Rating: 15/20
Plot: The titular high school friends terrorize the Schwab family and the suburban middle class in general.
I know, I know. Giving this much-maligned Robert Altman inexplicable teen comedy that may or may not be a parody of other teen comedies a 15/20 is going to get me called an Altman fanboy or something, but I really dig this movie. Like a lot of Altman movies, this is light on plot. It's breezy, a series of non sequiturs and oddball moments and half-heard lines, a hodgepodge of the bizarre. It's ornery Altman, one that might laugh at the same fart joke he's already heard three times. But you know what? This movie is downright entertaining and very funny. There's an absurdist slant to the whole thing that makes it, although still very much an Altman bastard of a movie, very different from other movies. You almost have to appreciate a movie that isn't going to appeal to anybody who might be the intended audience--not the people who like raunchy teen comedies like Porky's or the people who liked Altman's movies in the 70s. The rapport of the leads--Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry, neither who went on to do all that much--is great. There's a natural connection that helps hold this whole mess together. Ray Walston gets a great part as gramps, and Dennis Hopper is in there playing a crazed Vietnam vet like only Dennis Hopper can. It's also got one of the coolest movie cars you'll ever see, a car the characters buy specifically because it will be really loud and disrupt the lives of ordinary people. And that's kind of how this movie is--it's disruptive jab in the eye. In a good way! Nearly brilliant and undeniably stupid, this baffling little film would be almost impossible for me to recommend to anybody but myself and fans of King Sunny Ade.
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