Truly Dreadful Film

It is a performances centric movie

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Johnny Walker (Anthony Michael Hall) is the star high school football quarterback and punter. Backup quarterback Leo Wiggins (Robert Downey Jr.) is his best friend that never gets into the game. Wayne Hisler (Paul Gleason) is the hated coach. They win the championship and Johnny is recruited by everybody. His girlfriend Georgia Elkans (Uma Thurman) wants him to follow her to State college for a solid education.There are nobody to like in this movie. This is trying to be a comedy but it's not funny. This subject could allow for a dark gritty realistic tale of bad recruitment practices but it's so fake. The writing is nowhere near sharp enough. It's always fascinating to see a young star and this one has Uma Thurman. Hall isn't convincing or likable. Downey is mugging for the camera too much without getting any laughs. This is Bud S. Smith's one and only directing credit. There's a reason for that.

Uma Thurman, in her movie debut at the age of 17 or 18, is as gangly and succulent as ever, and maybe more so. She's awfully easy on the eyes. Too bad there isn't more of her.That's about it, as far as I'm concerned. I can imagine others getting more out of this noisy and ridiculous flick about a high-school football hero being courted by various colleges who offer him money, bribes, margaritas, and of course sexy women.I can imagine most of those others being adolescents because the film illustrates and endorses all the adolescent virtues. That wouldn't in itself be the kiss of death. Some very amusing movies have been made about adolescence.But -- well, let me give two examples of humor in this movie. You're supposed to laugh at both of them.The story opens with a football game. One of the cheer leaders on our side has removed her pants. The two rival teams line up. The quarterback on our team shouts, "Hey, that cheerleader has no pants on!" The rival team glances over and our side bursts through their line.Example number two. The happy family of the hero is seated around the family dinner table and chatting away. Even the little daughter with the missing front teeth asks impudent questions. The scene closes with the family members and the guest throwing pieces of food at each other and laughing.If you find this funny, if you like loud electronic guitars and pounding percussion, if you find raunchy comments about genitals amusing in themselves, you will enjoy this movie.I don't know how it ended because I couldn't watch it all the way through, but I imagine that Johnny the football hero gives up money, celebrity, beer, and girls, joins a monastery and becomes a contemplative monk.

A catatonic-ally awful jock-ball pic form the late 80s seems to have been made as a vanity project by some BOOGIE NIGHTS style producers clearly in love with the cute twink looks of Anthiony Michael Hall. He is very desired apparently but all his charm and HOME ALONE star style looks were lost on me. JBG also stars the gorgeous Uma Thurman in a practice role to get a casting reel together, and the great Robert Downey Jnr scoring some easy money before becoming less than zero for a few years. Even Meg Tilly appears for a few squawks. The same three scriptwriters are the three producers and I would bet any money you like there was three big posters of AMH in each of their studio lockers. JBG is terrible, an embarrassment and a fawning leer at a teen actor disguised as a footy comedy. No wonder Orion Pictures went broke. It looks like a subterfuge gay movie pretending to be a mid-west college comedy. Perhaps a gay remake would be better. It would have to be.

Well, I did it. I had heard about how bad this movie was and I went down to the Borders Books & Music and bought it. After having turned it on and shut it off on at least 10 successive occasions, I finally made it to the end tonight. You see, every time I fired it up I thought, "The rest of it can't possibly be as awful as the part I just watched. They can't possibly insult the viewer's intelligence any more than they have." The filmmakers proved me wrong each time.The script was clunky, the photography is badly framed and poorly shot, and much of the film just doesn't make any sense. Also, there isn't a single sequence the conclusion of which you can't see coming from a mile away- come on, of COURSE Johhny's "side" was going to win the impromptu football game when he has one hand shackled behind his back- and his girl is the prize! And Johnny Walker strutting down the Main street of his staid, middle-American town dressed like he's on his way to a Gay bar on Cowboy Night?! How ELSE would his straight-laced family react than with shock, indignation and disgust? As to the actors, Uma is lovely, Downey is Downey (and I admit is pretty good in his standard hopped-up sidekick role, especially in the motel scenes,) but Hall seems completely uninterested in what he's doing. He really acts as if he didn't really want to do this film, in spite of the fact that he DID want a vehicle that would break his Brat Pack Geek-in-Chief image. I felt sorry for him. He was really cute, but that was it. His character, Johnny Walker, speaks to a crowd of having embarrassed himself towards the end of the picture. To me, it seemed that Hall delivered those lines with utter conviction, and I'm not surprised. If this were on my resume, I'd deny it. Hall has, of course, gone on to a viable and even admirable career. I guess it's really true that you can't keep a good man down, even if he makes such a potentially suicidal career choice as this film. It's a testament to the man's drive and determination to succeed that he left trash like this far behind him and kept working.Another gripe I have: screenwriters Zacharias and Buhai wrote the original "Revenge of the Nerds," so they ought to have known what would work in a Youth comedy. Apparently they forgot.The two worst aspects of this film, however, were these: first, it was unbelievably boring (and a bad movie that is boring is the worst bad movie of all); secondly, the lampooning of corruption in collegiate football is a viable topic and it could have worked if the script had been decent, the story been told in a logically plotted arc, Bud Smith hadn't directed and Hall had acted like he cared (and not mumbled his lines as if he were auditioning for the first time at a Junior High School's offering of Romeo and Juliet.) I give this ludicrous waste of my time a 1.