Uncle Scoopy's Fun House

This offbeat film achieves the ultimate in compressing the rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Within a few days, three girls go from runaways to rock stars, and back to oblivion. (And back to stardom in the post script.)

A very young Diane Lane plays a teen with a 'tude. Some of her comments get aired on television, and other teens express admiration for her in "man on the street" interviews. Those broadcasts attract the attention of some greedy promoters who are salivating at the fact that she, her sister, and their cousin have a garage band called The Stains. It's more of a theoretical band, really. They've only had three rehearsals and can neither sing nor play, but after all, rock has never been about musical virtuosity in general, but about attitude, especially in the punk rock arena. (Remember Sid Vicious?) Although the girls have virtually no talent, their stage posturing and see-through blouses start to attract a following, and the media gets a hold of the phenomenon, which enlarges the following. The band's success also inspires more greed from more promoters, and plenty of jealousy from bands that take music more seriously. The jealous rivals soon tell audiences about the greedy profiteering behind The Stains's ostensible anti-commercialism, and the resulting disgrace returns the girls to obscurity as fast as it had lifted them out of it.

(As mentioned above, the film includes a post-script in which The Stains perform in a rock video that shows they have rebounded to stardom - by becoming a glamorous bubble-gum group! This makes absolutely no sense in context.)

This is an odd little film that almost works, but not quite. The pacing of the film is deadened by inconsistent characterizations and 1970s-style dialogue in which long pregnant pauses substitute for words. The script can never decide which characters and situations it likes or even which ones it takes seriously. Some characters have been exaggerated into obvious buffoons at all times and are in the film only for comic value. Other characters seem to live in the real world. Still others seem to stray back and forth between realistic behavior and buffoonery. I'm still not sure whether this film is supposed to be funny. If so, it fails, but if it could have found a consistent tone and held it, it might have been a cult classic.

There is one other liability that kept the film from success. It is filled with bad music. Mind you, this is not a weakness in the filmmaking. It is SUPPOSED to be. It's a film about awful fifth-rate bands, so they can't sound like Hendrix and Clapton singing Dylan songs. But that artistic integrity comes at the expense of commercial viability. There's more than a half-hour's worth of performances in this film, and bad music is bad music, whether intentional or not. How many people look forward to listening to a dozen really bad songs performed poorly? The answer is, "Very few," and the miniscule size of that target audience limited the marketability of this film so drastically that Paramount never released it until four years after it was made, and even then only to select arthouses. For a quarter of a century it was not even available on home media. Prior to the DVD release, the only way to see it at home was on cable TV broadcasts.

OK, so the film is not so hot ... but the DVD includes a commentary track from Diane Lane and Laura Dern, who were 15 and 13 when they made the film. (Young Debbie Rochon is also in the film, making her debut as an uncredited extra.) Lane and Dern now look back on their youthful antics with a combination of nostalgia and chagrin, and their reflections are worth a listen.

Sunday

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