Comment by Magic Marmalade:
The most eighties movie you will ever see.
(...And that's some stiff competition!)
This is a movie who's name ha entered my consciousness only in the last few months, on account of being mentioned here and there as a tough one to find on DVD...
...And there's a reason for that, as it turns out:
It's crap.
......Well, I want to be fair, and say instead:
mostly crap (...mostly :).
There is the kernel of a fairly good idea and story here, but for the most part it is buried under an avalanche of all the worst stereotypes and trope-oids of the eighties, from the horrifically toe-curling mega-eighties soundtrack, the "kid in school getting bullied" trope with your standard eighties high-school bullies (only played badly), very thin storytelling, wafer thin, paint by numbers characters, God-awful wooden acting which even makes No Retreat, No Surrender doubt it's claim to bad acting, and it seems to have borrowed everything around it at the time to "construct" this movie.
There's bullying thing (Karate Kid), The Time Travel (ish) element (Back To The Future), and a plethora of other stuff those familiar with the eighties will spot on sight... but all done waaaaaaaay worse.
And actually, for such a short movie (1hr:30mins), it feels long.
It does however, somewhat redeem itself in the last half hour, as I felt they finally started making something of their own, and the quality picks up a nudge, earning a couple more points over the 4 out of 10 I was going to give it, as it reveals something of genuine heart, and a poignancy in the relationship between returning from the dead 60's angel rocker type and the love of his life he lost when he died tragically in true "Leader Of The Pack" style stupidity at the beginning of the movie.
Most of the chatter I've heard about this mentions that maybe the almost simultaneous release of: Back To The Future at the time is the reason this all but vanished. Yeah... Let's say that's the reason!
(Not the fact that the the one note I mentioned aside - everything in this fails on every count).
All this said, it is definitely one of those that is in the camp of: So bad it's...erm... well, still pretty awful actually, but you have to admire it's awfulness, which is a kind of charm all it's own.
I think, if the budget was a little bigger -say, to the power of one hundred - the effects were anything more than less than amateur, the actors better, the story tightened up, with vastly better dialogue (not written on eighties version of AI, or whatever ape wrote it), you may even have something of a decent, if not great, movie here, as the idea is sound.
