"Hey, Hoops, you ever notice how people die in alphabetical order?”
The Story:
Graduation day is upon us at Generic High School, where Hoops McCann (John Cusack) and his buddy George Calamari (Joel Murray) are about to walk across the stage before jumping right into summer break. After they pick up aspiring singer/songwriter Cassandra (Demi Moore), who is on the run from a biker gang, they board a ferry to Nantucket, where a bizarre cast of characters awaits. Among them is a sleazy Beckersted family, who intend to claim the estate of Cassandra’s grandfather and turn into the site of a new restaurant.
The Review:
The Review:
The second Savage Steve Holland film starring Cusack, One Crazy Summer mostly lives up to its title. The first effort, Better Off Dead, is somewhat angsty, winter-bound, and laced with black comedy, and this is its sunnier counterpart. With the exception of an oddly mean spirited incident of dog kicking, this is yet another silly, weird romp from the mind of Savage, who is no doubt represented in the film by aspiring cartoonist Hoops. The animated interludes provide Hoops’s slapstick commentary on the already surreal events in his life; it’s a cartoon world of critical bunnies that he likes to perforate with bullets. Of course, because this is a Savage Steve film, real life proves to be every bit as strange, though, this time around, the unbelievable stuff mostly works out in favor of our intrepid hero to create some sort of teenage fantasy world.
Such a world is full of zany oddballs, of course. Hoops isn’t as awkward as Lloyd Dobler, but he’s every bit of a good guy who operates somewhere between being a lovable loser and a self-assured, cool kid. I have trouble ever imagining 80s Cusack to be a jerk--there’s just something unbelievably sincere about the characters he plays. His counterpart is the husky-voiced Moore, whom we also find to be more sincere than the voracious blonde (Kimberly Foster) who inexplicably takes an interest in Hoops. Also among Hoops’s cadre is Curtis Armstrong, who is effectively low-key, dialed way down from Booger levels of inanity in the role of a good-hearted goof who isn’t at all cut out for the military career his father envisions for him. A couple of dimwitted twins round out the ragtag group, with Bobcat Goldthwait often stealing the show as a twitchy, motor-mouthed spaz with a Tourettes-inspired inflection. They’re the clear underdogs in the struggle that emerges with their affluent antagonists--Matt Mulhern is a wonderfully douchy 80s villain, a smarmy, fair-haired kid of privilege.
His rivalry with Hoops starts out as usual teen movie stuff--they briefly scrap over Kimberly Foster’s affections before the plot gives way to the Beckersted scheme to take over he land. Of course, the ‘Cuse does not abide such shenanigans, leading to a fun-filled climax. On the way there, One Crazy Summer manages to generally be more fun than funny--the humor is mostly juvenile and off-beat stuff (a recurring gag finds Murray buried up to his neck in the sand and on the business end of chili-fuelled flatulence). Holland’s brand of zany humor is uniquely his own, with most of the laughs coming from the sheer absurdity of the situations. He also works in some film clever film spoofs that target Jaws, Godzilla, and slasher flicks (a drive-in film within the film makes me wish Holland had tried his hand at that genre). However, One Crazy Summer ultimately works because it embraces the “endless summer” fantasy and doesn’t ponder the angsty issues that the calendar eventually brings. With the exception of Armstrong‘s issues with his dad, this one presents an idyllic teen comedy world where every problem is easily solved by John Cusack winning a boat race. (Brett G.)
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