Black Cats

No, it's not a failure. It's not good either. It's simply one of the oddest ducks of 80's comedies - trying to be both an actual National Lampoon movie (it's based on one of the stories from the magazine, which I'm not sure), and a satire of them and teen comedies. Trouble is, I couldn't really tell. It felt more like Altman reaching further than he did with MASH to make a completely anarchic, tasteless comedy about a couple of guys (in this case Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry are FAR from the talents of Eliot Gould and Donald Sutherland) who just want to stir up the sh*t in middle-upper class Arizona and have some fun. Only this time there's no war going on or people to fix up in a hospital. What is there to do? Uh...

I was glad it wasn't just some assembly-line thing. It is an Altman movie, to the bone, so loose and free that you have to watch moment to moment because there isn't anything CLOSE to a plot here. It's just a semblance of vignettes around what OC and Stiggs did on their summer break (not their real names, and as OC says, one of my big laughs, is that "Call me OC, it sounds more ridiculous"). Make a wild car that is $100 off the lot and can be decked out to look like a monster-truck- Studebaker? Check. Bring a machine gun as a wedding present for a very unsatisfactory wedding? Check. Make friends and give out t-shirts from the Schwab insurance company to Melvin Van Peebles? Oh hell yeah a check. How about a trip to Mexico to snag an African band to later crash a theater production on its opening night? Uh... hey, it IS a National Lampoon movie.... sorta, not really, whatever.

I was fascinated by OC and Stiggs, no question there. Sometimes I was laughing, more for the little beats of oddball behavior that Altman was always known for sprinkling in. Ray Walston as the grandfather, while no more or less one note than any of the other supporting (or lead?) characters, is maybe the funniest most consistently, rambling about extreme acts of violence in stories and making outrageous omelette's and drink concoctions that he correctly predicts make one more prone to sex. And while he's not as funny as I'd hoped, Dennis Hopper also has a fun appearance playing his Photo-Journalist from Apocalypse Now - that is, if the Photo-Journalist ended up having lots of guns, ammo, and marijuana to grow out in the fields, uh, somewhere.

The whole project, from some of the casting (hey, Jane Curtain and, uh, future stars Cynthia Nixon and Jon Cryer) to how bizarre some of the set pieces get (skinny dipping again in the Schwab's pool? Hey, there's a tiki backyard next door!), is like a big stunt on Altman's part. And why not? His career was full of them, from doing a shaggy-dog take on the Long Goodbye to his madcap take on Popeye. But the main characters are so obnoxious that the power of the satire just became lost, and I wasn't sure if the line not simply got blurred between doing an actual teen comedy and a satire of it but that the line was screwed altogether. Over time the film seems to have gotten a small cult - maybe apologists, maybe people who genuinely like it after it unfortunately (or maybe rightfully) bombed after being shelved for two years - but it still doesn't make it top shelf work from this director. The style is just so all over the place that maybe, at best, it could work as a wild-card party movie, like throw it on, dip in and out, get laughs where they suddenly, outrageously, pop up, and skip over some of the lesser points. C+

I loved the National Lampoon magazine story O.C. & Stiggs was based on but this film is nothing like it's predecessor. It does however back up my long held opinion that the only reason Robert Altman has been allowed to make films after 'Nashville' is because of the prolific amount of drug use amongst movie critics. Altman has an uncanny ability to produce films that, regardless of the budget, look low budget. This one reads like a student film or worse. The two edgy & cool leads are horribly miscast with two very uncool comedic softies that completely undermine the angst and subversion of the original characters. Picture Jim Varney as Hunter S. Thompson or Paulie Shore as Ferris Bueller. Rather than subversive the material comes off looking juvenile and just mean spirited. But for those who insist on pretending they love Altman films, no worry. There is plenty of bad photography, busy cameras, scenes that makes no sense, overlapping dialogue and most of all, a huge cast of name actors that all look like they are practicing their lines.

By far the most wacked-out teen comedy of all time, this bizarre Robert Altman nugget was adapted from a single issue of National Lampoon magazine, the 1982 "Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs" special. The plot is simple: O.C. and Stiggs are two bored, horny, Arizona high schoolers who find immense satisfaction in tormenting the Schwab family (the patriarch is fabulously portrayed by Altman regular Paul Dooley). Over summer vacation, they canoe to Mexico, buy a machine gun from Dennis Hopper, organize a King Sunny Ade concert, and try to woo Cynthia Nixon. There's no sentimentality in this film whatsoever. The two leads are unlikable, homophobic morons, but it still adds up into a remarkably funny endeavor. If you're not in the mood for something with a profound statement to make and enjoy laughing at bizarre non-sequiturs, give this film a try.

I really wanted to like this movie, mainly because I laughed my ass off reading the 36-page odessey of O.C. & Stiggs in National Lampoon. Naively, I thought that an otherwise great director like Robert Altman could show us the wickedly funny side of hard-core juvenile delinquency. Instead, he lets us down by stripping away almost all of the mean-spiritedness that made the story so hilarious. All that's left are some wishy-washy hijinks from a couple of kids trying to look cute. Perhaps Danny Boyle, the director of "Trainspotting", could have done more justice to the story.

The movie is not entirely worthless, though. Occasional gems from the story survive in Altman's adaptation, and Altman's trademarked style is as evident as ever. Each scene is almost littered with celebrities, and there are plenty of layers of dialogue that no other contemporary director pulls off as well as Altman.

Phoenicians can entertain themselves during lulls in the movie by spotting local landmarks. Overall, you could do worse on a dollar rental, but you really should read the story to appreciate the little bits that survived in the film.

This movie was great when I saw it, so great that I bought a previously used tape at a video store. O.C. and Stiggs try to get even with a family of rich snobs who ruined people. They get even, and it is very funny.