One Crazy Summer

 Well, summer is over. Kids are back in school, Michigan’s weather is alternating between hot and swampy and rainy and swampy, and Wal-Mart is already stocking Christmas trees. Summer blockbusters are on their way out and the high prestige awards-season films are coming up. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Instead, I want to pay homage to the end of hot weather, time on the beach, and hanging out with your friends on endless Friday nights. 

Specifically, I want to talk about a movie you might have missed, the largely forgotten 80s schlock comedy, One Crazy Summer written and directed by Savage Steve Holland. Released in 1986, it stars a very young John Cusack and Demi Moore. Cusack plays Hoops McCann, a recent high school graduate who spends his summer on Nantucket Island with a group of weird outcast friends while waiting to get into art school. The movie features a biker gang, Godzilla destroying a model village, Demi Moore singing a terrible 80s synth ballad, and even cartoons interspersed throughout. It’s an 80s teen film, so naturally there are evil rich kids in Polo shirts who abuse the poor kids and act like they own everything. John Cusack is gangly and charming in his pre-Say Anything days, Demi Moore is the love interest, and the whole thing ends with a climactic boat race for prize money that will save grandpa’s house!

 

It’s clear that writer/director Savage Steve Holland wasn’t interested in making art that would last the ages. No, what he loved were sight gags and set-ups that sound like they were invented by your fourteen year old brother. For instance, what if your buddy was buried in the sand on the beach at Nantucket and then someone put a chair over his face for shade – but then someone else sat on the chair and started eating a can of chili? You get the idea. 

 Reality, character motivation, and sense all go out the window in the name of cheap, silly gags and one liners. The whole film seems like it was written by John Hughes’ little brother after he huffed glue. Like Hughes’ 80s teen classics, One Crazy Summer is at least superficially interested in social and economic class conflict, but instead of going for the gravity of the Breakfast Club or Some Kind of Wonderful, the film goes for the absurd by having the rich villain pathologically hateful of lobsters.

  

If it sounds like a hot mess, it is. Rather than story or sense, the film focuses on ridiculous performances by actors like Bobcat Goldthwaite and on silly side plots like the crazy uncle who spends the entire summer with his hand perched on his phone, waiting to call into the local radio station contest and win a million dollars.

 

If it’s so infantile and silly, why am I recommending it? It’s because all of One Crazy Summer’s zaniness and pointless joking seems like summer to me. It’s relaxing, it’s fun. Nothing is taken seriously and, like a long Sunday drive on a warm afternoon, it doesn’t really go anywhere but it’s a fun ride anyway. I love a heavy duty Oscar contender as much as the next movie fan, but I believe there’s also a place for movies that are so stupid, they’re funny.

So don’t watch One Crazy Summer in spite of its absurdity, but rather because of it. Because with school starting and the weather starting to turn, there will be plenty of opportunities to take things seriously coming up. For now, take one of the last warm nights of the year, pretend that summer’s not over just yet, invite some friends over, and watch something stupid like One Crazy Summer –just because you can. You’ll groan, but you’ll laugh too.

 This review originally appeared on Q90.1 Delta College Quality Public Radio. For more information, go to www.deltabroadcasting.org.