies. Photographed by Thomas Ackerman. Music by Thomas Newman. Running time: 87 minutes. A New World release. All three films are in area theaters.
Wendell Tvedt, see, is this nerd from Iowa State who heads to Palm Springs with two of his buddies for a little leching.
Wendell is the central character of "Fraternity Vacation," one of three new "youth-oriented" films that opened here recently and that come with inch-deep matinee substance.
He's a kid who simply wants to have a nice, cozy time with the cute daughter of the Palm Springs police chief (a situation that is trouble in itself), but whose good buddies get him involved in a creepy competition involving a pair of rival fraternity brothers and a pretty virgin.
Wendell's also a virgin, and as played by Stephen Geoffreys (recently of ''Heaven Help Us"), he looks like what might result if the young Jack Nicholson of "Little Shop of Horrors " mated with Jerry Lewis' Julius Kelp from "The Nutty Professor."
Naturally, Wendell - who does a mean Wayne Newton imitation - turns out to be a natural, a better swordsman than any of the other four guys, all of whom fancy themselves Tom Selleck clones.
"Fraternity Party" is a wretched film. A colleague compared it to two dogs checking each other out. However, any movie that advances the notion that Wayne Newton is more sexually formidable than Tom Selleck gets my vote. Quality has nothing to do with it.
"Rappin'," from the director who gave us the original "Breakin'," is another ghetto-ized Mickey and Judy romp, in which the film's Mickey (Mario Van Peebles) - named John "Rappin' " Hood - gets out of jail, cleans up his native Pittsburgh (of not only gang warfare, but also greedy land development) and wins a recording contract.
He gets the girl, too (soap star Tasia Valenza). Everything has been sanitized and sugarized in the urban world here, so much so that the original Mickey and Judy look like cynical J.D.s by comparison.
But at least "Rappin' " has a semblance of a plot. "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" simply continues the dance contest that started with "Saturday Night Fever" and "Grease" and continued with "Fame," "Flashdance," ''Footloose" and the two "Breakin' " films. It's . . . bouncy.
Sarah Jessica Parker, nevertheless, is engaging as a nice Catholic girl trying to hide her penchant for sexy dance gyrations from her hard-nosed daddy.
STRA-A-ANGE A PAIR OF NEW MOVIES DEMONSTRATES HOW FUNNY THE NIGHTMARISH CAN BE
San Jose Mercury News (CA) - August 2, 1985
Author: GLENN LOVELL, Mercury News Film Writer
THERE'S some seriously weird stuff going on at the movies these days. We're talking cuckoo-crazy, as in stra-a-ange. But don't be alarmed. The odd goings-on in "Fright Night" and "Weird Science" (both opening today) will have you laughing so hard you'll almost forget your fears.
Almost -- but not quite.
As every spooky spoof from "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" to "Ghostbusters" reminds us, the horror genre with its creaky cliches and moldy monsters is perfect for teasing.
And that's exactly what the two young filmmakers behind today's new arrivals have done, in films that flit easily from the stylish to the silly, from the erotic to the eerie.
And with this range working for them, it's a safe bet that both will become required summertime viewing for the out-of- school-and-ready-to- howl set.
The more conventional "Fright Night" is an ingenious reworking of the Dracula legend. Only here the hero is a small-town kid with a vivid imagination, the vampire is a Valentino-suave neighbor played by Chris Sarandon, and the fearless vampire killer is a cowardly horror -movie star who's now hosting a "Creature Feature"-type TV program.
But don't go expecting another zany "Love at First Bite" lark. Though there are laughs aplenty in "Fright Night," written and directed by Tom Holland, there are also wonderfully nauseating makeup and bat effects that will have you hiding under your seat.
Indeed, Holland, who wrote "Psycho II" and last summer's overlooked "Cloak & Dagger," has whipped up the best tongue- in-cheek chiller since Joe Dante's "The Howling." And just as the Dante film revitalized the werewolf yarn, "Fright Night" gives the vampire melodrama a much-needed transfusion of humor and suspense.
And just as you think Holland has played his last devilish prank, he one-ups himself with more gruesome surprises and throwaway comedy touches (like the vampire throwing sparks by dragging his long fingernails along a banister).
Newcomer William Ragsdale plays Charley Brewster, a horror - movie buff who spies new neighbor Jerry Dandrige (Sarandon) with his next luscious victim. Charley spends the rest of the movie trying to convince his mom and friends that the mutilation murders being reported nightly are the work of an honest-to-gosh vampire.
Making matters even more frustrating is the fact that Dandrige is a smug charmer who mocks Charley's every feeble attempt to expose him. Like all the best fiends, Dandrige delights in taunting his adversary.
And when he really gets mad, Dandrige puts the bite on Charley's girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) and his already wacked-out buddy (Stephen Geoffreys of "Fraternity Vacation").
Holland, who doesn't always play fair with vampire lore and logic, has great fun making his hero squirm. At every turn Dandrige outsmarts his young crucifix-wielding opponent (Roddy McDowall as the TV show host). Worse, that blankety-blank bloodsucker mesmerizes Amy at the local disco in what has to be one of the hottest, funniest seduction scenes in recent years.
Sarandon really comes into his own as the supercilious vampire who becomes a howling, red-eyed banshee from hell when miffed. Geoffreys is also a scream as the freaky friend who's basically an insecure loser. This is really the old Renfield/ Igor role given a New Wave slant.
Credit Richard Edlund of "Ghostbusters" fame with the amazing visual effects, which include an appallingly graphic reverse transformation from wolf to boy and a dive-bombing vampire bat that's about the size of B-52 bomber.
What Edlund's makeup people do to Bearse's lovely smile in the final basement crypt scenes will have you tossing in your sleep for weeks to come.
'Weird Science" is something else again -- a deliriously funny mix of "National Lampoon's Animal House," "Risky Business," "The Road Warrior" and such vintage Disney hoots as "The Shaggy Dog" and "The Absent-Minded Professor."
Since we're title-dropping, we should add that it's a color-tinted print of that 1935 classic, "The Bride of Frankenstein," that inspires our two young nerd heroes to show up the preppy bullies at school by creating their very own dream girl.
''Just like Frankenstein -- 'cept cuter," drools Gary (Anthony Michael Hall of "Sixteen Candles" and "Breakfast Club").
''I'm not digging up any dead girls," whines the shyer Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith), who lives in mortal terror of his older brother, the snarling CroMagnum (sic) with the boot-camp crewcut.
Of course things have been refined a bit since Dr. Frankenstein's days on the moor. Now our heroes blend computer science with voodoo and a bit of old-fashioned studio fog to create a living doll named Lisa (Kelly LeBrock of "The Woman in Red").
Their toughest decision: Whether to favor boobs over brains.
''I want her to live. I want her to breathe. I want her to aerobicize," Gary rants in a hilarious variation on the original Frankenstein's exultant "It lives!"
As it turns out, Lisa is as bright and brassy as she is beautiful. And this works out just fine, because she can protect her horny creators from threatening elders, as well as lecture them on the importance of friends who "like you for what you are, not what you pretend to be."
In other words, the boys have hit the jackpot -- a centerfold nanny who shelters them at night and showers with them in the morning.
''Weird Science" runs out of things to say and do, so eventually it resorts to repetitious sight gags and effects as well as the obligatory car chase. But there's still more to howl over here than in any five other teen comedies.
Once again John Hughes ("Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club"), who also wrote the script, proves himself a master at capturing high-school angst. His young Frankensteins possess all the intensity and nervousness of real misfits, not the cartoonish "Goonies" variety.
And Mitchell-Smith and Hall complement each other beautifully. The former is charming and painfully shy; the latter mouthy and naughty. The mix results in some of the year's funniest moments -- first at a blues bar (where Hall becomes a rappin' "Saaay whaaat?" soul brother), then at a wild and crazy party that's crashed by a Pershing missile and a gang of motorcycle mutants straight out of "Mad Max."
''Weird Science" is a weird concoction all right -- weird, wonderful and unexpected.
Fright Night
(star)(star)(star) 1/2
R (fleeting nudity, nauseating makeup effects)
Cast: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Roddy McDowall Director-screenwriter: Tom Holland
Studio: Released by Columbia Pictures
Weird Science
(star)(star)(star)
PG-13 (profanity, nudity,
emphasis on sex)
Cast: Anthony Michael Hall, Kelly LeBrock, Ilan Mitchell-Smith
* "Weekend Pass." A comedy starring D.W. Brown, Peter Ellenstein, Chip McAllister and Patrick Hauser. Written and directed by Lawrence Bassoff. Photographed by Bryan England. Edited by Harry B. Miller III. Music by John Baer. Running Time: 92 minutes. A Crown-International release. In area theaters.
* "The Initiation." A thriller starring Vera Miles, Clu Gulager and Marilyn Kagen. Introducing Daphne Zuniga. Directed by Larry Stewart from a screenplay by Charles Pratt, Jr. Photographed by George Tiri. Music by Gabriel Black and Lance Ong. Running Time: 99 minutes. A New World release. In area theaters.
The precivilized nomads who are making movies these days - apparently movies for anyone seeking voluntary solitary confinement in movie houses - are back in action.
The culprits this week are Lawrence Bassoff, whose "Weekend Pass" gives the impression of having been made by a middle-aged alter boy dabbling in SIN, and Larry Stewart, the flesh-hungry type, if his film, "The Initiation," is any indication.
You couldn't come up with two more opposite films if you tried: "Weekend Pass" is as simple, creaky and, yes, innocent as "The Initiation" is convoluted, contemporary and evil. Seeing them both in one day - and back-to- back, no less - as I foolishly did makes for a most demoralizing movie outing.
On Friday, "Weekend Pass" was shown as part of an all-day preview with ''Where the Boys Are '84," and the 13-year-old intellectual who was sitting in front of me provided the best review of it when she flinched and dismissed this comedy about four gobs on leave in Los Angeles as "square." She preferred the sizzling "Where the Boys Are '84" (which, ironically, is about four gals on the loose in Fort Lauderdale).
Bassoff has integrated his film in the predictable way - one nerd (Peter Ellenstein), one black (Chip McAllister), one jock-type (Patrick Houser) and the staple stud (D.W. Brown) who, refreshingly enough, turns out to be the cut-up of the group. The guys clearly have sex on the brains, but Bassoff keeps tickling and teasing them and never really comes through for them - or us.
Much of the film is a tour of L.A., with the black character paying a visit to his ghetto home and feeling disillusioned, the stud trying out his stand-up style at a comedy club, the jock calling on an old flame and the nerd being turned into a pretzel by an avid Oriental masseuse.
All four guys, meanwhile, get to hang out at a strip joint and an aerobics class. Golly-gee! What fun. Did Bassoff actually think anyone would pay to see something like this?
Say what you will about the embarrassing naivete of "Weekend Pass," it is preferable to the inhuman gibberish of "The Initiation." This is a Freudian- slip-of-a- horror -film, far more complex than truly frightening.
A young college girl's initiation into a sorority is all tied up with ancient childhood fears about her mother and father and her mother's paramour. One of them was murdered, either the father or the paramour, and the other was incarcerated in an asylum. We never really know which is which, and neither does Kelly (Daphne Zuniga).
Kelly, in fact, has such swift mood swings that she may in fact be two people. Or she may simply be schitzophrenic. Who knows? Who cares?
Anyway, on the night of Kelly's initiation - which is to take place in the vacated shopping mall owned by her mother (Vera Miles) - Mr. So-and-So escapes from the asylum, and people start dropping like flies - or like bad actors.
Smack-dab in the middle of this bloody mess is a curiously introspective moment (I guess that it's Stewart's half-hearted way of exhibiting his sensitivity) in which one of Kelly's friends (the excellent Marilyn Kagen) tells about the time she was molested as a child. She is killed immediately after the confession, and by the end of the movie, just about everyone is dead.
I wouldn't have it any other way.
Parental Guide: Both are rated R, "Weekend Pass" for its profane humor, ''The Initiation" for its violence and references to sex
In recent years, film critics have bemoaned the tidal wave of toilet humor that has swept over American comedies. Hysterical breaks new ground in that it is manifestly designed to appeal to those who have yet to be toilet-trained.
In what amounts to consumer advice of admirable candor, one of the Hudson Brothers - on his way to a supposedly hilarious autopsy - warns that you are going to need a strong stomach to get through it. An empty head is also advisable for coping with the endless inanity of Hysterical. The film is set - or rather irretrievably mired - in a tiny resort town called Hellview. That is the one apt idea in Hysterical, since watching its scant 87 minutes seems like an eternal punishment.
At Columbia pictures, the executive who told Steven Spielberg that E.T. was a dumb idea for a movie still goes home with a fat paycheck. The people who approved the financing and production of Hysterical will doubtless continue in gainful employment, and that is a depressing prospect. Usually, when a movie is this abysmal, the makers can cite a commercial reason for its existence. With Hysterical, it is hard to imagine anyone out of diapers finding a minute of it remotely amusing.
The snickering screenplay is mostly the work of the Hudson Brothers, and it strays in and out of parody of horror films and hits like Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark. As a lampoon of the mad-killer genre, Hysterical is merely frightful. Yellowbeard, the current pirate spoof, acknowledges the problem of the parodist by offering more than puns on old Errol Flynn pictures. The horror movie presents a trickier proposition for humorists, whose ranks do not include the writers of Hysterical.
The occult and, more recently, the slasher films have been churned out in such numbers that each new one is no more than a collection of cliches and borrowings from its predecessors. Directors trying to be serious confront the dilemma by coming up with more inventive ways to kill their characters. Playing in this area for laughs is a losing bet almost every time. With the exception of High Anxiety, horror lampoons have nowhere to go but down.
Hysterical trots out every shopworn device with a child-like air of having discovered something fresh, and that lends the movie its especially awful quality. It has the look of a film that has been assembled at random. Richard Kiel, who played the steel-toothed villain in Moonraker, is a lighthouse keeper who returns from the dead to create mayhem in Hellview.
His attentions disturb the current occupant, a hack writer who has bought the property in the hopes of creating the great American novel. To call what happens in the rest of Hysterical the work of hack writers is to demean that lowly calling. The film forces an actor to look at a lighthouse and say, "I hope batteries are included."
Its one saving grace is the repeated appearance of the village idiot - the target audience for a film like Hysterical. "You're doomed," he says at every opportunity. It amounts to a fair warning to anyone unfortunate enough to have parted with honest money to sit through Hysterical.
HYSTERICAL
Produced by Gene Levy, directed by Chris Bearde; written by Bill Hudson, Mark Hudson, Brett Hudson, and Trace Johnston; photography by Robert Ragland, music by Don Morgan, distributed by Cinema Group; running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes. **SINGLEG*Captain - Richard Kiel
In terms of teenage sex films, "Wacko" - another opus from Greydon Clark, the public nuisance who just recently foisted "Joysticks" on us - is as about as arousing as a cadaver.
What we have here is teenage sexploitation, with a Hitchcock twist: Between its staple scenes of kids at Hitchcock High trying to get laid, the movie serves up quotes from Hitchcock films (most notably "The Birds" and ''Psycho"), as well as those made by such imitators as Brian De Palma and John Carpenter.
It's easy to see why these films are geared to the pre-pubescent, "how- about-a-joint?" crowd - only an uninformed, clouded mind could find anything to enjoy in these stinkers.
The resident virgin is a girl named Mary who, 13 years ago, witnessed the lawnmower mutilation/murder of her sister. Mary's beau is one Norman Bates who, true to his "Psycho" namesake, is also sexually untarnished.
Half of the cast of "Wacko" drops like flies; the other half makes pathetic attempts at having sex. (Is this film trying to say something?)
For the record, an embarrassing George Kennedy and a tacky Stella Stevens play Mary's incompetent parents, and Joe Don Baker, who hit a low point in ''Joysticks," sinks to rock bottom here as the disgusting gumshoe examining all the dead bodies that litter dear old Hitchcock High. He's downright odious.
**SINGLEG* Parental Guide: Rated R for its bloody ways and infrequent nudity.
Yes, Get Crazy has a scene in which guys clamber up a rickety ladder so they can gawk at a nubile cheerleader-type in her bubble bath.
Yes, there is a pimple-faced nerd whose virginity is taken by a beautiful blond woman who speaks in some strange Scandinavian tongue.
Yes, there are gratuitous masturbation jokes, gratuitous drug jokes, gratuitous (female) nude scenes and general gratuitous gratuitousness.
But there are also, in this low-budget, low-brow comedy, some wonderful satiric moments, one of the odder aggregations of actors and rock 'n' rollers you are likely to see in some time, and about a solid half-hour of frenzied, goofy entertainment.
What you have got here is this: a story about the backstage catastrophes/ high jinks/intrigues/hassles/
and whatnots that transpire during the preparation and presentation of a gala New Year's Eve rock concert. You have Max Wolfe (played by the not-untalented Allen Goorwitz) as the kindhearted veteran concert promoter; you have Neil Allan, our hero, an earnest, bemused young stage manager, played with earnest bemusement by the not-untalented Daniel (Diner, Breaking Away) Stern; you have aging British rock star Reggie Wanker, a shameless (and not very good) sendup of Mick Jagger by none other than Malcolm McDowell.
You have a supporting cast that runs the gamut from awful (Miles Chapin as Wolfe's simpy nephew; Stacy Nelkin as a spandexed schoolgirl) to awfully weird (Lee Ving, the rabid, cretinous lead singer of the punk band Fear, as a rabid, cretinous punk rocker called Piggy; Lou Reed as a '60s folk poet known as Auden, and Eating Raoul's Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov as a lecherous doctor and a no-nonsense lighting technician, respectively).
The bad guy in all this is Colin Beverly, a slimey rock promoter who wants/ needs/must have Wolfe's theater so he can erect an 88-story office building with his name on it. Decked out in a loose-fitting, silvery jumpsuit, Ed Begley Jr. waddles through the part of Beverly sneering snidely at anyone who looks at him crosswise, including his two dunderhead sidekicks, played by (no kidding) Bobby Sherman and Fabian. This last bit of casting is kind of pathetic.
Get Crazy was directed, sometimes deftly, sometimes shabbily, by Allan Arkush, whose Rock 'n' Roll High School has become something of a cult favorite on the midnight-movie circuit. An alumnus of Roger Corman 's New World studios, Arkush knows his dumb-teenage-sex-and-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll movie inside and out (the new issue of Movies refers to this genre as "horny noir"). He also knows his rock concerts: Arkush made his way through New York University film school working as an usher and stagehand at Bill Graham's Fillmore East.
In fact, some of Arkush's little nods to '60s psychedelia, including footage from a spacey 1920s cartoon that used to precede Grateful Dead shows at the Fillmore, are among the most inspired bits in the movie. There is also some fierce, droning rock (courtesy of Fear) that is worked into a sharply choreographed performance by New York dancer/performer Lori Eastside and her group. And then there is all the Porky's stuff - some of it funny, some of it just lame.
As it turns out, the funny and the lame are dished up in equal dollops, making Get Crazy, with its wonky cast and cheap effects, an erratic piece of entertainment.
Footnote for trend-spotters: Like Steve Martin's The Man With Two Brains, Get Crazy features a pet - in this case, a well-coiffed French poodle - being kicked with great, violent zeal from one end of a giant room to another.
GET CRAZY
Produced by Hunt Lowry, directed by Allan Arkush, written by Danny Opatoshu, Henry Rosenbaum, David Taylor, photography by Thomas Del Ruth, original music by Michael Boddicker, and distributed by Embassy Pictures; running time, 1 hour, 42 min. ***
