O.C. and Stiggs

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.

Definitely one of Altman's worst, though perhaps not quite as bad as some may lead you to believe. The producer wanted Altman to make a teen comedy in the vein of Porky's or something. Altman hated those kinds of movies, and decided to make a parody of one instead. Unfortunately, you just can't make a parody of a comedic genre. It never works. O.C. and Stiggs comes off as just a wacky teen comedy as directed by Altman; the only difference is that the characters are slightly more obnoxious and, instead of being fun anti-heroes, they're detestable. Which makes for a rather unpleasant movie. The script (or Altman's alterations – he apparently hated the script as written, so who knows how much he changed it) is extremely sloppy as well, especially as it nears the end. There are some amusing moments along the way, so it's not a total bust. It does contain one of the funniest dialogue exchanges I've ever heard: "How would you like to have more fun than you've ever had in your life?" "I don't know. I've had a lot of fun. I have Legos, you know."

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.

Perhaps it's because I came in with bottom-of-the-barrel expectations for a movie I've heard absolutely nothing good about, but I found myself enjoying "O.C. and Stiggs" quite a lot. I know from experience how bad bad Altman can be, so I expected the worst. But if you share Altman's smart-ass sense of humor, as I do, I can't help but think that you'll find this movie pretty funny.

The very nominal plot has something to do with two adolescents (the O.C. and Stiggs of the title) spending one summer terrorizing an affluent, middle class family because the patriarch (played with just the right amount of buffoonery by Paul Dooley), head of an insurance company, has denied insurance for O.C.'s grandfather (played uproariously by Ray Walston). But let me stress the word "nominal." This narrative loosely holds together what can otherwise only be described as controlled chaos. In typical Altman fashion, the film is an assemblage of barely choreographed scenes in which actors wander around ad-libbing to their hearts' content. This is not an insult. This style has resulted in some dreadful bombs for Altman, but it's also been responsible for some of his inspired classics. "O.C. and Stiggs" is nowhere near the latter, but it's certainly not the former either.

Altman said in interviews that he intended "O.C. and Stiggs" as a satire of all of those naughty "boys behaving badly" comedies popular in the 1980s. I don't know that it's so much a satire of those films as it is on people in general. It's full of a sneering disdain for a sort of vapid, bourgeois lifestyle that rears its head in much of Altman's work. Scottsdale, Arizona is depicted as a bland land of lawn ornaments, plastic furniture and man-made nature. We don't learn much about O.C. and Stiggs, and they're not even necessarily that likable, but neither are the Schwabbs, the family they torment, and anyway Altman doesn't really ask us to root for anyone but rather just enjoy the silliness. The funniest thing about the film is that the Schwabbs seem to be completely unaware that they're being tormented and instead wander around in a self-absorbed daze.

The rest of the cast includes Jane Curtin, as the boozy matriarch; Martin Mull, as a designer of African fashions; Cynthia Nixon, as a love interest; Jon Cryer, as a dweeb; and best of all, Dennis Hopper, reprising his role from "Apocalypse Now," and who features significantly in the film's climax, a shootout in the Schwabbs' bomb shelter.

It would appear that time has been kind to this utterly dismissed film from the mid-1980s, and you could do much worse from Robert Altman's canon alone, let alone from other films in the same genre.

Grade: B