One Crazy Summer (1986)

Director: Savage Steve Holland

Cast: John Cusack, Demi Moore, Linda Warren

Synopsis: A teenage cartoonist and his friends come to the aid of a young woman trying to save her ramshackle home from developers.

A young and thin John Cusack (The Cell, Frozen Ground) plays a would-be cartoonist who spends his summer holiday with a friend in Nantucket Island, where he discovers life is overshadowed by a power-mad megalomaniac who has plans to build a new development on land on which the ramshackle house newly-inherited by rock chick Demi Moore (Striptease) sits.   Demi has to raise X amount by such-and-such a date otherwise the bulldozers are moving in.

I wonder what John Cusack thinks when he looks back at stuff like this.   Turns red with embarrassment, I shouldn’t wonder; probably hides in the cupboard under the stairs whenever they show it on TV.   And well he might, because there’s not a lot to recommend here. While its young characters seem unusually untroubled by the typical distractions of sex and, well, more sex, for the most part the movie shares the same quality of comedy as its 1980s counterparts.   And that level of quality, in case you didn’t know, is pretty low. There are a couple of funny moments, but they’re few and far between, and when the biggest laugh is reserved for Bobcat Goldthwaite (Shakes the Clown) dressed in a Godzilla suit as he rampages across a scale model of the proposed new development while a startled Japanese investor looks on, you know you’ll miss little by hitting the ‘off’ button on your remote.

(Reviewed 1st November 2011)