Lengthy detailed review. Give it a read:
I'm pretty sure this is the movie I rented once and came home with a p-rno in the case for it. I called the video store, and the clerk was super apologetic until I told him what movie I'd rented, then immediately sunk into a dismissive, "Oh."
This movie remains more fascinating to me than it has any right to be. The reason has little to do with the movie itself, but the intention.
Did Jim McBride start writing the world's h-rniest Archie parody and then lose the thread a third of the way into writing it or did he write a h-rny teenage comedy and then think to make it an Archie parody and threw a small handful of Archie related jokes at the beginning?
For what it's worth, Steve Curry's "Mughead" is the only performance that could have been from a real Archie movie, or at least committed Archie parody, while I suppose Rick Ross's "Reggy" is trying for the right thing, but he falls way short. A few others, including Henry Cory's "Archie Anders", talk in kind of an odd '40s sounding voice, and most of the rest just seem like '70s post-hippies just talking the talk of the day.
"Midge" makes a brief appearance to explain why she can't make it with "Archie" despite "Big Moose" being out of town.
But really, that's it for the parody stuff. Amy Farber's "Bette" isn't even blonde. Despite knocking it, I've perhaps still made the parody sound like more than it is, because it's unavoidable to mention it and discuss that element when talking about the movie, which can't help but make it sound more important than it is.
Before the halfway mark, "Archie" leaves the high school setting, before we meet Miss Grundy, Mr. Weatherbee or any other characters one might have expected.
"Archie" continues pursuing "Ronnie" and "Bette", although neither have characters related to the characters they're parodying. The last hour has a single Dilton/"Milton" joke and I suppose he falls between "Mughead" and "Reggy" in portrayal, although his appearance is too brief to discuss properly.
The plot ultimately is just "Archie goes from place to place trying to get laid". I must note that I've never seen a movie with that plot in which the lead character has as much penetrative sex that's interrupted as this one. I'm not certain if I've seen that device used at all in another of them, but it honestly happens 3 or 4 times in this.
As I noted, he leaves high school and, for the most part, high school kids, before the halfway mark. He wanders the streets of New York, meeting cab drivers, prostitutes and ends up at a p-rn shoot. It's less a story as a series of vignettes, but even then I'm not sure the vignettes hold up on their own.
That said, there's something hypnotic about the whole thing, perhaps it's just the narration by Curry, who tells the tale, despite leaving the story before the halfway point. I honestly wish after watching this and McBride's much better Glen and Randa that Curry had gotten more movie opportunities, because I think he's quite. Hell, I wish he'd gotten more opportunity in this movie, since he's really clearly the most dynamic performer in the whole mess.
