Amazon.com video review:
Lane Myer (Cusack) is stuck in a personal hell. A compulsive,
adolescent Everyman growing up in Suburbia, USA, not only does he fail
to make the prestigious high school ski team (again), but his beloved
sweetheart, Beth, also leaves him for Roy, the team's popular,
arrogant captain. If this isn't bad enough, he's stuck with a mother
who frighteningly experiments--rather than cooks--with food, a brother
who builds rockets out of models, and a best friend so desperate for
drugs that he settles for snorting powdered snow. Faced with these
prospects, Lane opts to end it all ... until he comes up with a
ridiculous plan to gain acceptance and win Beth back. Director Savage
Steve Holland warps this simple, clichéd premise, letting his
wacky imagination twist it into a fairly original, slightly dark, and
completely hilarious '80s teen comedy. Not as serious a
"suicide-attempt" movie as, say, Harold and Maude
but just as funny, the film's more a collection of screwball sketches
than a narrative. Holland livens the high jinks with surrealistic
fantasy touches, including Jell-O that crawls, a hamburger that sings
Van Halen, drawings that mock its creator, Japanese race-car drivers
who only speak Howard Cosell, and a psychotic paperboy seeking blood
over a missing $2. Cusack puts the whole thing on his shoulders and
carries the insanity with another one of his touching, obsessively
romantic performances, which, along with Say Anything, The Sure Thing,
and One Crazy
Summer, made him the quintessential (and appealing)
personification of lovestruck adolescence and suffering. --Dave
McCoy
