Non giocate con il cactus

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.

O.C. & Stiggs is one of my favorite 80's movies. I truly wish it would get issued on DVD but I realize the chances of this are remote. The movie did not have too much of a plot. And, while I loved the liberal trashing of the extreme right-wing conservative neighbor, the movie was quite mean-spirited at times. It is tough to classify this film, but I believe it struck a chord with me due to the anti-establishment mentality of the two lead characters.

The story centers around the two lead characters, high school guys with way too much time on their hands with an affinity for the African music stylings of King Sunny Ade and an extreme antipathy towards the ultra-right-wing insurance agency owner who lives in their neighborhood. The movie follows the two leads as they prank the family (the Schwabs) and otherwise try to survive a record Arizona heat wave by bothering as many people as they can. For instance, their joint purchase of the "Gila Monster". A giant monster-truck-tired old-school convertible which made more noise and belched out more smoke and fumes than any self-respecting oil refinery. Perhaps it was my being 16 when I first saw the movie and latching onto ti for being different (and funny), but hey, if it ever gets re-released, I will re-buy it.

The movie isn't for everyone, but I enjoyed it immensely. One quote in particular was worth the price of the rental back in 1988: "That's the problem with insurance. Destruction just isn't permanent anymore". And, if I can ever find my old VHS copy (many, many friends have borrowed this tape), I need to find out the title of the King Sunny Ade song he plays in the impromptu concert scene.

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.