Miracle Beach (1992)

This is another of the Netflix Dump 8, which I chose because it stars one of my all time favorites, Dean Cameron aka Chainsaw from Summer School, aka Dave Marshak from Ski School and Ski School 2.  I love seeing this guy in anything possible, so this was a must.  It also starred Ami Dolenz, Pat Morita, Martin Mull, and Vincent Schiavelli, making it all the more sweeter.  Let's see how it went.  Also, our friends over at BMovieChicks.com did this one too, so go over there and see what they said.

Miracle Beach stars Cameron as a down and out beach bum who catches his girl in bed with his boss, meaning he's fired, and two seconds later his landlord evicts him.  At the same time, Ami Dolenz lives in a world of genies-- yep, that kind of genies-- and she's sent to Earth to be someone's genie.  She and Cameron seem like a match made in heaven, and Cameron can't wait to use her omnipotence to change his fortunes.  He opens his own beach resort, chases the local hottie, gets said local hottie a gig with major Hollywood producer played by Martin Mull, and sets his two buddies up with a sweet situation at the resort with some bikini models.  But Dolenz is falling in love with Cameron-- can you blame her?-- and she starts to sabotage his dating of the local hottie, causing friction between the two.  Will Cameron discover his love for Dolenz before the genie review board puts her away in her bottle for good for meddling in her master's affairs?



Unfortunately this one was a disappointment for me.  I felt like Cameron was wasted.  This was not the Dave Marshak we wanted, and the genie aspect removed the best part of Cameron's characters: their resourcefulness.  It's always great watching him plan things, and then watching his elaborate plans come together.  The material also didn't give him many opportunities to be funny, which was too bad too, because we know how funny he is, and that's what we're watching an early 90s beach romp starring him in it for.  Dolenz was fun, and Morita, Mull, and Schiavelli were all great too-- as was Cameron despite how poorly his role used him--, but this suffered from the fact that the genie aspect didn't take off.  It still has some USA Up All Night nostalgia factor, so in that sense, it might work for some, it just didn't work for me.

The good romp involves a few factors.  First, charismatic characters.  We had it in Cameron, Dolenz, and Morita, but it lacked sorely in Cameron's two buddies.  They were just women chasing blah, no real personality, simply afterthoughts.  These guys make the film when they're good, and annoy the viewer when they're bad.  Second, adversity.  There need to be heels that need to be overcome.  Jerk ski instructors, asshole businessmen, etc.  Because we had the omnipotent genie aspect, heels had no pull in this.  Dean Cain has a small role as a potential heel, but he's gone immediately.  Without that tension, the script just plods along.  Finally, the lead needs room to be the lead.  He needs to be out there riffing and doing crazy stuff.  Having his genie give him things to impress a woman isn't enough.  This was a romp that lack in romp-iness.



A Dean Cameron Ami Dolenz Romantic Comedy is something that could've really worked though in a better scenario.  They had the chemistry, just not the material.  I don't know if the better setting would be Cameron wooing Dolenz, or if she were the other woman trying to make Cameron notice her, but in a classic 80s/90s romp paradigm, it would've been so much fun.  The thing is, why can't we see that now though?  What about a remake of Back to School, with Marshak as the billionaire who buys his way back to school, and Dolenz as the professor who has a thing for him, but doesn't know if she can take him seriously enough.  Bring Dean Cain back in too as the guy she's engaged to.  Seriously, how great would this movie be?

Unfortunately, Pat Morita won't be able to star in any remake, as he's no longer with us.  I loved seeing him here though as the beach bum that Cameron befriends and gives a job to at his resort.  Schiavelli played a local mystic, who may be more of a scam artist that has bitten off more than he can chew when Cameron shows up asking him about a magic lamp.  Martin Mull as the sleazy producer/director whom Cameron has the genie make into his old friend so he can introduce the local hottie to him was a lot of fun too-- we'll have him play the dean at the college Cameron attends, the Ned Beatty role.  Dean Cain was like an almost heel that never was, and is credited only as "Volleyball Player #1".  Seriously.  Finally, I totally missed this, but Alexis Arquette played one of Cameron's buddies, only as a dude.  I missed it so much, I didn't even get an image of her in it.  That's the problem with these Netflix dump kind of things, if I miss something, I can't go back and rectify it.



Finally, Dolenz has a scene where she's watching TV while Cameron is on a date.  Flipping through the channels, she finds a movie with DTVC favorites the Barbarian Brothers, and a basketball game featuring my Celtics and the LA Clippers.  Gary Grant himself appears on-screen, as Dolenz transports him to her living room so she can give him a pep talk, and send him back to the arena to take down my C's.  It was a great blast from the past, especially seeing my C's in better days-- though '91-'92 was when they were hoping McHale and Bird would be healthy enough for one more run, not unlike the current situation with my team.  Unlike my C's, the Clippers are finally a much better team, something that 20 years ago would've seemed impossible.

So this is a pass for me, unfortunately.  I wanted so much to like it, but ultimately the entire thing was sauteed in wrong sauce.  Hopefully that remake of Back to School with Cameron and Dolenz will be made, which will make up for what we didn't get here.  I'm not holding my breath for that though.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104879/

Ski School (1991)

There are movies, and then there are movies: the pinnacle of the art form, leaving an indelible impression on all who come in contact. For me, this film is that. I feel like there's hope in the world when a screenwriter, director, actors, and various crew can create something as pure and inspiring; when their vision comes to fruition in such a state of perfection that we as the viewer are left with nothing but our gaping jaws and the word "awesome" dangling upon our lips like lavender honey from a ten dollar jar.

Ski School is about a ski school with two rival ski instructors. Reid Janssens runs section one, and is the head ski instructor (for the purposes of a movie like this, he's the heel). Dave Marshak runs section 8, and he and his ski pals party all the time and don't take anything very seriously (he's the hero). Usually Reid's team wins the annual ski meet, but when he mistakenly sends ski prodigy John Roland to Marshak's crew, the balance of power shifts. At the same time, the head of the ski resort wants to sell, and he knows he'll have trouble doing that with Marshak and his boys partying all the time. Hilarity ensues as Marshak and crew fight back in an attempt to reclaim the mountain.



We watched this all the time in high school. It may sound like your run-of-the-mill bad sports comedy, but believe me, it ain't. Dave Marshak is probably the greatest hero in this type of film this side of Ty Webb. Janssens as the heel is almost too perfect, like he's a parody of the heel from the genre, which makes it all the easier to laugh when he's made to look bad. There's also tons of beer, and lots of scenes where people walk into a room and have a beer thrown to them, which was cool for us underage drinkers looking for role models. Plus, there is so much partying and funny pranks that when the two teams square off for the perfunctory end-of-the-movie showdown, it actually doesn't hurt.

Dave Marshak, played by Summer School's Dean Cameron, is the quintessential awesome head party guy for a movie like this. He's cut from the same cloth as an Otter from Animal House, and makes a Van Wilder look trite and clicheed. One of my favorite scenes with him comes after a woman in a bikini walks out of their dorm. "Does anyone have a problem with that?" he says in a pissed off voice. "Half-naked girls walking around at 9am? Last year they were completely naked by this time!" According to imdb, Marshak's name was originally supposed to be Marshall, but the director decided last minute that that was too ordinary. You can kinda tell that he dubbed all of the actors afterwards, because it looks weird when they say his name. I must say it was a great decision, though,because Dave Marshall doesn't have the same ring that Marshak does.



For the JAG fans out there, Patrick Labyorteaux, or Lt. Cmdr. Bud Roberts jr., is in this, as, of all things, a ladies man. He's still goofy as hell, he just seems to get tons of chicks. Then Marshak and his right-hand-man Fitz, hypnotize him into not wanting to have sex, and he spends the rest of the movie telling all these hot chicks that he's not interested. I never got the point of JAG, other than a bad show that me and my friends could make fun of. A navy lawyer getting into all these life-or-death situations just seemed odd to me. CBS has a habit of making hour-long dramas about weird things: a Texas Ranger who drives around in a pick-up beating the crap out of people, a Navy lawyer/action hero, a cantankerous navy forensics expert, and now I've seen advertised during football games a show called The Unit. They've actually gone as far as to make a crime drama about a penis?

Speaking of weird premises (premisi?) for TV shows, Darlene Vogel of Pacific Blue fame is in this as hot shot ski prodigy John Roland's love interest. At the end she's in one of the most unintentionally funny scenes. The guys in section 8 are barred from skiing in the finale because the bad guy has had them evicted from the ski school. They show up anyway with a bunch of beer, and everyone there except for Janssens and his cronies want them to compete. There's a chant going around of "Let them Ski! Let them ski!" For some reason the film makers decided when the shot was on Vogel, they would have her voice come to the forefront over the chanting. I think it may be dubbed as well. Anyway, she says in this hilarious, high pitched voice, completely out of rhythm with the background, "Let them ski! He he he he..." We had to rewind it and watch it a couple times.



One of the interesting things you'll see in the background are boxes of Miller Sharps beer, which is non-alcoholic. Considering this film came out in 1991, there was plenty of time before Alanis Morrisette released her hit "Ironic" to have seen it. Had she mentioned this film's inclusion of non-alcoholic beer in her song, she would've had at least one instance of irony. But she didn't, so instead she put out a song titled irony with no examples of irony in it. I guess that would be ironic, though, if the song's called irony, but nothing in it is about irony. Anyway, I'm totally digressing.

This is one of the rare cases where I have trouble in the confines of a blog describing just how good a movie is. You really have to see it to get the full effect. If you like to party, you'll love this. If getting drunk doesn't really appeal to you, though, I'd skip it. I'm personally at an age where I kinda don't do that stuff anymore, but this movie, for me, comes from a time when I did, and it's great to watch it now and reminisce.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102940/

Ski School 2 (1995)

In high school, the first Ski School was one of our staple movies. There wasn't much better than it. And with that in mind, I rented Ski School 2 while I was home during a break in college. I put it on on the TV in the living room, while my mom was reading a book, and my 9-year-old brother was doing whatever. First scene, out of the gate: a woman wearing only a tool belt, hard hat, and panties. Big boobs, too. My mom looked up from her book and said "Um, no."

And believe me, the movie is that great. Dave Marshak, our hero in the first one (played by Dean Cameron, the guy who was into horror movies in Summer School), returns to win his woman back before she makes a big mistake and marries a real dork: a big dork who of course is only marrying her to take over the ski resort and make it Evil. You already know the story; it's about all the other madcap romps that make a movie like this work. And this one does.

This isn't as good as Ski School one, but it's close. There's a great scene at a lesbian S&M bar. Marshak, our hero, takes over and starts serving drinks. In another great scene he crashes some pre-wedding party and has everyone do the chicken dance. There's also no perfunctory competition at the end: it's about Marshak proving to his girl that the guy she's going to marry is bad news. We're really rooting for Marshak, because he's just so awesome.

If I had one complaint, though, it was the heel. He wasn't anywhere near as cool as the one in the first movie. That guy was this asshole who did everything perfect and made everyone want to hate him. This one's an anal retentive moron who looks slightly better than, but is essentially the same person as, Jeremy Piven in Old School. It's kind of a cool take, because this guy's no match for Marshak, and in a twist on other films from the genre, the woman in question actually feels bad for her man because of what Marshak does... as if he's the bad guy. Just the same, give me the detestable one-dimensional heel anytime: it just plays better.

Now I read something on imdb that's distressed me a tad. "This is my favourite film, so imagine how disturbed I was when I picked this up on DVD and discovered the awesome soundtrack had been changed!" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114465/#comment). Whoa, hold on a second there. If that's true, then avoid the DVD version at all costs. I didn't really have a big problem when Lucas messed with the Star Wars movies, because they're not a big deal to me. But don't go fucking with Ski Schools 1 and 2. They were perfect as they were. That just upsets me. That being said, the one I got from Netflix was cool, so you shouldn't have to worry there.

So bottom line: see this and the first one before you die. What's great about them is that you can see 2 without seeing 1 first, and still enjoy it as much. I must, however, strongly advise against the Lucas-ized DVD version. I haven't looked into this myself, but the guy on the comment board seemed very reliable: "I could model my life on the teachings of Dave Marshack - in fact, his name was on my fake id up until i could drink legally." (ibid.). So get your hands on the VHS of this however you can. You won't be disappointed.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114465/

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