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Lane Myer (John 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
Review
Cartoonist Savage Steve Holland made his directorial debut with this acid comedy about a going-nowhere hamburger flipper and his run of bad luck. Its gleefully twisted tone, exemplified by a goofy suicide attempt in a basically lighthearted film (John Cusack's character jumps off a bridge, only to land among the refuse of a passing garbage truck), made it a minor quotable classic to a generation of young anti-authoritarian filmgoers. In one of his earliest roles, Cusack wears his expression of hangdog gloom with real comic sensibility, and the succession of miserable people and events that enter his life warrant every last frown and sigh. The funniest and most memorable character set on bedeviling Cusack's Lane Myer is the determined paperboy, willing to ride his bike down a ski slope to collect his fee, whose refrain "I want my two dollars!" will resonate with audiences long after the credits roll. Curtis Armstrong and Dan Schneider also turn in quirky performances as Lane's best friend and his nemesis next-door neighbor, respectively. The set pieces, some of them punched up by Holland's own animation and offshoots thereof, make for a pleasingly outlandish little coming-of-age story that doesn't betray its own world view, even during the inevitable happier moments of the tale. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
