But you would expect fourth graders to be terrible actors. The ones that appear in this steamer are supposed to be professionals. It's absolutely amazing how terrible these "professionals" are. They sound like they're reading their lines, with no real inflection or skill. The story is cheesy and about what you'd expect from Roger Corman, who has something to do with this farce. Whoever came up with the lame idea to take a bad old movie (just because it starred Jack Nicholson in 1960 before he made it big) and use that awful black & white movie as an extended, colorized flashback for this awful "new" movie should be beaten with an old DVD player. Seriously, this thing is really bad. Whoever plays "Jake" (what an original name for a bad boy!), the rebellious young modern delinquent, actually reaped what he sowed here. Nobody ever heard from him again and his name isn't listed on the DVD among the "actors" at all.
There are only three slightly interesting facets to this thing: 1) Joe Richards, the actor who plays the old Johnny Varron (young Nicholson's character with a cliched name from the 1960 movie), actually looks a lot like Nicholson; 2) one of the cute female actors doesn't wear a bra in one scene when she's scolding the anti-hero; and 3) the supporting character played by then-unknown Saturday Night Live alum Jason Sudeikis has bright lime green hair, some ill-advised piercings, a rotten personality and an extremely funny name.
