Boardheads
(2003)
Director: John Quinn
Cast: Bronson Pinchot, Loretta Swit, Alex DeBoe
I can't say that I have seen, for a number of years now,
any horror movie that has really scared me. Oh, there have been horror
movies that have made me
taste a foreboding atmosphere. I've also seen horror movies that deal
with extreme subject matter that made them somewhat disturbing to
watch, and I have been jolted out of my seat a few times by quick and
surprising occurrences. But a horror movie that gets my heart pounding
and makes me check and double-check the lock on my door before I go to
bed? Nope, not since I was a kid. In fact, the only way horror movies
get any chill up my spine these days is with their television
commercials, when I hear that guy with the raspy voice utter at the end
with the utmost creepiness, "Rated R." (Oooh!) You can probably easily
guess why horror movies from today or in the past, from this continent
to all the others, fail to move me. Quite simply, I have seen so many
horror movies that I have become comfortably desensitized to anything
that may frighten me in a movie. I've seen so many different kinds of
horror movies that I am familiar with all the plot turns, all the
tricks. Another obvious reason is that as I've gotten older, I've
learned that much of the subject material in horror movies is unlikely,
if ever, to actually happen in real life. There are no such things as
vampires, werewolves, or protozoa-eating goblins.
Zombies and mad cannibals are another thing... but since I don't live
in Haiti, or Milwaukee (or Germany),
I feel pretty safe.
I think I should also point out that there have been
some kinds of horror films that have never scared me, not even when I
was a kid. A lot of the "classic" horror situations like haunted houses
never moved me that much, perhaps because the particular movies of
these types I was first exposed to I found harder to relate to - even
back when I was a kid, my world was in color and had better special
effects. Another kind of horror movie I never found particularly scary
were those that were horror anthologies. You may have guessed the
reason why if you've been a regular reader of this web site for some
time. I've mentioned in the past that I loved EC comics and anything
similar to them when I was a kid. Even when I was young, I knew the
creators of these stories weren't taking things too seriously. The
stories were simply too outlandish to be frightening. The same subtle
sense of humor could also be seen in the art, which presented the
subject material in a more cartoony than realistic viewpoint; it's not
surprising some of these same artists later worked for Mad
magazine, which I was also a voracious reader of at the time. Even when
I started to find more graphic presentations of the form, like the
comic novelization of Creepshow (which I sneaked peeks
at countless times whenever I went in a bookstore and my parents
weren't looking), my viewpoint of the horror anthology had been set. So
much so, that even upon finally seeing the form and its mayhem in
live-action not long afterwards, it felt familiar and comfortable to me.
Of course, there are other reasons, pretty
straight-forward ones at that, why horror anthology movies have never
frightened me. The most obvious is because they are made up of several
short stories and not one long story; with less time to tell a story,
it's much harder to come up with something in that short time that will
scare a viewer. You often have to work long and hard first to build
things like characters and atmosphere before you can start putting in
the scares. But the biggest reason I feel that horror anthology movies
fail to give me a scare is that so many of them are not even good.
Garbage like Tales That Witness Madness, Deadtime
Stories, or Freakshow. In fact, they are so bad
that contrary to what you may be thinking by now, I am not reviewing
one this week. (Suckers! Ha ha ha ha ha!) Instead, I am reviewing
Boardheads, which is instead a comedy. More specifically, of
the particular kind with a beach setting, a la Harbodies.
The central figure in Boardheads is Link (DeBoe), a
struggling artist uneasily balancing his love of surfing with his
friend Bernie (Douglas Spain, Resurrection Blvd.) with
maintaining a solid relationship with his ever-frustrated girlfriend
Sunny (Gabrielle Anwar, Scent Of A Woman). His problems
just increase when his landlord (Swit, M*A*S*H) threatens him
with eviction after not paying his rent for the past three months. But
he soon finds himself in luck. Three middle-aged men have just moved
into the neighborhood, and while the slick Ronald (Pinchot), cowboy
Conner (William Bumiller, Boat Trip), and nerd Howard
(David Packer, V: The Final Battle) may be fabulously
rich, they find not even their fortune gives them success in picking up
all those "tasties", as Link calls all those abundant bikini-clad
knock-outs. So the three men hire Link to teach them the art of the
pick-up. Yeah, I know - not only does this movie share the same genre
as Hardbodies, it also shares its plot!
Even if you had no prior knowledge of the fact Boardheads
spent five years on the shelf before being released straight to video,
you've probably guessed that it is not a very good movie - after all,
this particular kind of movie doesn't exactly have a number of shining
examples on hand. And you would be right in your guess - even the
die-hard surfers characters that appear in Boardheads
would call it a lame and bogus experience for sure, man. But all the
same it manages to be much more bearable than just about all its
brethren. For starters, it eschews the strident and often mean-spirited
attitude found in most of these films. Instead, everything is very
relaxed, and the movie puts a great effort into making just about every
character a likeable one. While Link may be a little too obsessed with
surfing for Sunny's liking, and often gets distracted by the many
bikini-clad women, we soon see he's not really a bad fellow. He may be
a little immature, but he does love Sunny, and admits he's too hung up
on her to ever actually cheat on her. Bernie is a goofy but loyal and
caring friend. The geeks come to the beach with one thing on their
mind, but soon find true love and friendship more appealing, and
abandon thoughts of one-night stands long before the movie ends. And
while Mrs. Jones at first appears to be the movie's villain, since she
does manage to evict Link, she has a warm personality at all times that
makes it impossible to dislike her. In fact, even though Link has the
opportunity later in the movie to get revenge on her, he instead
chooses not to, and the two end the movie on good terms.
The beach community where the movie is set is presented
in a very inviting light. The weather is fantastic 99% of the time, and
even the nights are filled with glowing and attractive colors. It's a
clean and extremely friendly place,
where even the local cops who come to reprimand you for the noise you
are making at a party can be easily quelled by introducing them to some
of the local girls. And oh, what girls; everywhere you look in this
town, you see tons and tons of bikini-clad girls who are all gorgeous.
(Someone give the casting director of this movie a bonus!) No doubt
about it, this gentle and amiable spirit of Boardheads
is a very pleasant change from what we usually get, and itself makes
the movie fairly painless to watch. But it's not enough to actually
make the movie good, and unfortunately there is not that much
positive to say about the rest of the movie. The biggest problem is
that the movie simply isn't that funny; not once did I laugh at any of
the jokes. I did smile during the scene where Link is struggling to
teach the geeks the proper way to use a certain four-lettered word, and
the later "bathroom" comment by one of the geeks made me smile again.
But otherwise the jokes are far from inspired, and even further from
being funny. I'm talking about a sense of humor that thinks people
having potato dip poured on their heads is hilarious, the use of stink
bombs as knee-slappingly funny as they were back in the third grade,
and the idea of people in their senior years still having sexual urges
a howl. You get the idea.
But it's not just that the humor in the movie is
juvenile, but that it's done with absolutely no sense of comic timing.
Time and again, each attempted moment of humor goes by with no feeling
of energy, sometimes even without any recognition of possible amusement
in the scene. It's fine to have a laid-back spirit in the background of
a movie, but it becomes deadly if it extends into the comedy. Director
John Quinn (who also wrote the screenplay) doesn't seem able to direct
a comic moment any different from the other material in the movie, and
his oft-repeated technique is little more than point and shoot. He
doesn't seem to have talked to the performers a lot about their
characters, and the performers often come across as a little lost; the
sometimes awkward way DeBoe and Spain swagger around as surfer dudes
comes off more as a lack of guidance than any lack of acting ability.
The screenplay certainly doesn't give any real insight into any of the
characters. Take those three geeks, for example. We learn early on they
are rich, but how did they earn their wealth? Well, we later (much
later) learn that Howard is a software programmer, but that's it. If
they're so rich, why are they all renting the same house? For that
matter, why were they only able to rent one that leaks when it rains?
How did they all become friends, especially since Texas cowboy Conner
seems to come from a completely different environment than the other
two?
While the movie later on has a few nice and surprisingly
life-like moments of the three of them laughing and partying with Link
and his friends, these are just brief candid moments, nothing that
adds any real character to anybody. The movie doesn't seem particularly
interested in going that direction, and the few times it does make a
stab in that direction (like the subplot involving Sunny wanting to
open an auto shop), it forgets about properly resolving it. Even when a
true villainous character appears and has revealed to have done
something particularly despicable towards the protagonists, the movie
has him jump on a motorcycle and escape into the night forever, never
to get punished or even mentioned again. With this character gone, the
movie runs completely out of plot, yet there's still several scenes
that are yet to unfold. The reason, by the way, the movie runs out of
story prematurely is because most of the second half of the movie
before this point is devoted to the gang's planning and running of a
beachside bikini Olympics. Thinking back to this portion of the movie,
and putting outside observations like that the event gets media
coverage but no spectators, I offer some advice to wannabe filmmakers:
Whatever the subject matter of your movie is, stick a bikini contest in
it at some point. No matter if the rest of the movie happens to be as
bad as how utterly bad Boardheads often is at times -
the sight of skimpy bathing suits will go a long way in cajoling horny
movie critics. Trust me.
Check
for availability on Amazon (DVD)
See also: Hollywood High,
Hot Chili, Hot
Resort
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