The Brat Pack Movie & Music Collection (The Breakfast Club/Sixteen Candles/Weird Science)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+/CD: B     Extras: D     Films: C/C+/C+     CD: C+

 

 

There were many good and a much worse number of teen films in the 1980s and John Hughes formula of geeks, nerds, loners, idiots, goofs and sexually insecure kids made with usually bad New wave music for some hit films.  Several of them were recently reissued and The Brat Pack Movie & Music Collection collects three of them in a case that looks like a study binder and includes a CD.  The films includes here are as follows:

 

The Breakfast Club (1985) is the ever-annoying tale of a bunch of misfits held for detention by a stereotypical authority figure with a “voice of God” voice that is somehow always funny and unhip.  We learn about each of the individual delinquents and Ally Sheedy in particular can escape clinical depression by just putting on some make up and be a “real girl” (i.e., avoid being “like a” lesbian).  The oversimplicity of the film is matched by the formulaic nature of the script and distracting presence of Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald in what is essentially a rollback of much better and stronger films of the time (like Francis Coppola’s Hinton adaptations with some of the same names) and the like.  It has not aged well and Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me) is a song too good for this film, used out to legitimize its melodrama.

 

Sixteen Candles (1984) fares better as a film about teen angst and offers Samantha Baker (Ringwald again) as her whole family forgets her birthday, are distracted by a wedding and Murphy’s Law could not begin to explain how everything goes wrong.  This is not as bad as Breakfast Club, but is a forerunner of Home Alone in having an idiot family in an idiot plot.  It serves as a time capsule of sorts, and some have pointed out that only a suburban family could be so out of touch.

 

Weird Science (1985) came out the same year as Martha Coolidge’s Real Genius but was not as good, yet thanks to the New Wave temper tantrum refrain of the title song (“My creation!  My creation!), got more attention and made more money.  In what is more sexist a plot today, two teens (Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) spend part of the film trying to figure out how to find a perfect woman in what was a cycle of such stupid films (Mannequin for example) because they are just having no luck relating to women.  Staring with a viewing of the 1931 Universal classic Frankenstein is a colorized version (!!!) you will never see again, they start to come up with alternate ideas of maybe just creating that perfect woman.  The eventual result is they create a sexpot (Kelly LeBrock) who happens to have a British accent.  I guess it must have been an accident.  The guys get to ape being adults while treating the audience like they are apes.  LeBrock is sexy, but the film really does not know what to do with her or the situation.

 

I had not seen these films for a very long time and was shocked at just how bad they were.  When they came out, they had the novelty of the casts, their time period and part of the parade of distraction the 1980s media blitz was known for.  Too bad they had little more to offer except the supposed “honesty” of embarrassment (read exploitation) in growing up, but the films never deal with any of this honestly.  It is all more plastic than Rubik’s Cube, but without an ounce of the challenge.  Even by virtue of the packaging, Universal knows the market for these films.  They deserve to be in print, but they are bad time capsules of the era at best, which should be seen so they cannot be more romanticized then they have been.  Oddly, no one talks about these films much or fondly when they do.  In an era where the post-9/11 era and smart films like Donnie Darko expose their limitations, that is no surprise.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on all three films is on the weak side, with apparent grain, weak color, lack of depth and a showing of age that shows these are likely professional NTSC analog video masters.  Not that any of the shots are that memorable, but stills on the case have better image fidelity.  The Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 mixes are not that different in these cases, with Club and Candles far too pushed into the center channel as if the films were bad Pro Logic mixes.  Science fares slightly better, but not by much, while the sound is also harsh and limited like Universal’s 5.1 remix of Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983, reviewed elsewhere on this site) DVD reissue was.

 

The only extras on the DVDs are previews for each of the respective films and other Universal DVDs, but this set adds a CD with eight songs.  This includes the Simple Minds hit sounding better on the CD, Weird Science not having the range of the DTS on the DVD in its credits and hits by Spandau Ballet (True), General Public (Tenderness), Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (aka OMD on If You Leave, one of their most annoying hits), Yello (the grossly overplayed Oh Yeah!), The Psychedelic Furs (Pretty In Pink, a film NOT included here) and I Go Crazy by Flesh For Lulu.  It s a nice gesture, but they could have offered many more songs, maybe even a few more films.  When you think about it, this set is like a Rambo collection.  It is a gift or item to have with an underlying joke always attached.  Obviously, this is for fans only.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo