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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

Like many of Robert Altman's smaller movies, O.C. and Stiggs is under-appreciated. Most of the teenage movies that clogged up the mid-80's consisted of nothing more than stupid sex jokes and gross-out shots designed to humiliate straw men villains. O.C. and Stiggs is a movie where you feel that all sorts of things are possible. It's humorous in the best sense.

It remains a mystery why some of Altman's films are overrated (e.g. The Player and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), while others are immediately forgotten.

Like many others who have left comments about this movie, I was first introduced to O.C & Stiggs through the National Lampoon stories. I can't remember ever laughing at anything I read as much as I laughed at the story of O.C. & Stiggs and their summer vacation. Now, I'm not judging the movie O.C. & Stiggs based on my dissapointment on how closely or remotely it followed the print version. I'm basing my comments soley on the movie itself. This is a bad movie. This is an amazingly bad movie. This is such an amazingly bad movie it must be one of the worst movies ever. It is that bad. This movie is bad in every way a movie can be bad: script, acting, directing, cinematography, lighting, sound, and probably gaffing, best boying, and catering. What the hell happened? Having Pauley Shore, Keanu Reeves, or even Kevin Costner standing in front of a video camera for an hour and a half reading the original story from the magazine would have been 10 times funnier than this..movie.

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.

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.