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Boy-crazy Deirdre, virgin Madge, Annie Mallick (Cherie Currie), and Jeanie (Jodie Foster) are best friends in the San Fernando Valley. Jeanie has problems with her single mom Mary (Sally Kellerman). Annie keeps running away from her troubled parents and her policeman father wants to institutionalize her. Brad (Scott Baio) is a guy friend. Madge starts dating older Jay Thompson (Randy Quaid).

In very broad strokes, this is Little Women thrown into the L. A. scene. The female friendships are unbreakable. It's very teenage angst, chaotic, and young girls searching for love. It has quite a few interesting young faces. I do wish for it to pick a story and stick with it. It meanders around. In a way, it's a teenage world. With such a scatter-shot plot, it sometimes does hit on something interesting. I also wonder if it needs a female voice with the writing. The girls do give it a good sense of reality. Cherie Currie and Jodie Foster have magnetic presences. It's an interesting early movie about 80's teen culture.

I adore this movie. It is one of the best teen movies ever! Jodie Foster, Cherie Currie, Marilyn Kagan, and Kandice Stroh were awesome! The whole movie seems realistic, and is very interesting and thoughtful. It concerns four teenage girls struggling with problems as they live their lives in the San Fernando Valley. Jeanie (Foster) is fighting with her divorced mother, Annie (Currie) is a teen runaway who drinks and pops pills, and runs away from her abusive father. Madge (Kagan) is a young girl who is overweight and mad that she is a virgin. Plus, her parents are overprotective and she has annoying younger siblings. Then there is Deirdre (Stroh) who is not as developed as the other characters, she is basically one of their friends who likes boys and has a lot of boy troubles. I like the music, the acting, and there were some scenes that were great...the party and the ending were standout scenes. The concert scenes were funny as well. The ending is a tearjerker, but I won't give it away. See for yourself and rent or buy this great film.

Privileged Valley girls discover that they are not immune to the consequences of their bad decisions.

I was not impressed by this movie on my first viewing, more than forty years ago, but a chance to see it on Turner Classic Movies after I had forgotten everything about it revealed a better movie and a more mature understanding of what the film makers were trying to say. The young women, led by Jodie Foster and Cherie Currie, don't understand the costs of what they are doing, between the drinking, the sex, and the hard partying that leaves the parents angry at the sheer destruction. Like the contemporaneous LITTLE DARLINGS, it failed because it didn't really understand who its audience was, and what they would enjoy seeing. The older segment of the audience was angry at the young women, and the younger portions didn't care for the unhappy ending with its inherent moralizing.

Having grown up with the East Coast bracket of privileged young people, I can say the attitudes were precisely on point. With Scott Baio, Sally Kellerman, Randy Quaid, and Laura Dern.

Four teenage girls in a suburb of Los Angeles get into all kinds of trouble: parties, drugs, cops, mixed-up parents, older boyfriends. Jodie Foster, the group's level-headed mother hen, tries keeping everyone together "like a family" (like the family unit she's never had), and the heartbreaking thing about the movie is that she can't. Slowly, everyone grows up and goes away. THAT precise plot point, though underscored throughout, is unfortunately tampered with. Did we really need a long sequence with Scott Baio outracing a car full of thugs on his skateboard? Or an even longer sequence--also with Baio--where Foster has a strange soliloquy about pain as an illusion. Some of the dialogue in fact is downright loopy, and I didn't much care for an edit in the third act which segues clumsily from a death to a wedding. But these are nitpicks in what is basically a very sensitive story about the loss of a tight bond. And Jodie's face at the ending speaks volumes. If viewers do get choked up, the movie has earned this. The film doesn't pander for tears or ask for sympathy--it shows us an example of friendship and hopes we understand. *** from ****

Story about four teenage girls growing up in California. Jeanie (Jodie Foster) is the most level-headed of the bunch--but wants to move out of her house where she lives with her divorced mother (Sally Kellerman). Annie (Cherie Currie) is addicted to drugs, alcohol and bad boys and is beaten up by her father. Madge (Marilyn Kagan) has overprotective parents. Deirde (Kandice Stroh) thinks she's more mature than the rest of them.

This is nothing new from what we've seen plenty of times before--but this one has one big difference--it's accurate. I graduated from high school in 1980 (when I first saw the film) and I was surprised at how realistic it was. They got the dialogue, clothes and attitudes down completely right. Even the main song of the movie ("On the Radio" by Donna Summer) was a big hit before this came out. This film hit me harder than any other teen film of the time because I could understand and relate to the characters. I knew girls in high school who were just like this! The film is (of course) dated but it captures a time we will never see again.

The acting is good on all counts with Foster giving the best performance. The relationship between her and Kellerman (who was excellent) was realistic and well-done. Even Scott Baio (who has a small role as a friend of the girls) more or less realistically played a teen boy.

A very good movie--essential viewing if you came of age in 1980. The film has a deserved R rating (plenty of drug use and swearing) but should be seen by all teens. I give it a 8.