Welcome back to another bodacious review at B-Movie Enema!

The 80s… I’m surprised there were any movies like Reds or Gandhi or Terms of Endearment or Out of Africa released during that decade. It seemed like most movies from the era were either muscle-bound hunks of men with giant guns or sexy boner comedies or beach party movies… that were also boner comedies. In a sort of way, the 80s revived the beach party movies of the late 50s and early 60s. I guess people, for some dumb reason, like seeing sexy people in skimpy bathing suits frolicking and making kissy faces with each other.

Enter writer/director Tamar Simon Hoffs and her 1987 comedy The Allnighter. Now, The Allnighter was one of those movies that ALWAYS caught my eye at the video store. Why? Because Tamar Simon Hoffs put her own daughter, singer Susanna Hoffs, on the cover with her graduation gown wide open and her skimpy matching bra and panties showing. That’s a hell of an ad campaign.

Susanna Hoffs was maybe best known as the sort of de facto lead of the 80s pop-rock band The Bangles. Even if you don’t really know much about The Bangles, I guarantee you know at least one of their songs. In the early 80s, Hoffs, along with the sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson, each had been in bands here and there across Los Angeles before forming The Bangles. Bassist Annette Zilinskas joined the three of them for the first iteration of the band. However, before recording their 1984 debut album, All Over the Place, Michael Steele replaced Zilinkas. At the time, the Peterson sisters sang the majority of the songs, either one of them going solo or them sharing lead vocals for six tracks on the album.

In 1986, their second album, Different Light, was much more commercially successful, even though it was not as well-received critically. But this was the album that had two songs hit big on MTV and the Billboard Charts. “Manic Monday” was a song written by Prince for the band. That was a decent hit. Nothing compared to their next single – the mega popular “Walk Like an Egyptian.” That’s the song I figure most people know, even if they don’t know it was The Bangles who did the song.

While Hoffs was not really the group’s lead singer, and her lead vocals were even less in number on Different Light, she was still kind of the marketable one. She was the diminutive girl with the big eyes and the sultrier looks than her bandmates. To be honest, I actually was more of a Vicki Peterson guy myself, but, yeah, Susanna Hoffs was hot too. Her mother was a filmmaker, and while this movie has nothing to do with The Bangles, I’m guessing her part in the band was starting to be a little more than just a member of the band itself who sang some of their bigger hits.

To be fair, that is complete conjecture on my part. I especially say that because a year after this movie’s release, The Bangles’ third album, Everything, would be their last until 2003. Hoffs, again, sang the hit “Eternal Flame” (a really good song), but internal strife was starting to cause the band to buckle under the pressure of remaining together. They would reform in 1998 and do some tours and record a fourth album, Doll Revolution. Michael Steele left the band in 2005 and later retired from music entirely. The band’s fifth, and to date, their final studio album, Sweetheart of the Sun released in 2011 (though some 80s-era rarities and previously unreleased songs were collected for a 2020 compilation). In 2018, founding member Annette Zilinskas returned to the band’s lineup and has continued performing with The Bangles since.

In 1993, Hoffs would marry director Jay Roach (known for the Austin Powers movies), and go on to do some really really good covers of older songs. She’s released several albums of covers with various other musicians. Seriously, check out her cover of “A Different Drum,” written by Michael Nesmith and made famous by Linda Ronstadt. It’s fantastic, and perhaps my favorite version of the song.

It’s funny, I spent a lot of this preamble talking about The Bangles, and this movie has NOTHING to do with them or Susanna Hoffs’ music career. This movie has some quite notable co-stars. The biggest of which is Joan Cusack as Gina. It wasn’t really until AFTER this movie that she really took off. In 1988, she appeared in the big hits Working Girl and Married to the Mob. Both movies were nominated for Oscars. Interestingly, she appeared in Married to the Mob with Michelle Pfeiffer. In The Allnighter, she works with Dedee Pfeiffer. We saw her previously in the Asylum’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Most importantly, though, we get the return of Pam Grier! Yeah, the greatest of all bad ass ladies of the 70s is back on B-Movie Enema!

So this movie didn’t do so well. While it only cost about a million bucks to make, it made only just over two and a half million at the box office with an early summer release. I guess Susanna Hoffs and her scantily-clad bod didn’t sell a whole lot of tickets. It was something that Hoffs did feel a little icky about, but eventually got over it with the help of having Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” playing in the background of a scene in which she had to do with her being only in her skimpiest of underwear. While she recognized it wasn’t that great of a movie, she did say the experience of making a movie was a good time, and she loved working with her co-stars.

Speaking of The Allnighter not being “that great of a movie,” well… the critics fucking hated it. It’s one of those 0% Rotten Tomatoes flicks. Leonard Maltin said the movie was “grotesque in the AIDS era.” The New York Times called it “outstandingly dim.” But this is B-Movie Enema. It’s my place to re-evaluate these movies and see if maybe we can mine some fun out of them. So, with that, let’s take a fistful of speed and talk The Allnighter!

The movie opens with Gina, played by Joan Cusack, introducing her own little movie. She’s something of a documentary filmmaker, or a wannabe documentary filmmaker. She talks about how this film is about the final days of her and her friends Molly (Susanna Hoffs), Val (Dedee Pfeiffer), and their guy friends, Killer and CJ (played by Deathstalker II’s John Terlesky), spent at Pacifica College. It’s surprisingly kind of whimsical, ya know? Like it’s meant to be a love letter to themselves. She talks to a camera she’s set up on herself in a way that makes it really come off as a goodbye. She talks about how anyone seeing this 20 years later should remember them this way.

Now, I’m a sentimental guy. That’s… that’s not a bit. I’m a VERY sentimental guy and often get myself caught up in thinking fondly about things I’ve experienced or the people I shared those times with, etc. However, you’ve got me very confused here, movie. You sold me on this:

And now I’m getting some melancholic thoughts on growing up and entering the real world. I wanna see skimpy bikinis and get boner jokes all over the place. Heh… All over the place… Like the name of the debut album from The Bangles. Anyway, I didn’t exactly put this movie on the calendar to review for yucky girl feelings… blech! Okay, sure, as Gina goes around and interviews friends and classmates, they are talking about getting drunk, going to football games, getting educations in anatomy, and the true meaning of 69, but that shit is similar to what I saw in The Big Chill.

Actually… I don’t know if I remember The Big Chill all that well. I know William Hurt’s dong didn’t work right in that movie and Kevin Costner was cut out of the final film. Eh… I’m guessing that’s basically the same thing as what we are seeing in the early stages of The Allnighter.

Molly is apparently the key figure in this movie. Not only is she the daughter of the movie’s co-writer and director, but she is also a current pop star, so she gets to be the lead. I don’t make the rules, I just live by them. She’s asked by Gina what she got out of her four years at Pacifica. Molly is a little distracted. She’s trying to clean up the girls’ house they live in by the beach before her mother arrives. But when she relents, she says that she only knows what she didn’t get out of the four years – a great big, whirlwind romance. When Val suggests she could settle for a decent casual thing, Molly says it’s too late for that too.

But what’s Molly looking for? She tells Val that she expected to find someone at Pacifica who was really cool, but also smart. The guy she references as the example of who she thought she would meet was Sam Shepard. You know, the guy who was in his mid-40s at the time The Allnighter came out. Like, she could have said a million other people. Some of which would have been the same age as Shepard, like David Bowie. She could have even said Tom Cruise, and you’d kind of get it. Cruise isn’t really a dummy. In 1987, he was pretty cool. But what 22-year-old girl in 1987 wants to meet Sam Shepard? It’s not exactly set up in these early scenes that Molly is the intellectual one. She’s the neurotic one as she’s trying to clean up the friends’ bungalow before her mom shows up and finds things to nitpick at. She’s got a speech to write, indicating, I suppose, that she’s the valedictorian of the graduating class. But we’ve not exactly seen her studiously reading the collected works of Sam Shepard to understand her throbbing loins over a guy, at this time, twice her age.

Molly also comments to Val on how immature and disappointing CJ is. Now, I guess they are just friends, but they kind of like each other? Val says that CJ is immature and is lured by things like fake tits. He doesn’t exactly know how to reconcile his feelings for a girl who is really cute and really smart. He just likes chasin’ strange and catchin’ waves on his surfboard. Sometimes at the very same time! Meanwhile, CJ ponders just going for her at tonight’s big party.

Alright, so the big end of senior year fiesta is happening in just a few hours. Molly is kind of stuck thinking about all she didn’t get out of college (i.e. a grand romance she will remember forever). Val seemingly has a choice to make between seeing her boyfriend and having one last blowout with the girls, which leaves her doubting what she has. Gina seems too wrapped up in making a movie to care one way or another about getting laid. Killer just wants to ride a buzz. CJ is a horndog and a big man on campus who might just be more interested in Molly than she realizes.

That leaves two additional characters that kind of pop up out of the blue. Michael Ontkean plays a former pop star named Mickey LaRoy. He has arrived on campus, not to entertain the kiddos, but to see an old flame, Connie. Connie works at the college. When he was walking through the halls looking for her, he passed Molly, who found him rather cute. This was just after Val said Molly should look for an older, more mature guy instead of someone like CJ.

Look, I think I know what’s going on here. This is essentially a light comedy about the last day of college before these people go their separate ways. There’s a lot of talk about tonight’s fiesta. So all roads are leading to that and a big crazy party, right? But I want to see the young people do fun, sexy things. I don’t care about these other two characters hashing out their past whatevers.

But we’ve reached our first big conflict of the movie. Val got a phone call from her boyfriend, Brad. He has no interest in the fact that tonight is the big fiesta. He wants to spend the night in a bitchin’ suite at the hotel with Val wearing a lavish gown he bought for her instead. He sells it to her, as she has to try to sell it to Molly and Gina, that this is a chance for them to spend the night together like the real married couple they are going to eventually be. The girls are quite disappointed by this news. This was supposed to be their last night to be together as they were in college, the Three Musketeers, if you will.

After the friends all have a final dinner together, Mickey comes knocking on their door. He used to live in their bungalow. Molly knows Mickey as the lead guitarist for a band called The Rhinos. She’s really excited to talk to him, and this pisses CJ off to the point that he immediately starts calling Mickey old and stuff. Val leaves to meet Brad, and CJ and Killer leave for the fiesta. Mickey and Molly stay at the bungalow to dance to one of The Rhinos’ songs while Gina films it.

And just like that… We now have two love triangles for this movie’s plot. I kinda feel like this movie can’t really handle one love triangle, let alone two, but here we are. There’s the triangle of Molly/Mickey/CJ. There’s the one that more or less concerns Val, Brad, and her besties, Molly and Gina. There’s a lot going on here on the last day of school before the big fiesta!

After Mickey leaves, Gina tells Molly that CJ is really pissed off. At the fiesta, CJ tells Killer Gina pisses him off. At the hotel, Brad is too busy doing business things to pay attention to Val, who is in a pretty fetching nightgown and ready to enjoy the night as Brad wanted, like a real married couple. Brad is a massive dork, so I hope she leaves him.

Look, readers… This movie has little to no interest in being good. What’s the plot? A party. What’s the point? To have a bunch of sexy young, sort of actors, drinking and thinking about sex and drugs. Actually, NO! This is a decidedly drug-free movie. There was a joke that Joan Cusack made about the other two girls dumping her pot into the lasagna sauce because they thought it was oregano, but I don’t think that’s what that was. I mean, who puts their pot in a jar in the kitchen that looks like where you’d keep oregano? I guess you could put it there if you were nervous or paranoid that people would find it and narc your ass out, but if that’s true, then why not tell your friends that it’s not oregano?

This movie has an identity crisis. It’s trying to be a sex comedy where you have doofy surfer dudes and sexy college girls having one last big party, right? But it’s neither sexy nor funny. It also wants to be something sentimental. That’s the angle this movie really should be selling and heavily leaning in on. But it has to be the sex comedy, too. So, while there could be something to Molly and CJ kind of orbiting each other but never really colliding, it feels very contrived. These two have known each other for four years now. They really should have had a drunken roll in the hay after some party, realized one or the other, or both, is really bad at sex, and moved on. At least they did it, right? You also have Val in a position where she has to question what she has with Brad. Does she really want to settle for being a wife while he spends all his time being a dorky 1980s capitalist? Then, there’s his ADR and his acting…

Look, I know what it’s doing. Brad is a fucking mega dork, right? We can smell our own. So the movie is trying hard to make us dislike him, but the dialogue about sales, his frustration about his manager not having call waiting, and his general dorky vibe, how the hell did he score Val? She’s A-1 prime babe. She’s a fucking Pfeiffer. It also doesn’t help that the ADR is out of control.

Speaking of CJ and Molly always missing each other while constantly in orbit, a scene that really does work in this movie takes place at the fiesta. Molly and CJ run into each other and have a dance. He kids her about dancing with Mickey. He also asks her why she’s been so weird lately. She says she really wants to tell someone how she feels about them, but doesn’t know how. Just when you think they are about to settle this shit about an hour early, a bubble-headed beach blonde comes up looking for CJ to get his attention. Molly goes home and decides it’s time for a makeover, and the crowd goes wild.

Alright, so Molly ditches the good girl vibe and goes all out as a sexy woman. We’re all very appreciative of this scene. Yeah, I know Hoffs had a little bit of nervousness around doing this scene, but goddamn. She is a very good-looking woman and knows how to kind of play this moment realistically. Like, I think her nervousness about doing the scene does her some good when acting out the little dance in front of the mirror. She’s stepping outside the boundaries she’s always kept herself in.

Also, I can’t help but ask if maybe Joan Cusack is meant to play her role a little gay. One, she’s not one who is known for going for guys. Characters have already brought up how she cares more about talking about sex than actually having it. She sees Molly and is stunned by how her friend is dressed. This was 1987. There wasn’t much of a concept of how to appropriately play a member of a friend group as asexual or anything other than straight. But I can’t help but see something there in how she is depicted here.

But enough about that. I’m going to be able to live the rest of my life with the image of Susanna Hoffs in her tiny little panties in my head. So, what is Molly’s big plan? Well, she goes to the hotel Mickey is staying at while in town and asks if he’d like to have a drink with her. Goddammit, if she’s not going to get Deathstalker II, she’s going to get Sam Shepard! There’s a gag here at the hotel about all the women who show up dressed up are all hookers meeting johns. There’s a guy at the front desk who is a hotel detective (I guess that’s a thing?), and he is overly eager to see which girls go upstairs so he can bust them. I feel like that’s waaaaaaay not cool and an invasion of privacy. It’s a bad joke. For one, why would a hotel have someone getting into the business of the people who stay there? Do they have a major problem with hookers?

Well, what this is is a reason to create some zaniness. One, the detective is looking for women to go up to the guests’ rooms. After Mickey tells her there’s no way what she thinks will happen will happen, she concocts a way for her to get to his room by saying the fake eyelashes she’s put on are getting into one of her eyes. So now, she’s a woman going to a guest’s room. But that’s actually not the zaniness. Just as he’s going to take her downstairs to send her back to the fiesta, a knock comes to the door, and Mickey puts her out on the balcony. Connie is at the door, so now Molly is stuck on the balcony, hearing him get it on with her. But that’s not actually the zaniness either! No, she has to try to climb down from Mickey’s room’s balcony.

But here’s the thing about all this, along with the importance of the central thing in this movie (the fiesta), and even the FUCKING TITLE OF THIS MOVIE. Okay, so everyone talked about going to the fiesta, right? Well, at the halfway point of the movie, everyone at the fiesta is so fucking blitzed that they are all passed out on the beach. Also, the only time Gina showed was to film everyone passed out on the beach. So she didn’t attend. Val missed more than half the party because she was stuck with her dork of a fiancé. So she was barely at the fiesta. CJ was at the fiesta, then wanted to leave the fiesta, until he ran into Molly and they danced, only for him to eventually leave with the blonde, which forced Molly to leave angry and decide to go get sex from the aging rock star. So he was at the fiesta but didn’t want to be there, only to eventually leave with someone other than the person I think he wanted to leave with. That means Molly went and quickly left, too.

So the fiesta was a giant nothingburger in this movie.

Now, Molly’s asleep on someone’s balcony, and Val and Gina have to rescue her. Now, I assume it’s, like, what… 1 o’clock in the morning? Maybe 2 o’clock? This movie is called THE ALLNIGHTER. That implies that the movie is one zany night of crazy shenanigans. Yet, our lead is asleep on a balcony.

But, in a way, Val and Gina are having a bit of an adventure. They arrive at the hotel only to be led to the wrong room due to some misunderstanding by the young bellhop. They go to a room full of hookers. Apparently, there’s a whole racket there, and the girls think the coeds are “new recruits.” But then the hookers have hacked into the computer database where they know which rooms everyone’s in. They tell Gina and Val which room Mickey is in, but as they leave, the hotel detectives are there to arrest the hookers, Gina and Val included.

This whole thing is a very contrived series of events. One, I think I’ve made my feelings and thoughts very clear about the whole hotel detective thing. It’s like the movie wasn’t full enough to support being feature-length, with the concept of it being the last night of college, and everyone’s going to go to a big party to let off four years of steam. So they added this whole thing where it’s a CRAZY night and two of the girls get arrested under false pretenses and have to get out of it! That’s very dumb.

Second, this is a classic “idiot plot,” as coined by Roger Ebert. Everyone has to be really stupid for this to work out the way it does. The “hotel detectives” have to be overly zealous. That means they won’t listen to reason. Val and Gina are unable to actually express themselves or explain what it was they are doing. Even when Molly tries to help, she’s shoved aside and yelled at to shut her up and prevent her from helping resolve this conflict. Even at the police station, Val and Gina are unable to get a word in about what is going on, why they were there, and that there is a big misunderstanding. Hell, even when they do get a chance to speak, they can’t articulate shit. And! From what I even understand by a brief exchange of dialogue, they weren’t even read their Miranda Rights. Instead, it led to two of the hookers talking about “that bitch” Miranda. Then, just to shut them all up, they’re shoved into the paddy wagon and hauled off to jail. Everyone in this movie is a goddamn idiot!

Oh, hey, I forgot I mentioned that Pam Grier was in this.

Well, at least the movie makes it to the morning, which means it achieves the title… I guess. I mean, if “The Allnighter” refers to Val and Gina’s time in holding at the police station. With only 30 minutes left in the movie, the movie decides to go back to CJ and Killer, who go out for a morning surf. That’s REALLY important to the resolution of this movie, ya know. But I guess CJ needs a little strife. He falls off his board and gets bonked on the head. Killer goes out to retrieve him. I guess this is going to be the warning to CJ that he needs to be cool and just be with Molly.

By the way, I was being facetious, but he says that as he was about to drown, the last thing he thought about before blacking out was Molly. Killer tells CJ that he has finally passed his final class, and they are going to ultimately go their separate ways. CJ is headed east to go to law school. With CJ going in that direction and thinking more seriously about Molly, Killer reminds him that “change is inevitable.” Okay, on a sentimental level, considering Killer leaves right then and there, that was a decent little scene between the surfer bros.

CJ and Molly go to the police station to clear up the whole wrongful prostitution charges against Val and Gina. Pam Grier says she will release the girls to CJ’s custody, but for $500 bail each. Now, much like with the hotel detectives, I’m not sure this is a real thing. I think a judge has to set bail, right? Right? I think they would get an arraignment and then they would get a bail set by a judge… or not, depending on the charge. Whatever… When Molly talks to Pam Grier and tells her that she can have this ring that she’s been keeping for Val (her engagement ring), it should be more than enough collateral to cover the bail; she agrees to free the girls and completely exonerate them.

Outside, dorky ass Brad shows up to scold Val for leaving their room and going missing for the next 12 hours or so. Val tells him to get fucked and breaks up with him. Driving back to school, CJ explains that Killer up and left, claiming Killer believed it was his time to go. Everyone says their last goodbyes to their college years. Val tells Gina that she just had the best day of her life. How that could be true, I cannot say. Molly goes to see CJ to finally tell him something I feel like these two should have said to each other YEARS ago, but everyone’s a goddamn moron in this movie.

Molly and CJ fuck. They show up just in time for her valedictorian speech, and it’s… pretty bad. But everyone graduates, and I guess Gina finished her movie. And I graduated from this movie.

Look, I understand how everyone making this movie could have had a great time making it. This is a movie starring mostly unknowns at the time, who were just happy to make a movie. If you’re just a 20-something getting to act in a movie that takes place on the beach and you’re surrounded by other 20-somethings, I bet you’d have a blast. Plus, Joan Cusack’s there! She’s a goddamn Oscar nominee for a movie she makes the very next year!

There is something here that could have worked. Again, I’m a sentimental fool myself. I could get behind a movie that documents the final days of a group of friends before the inevitable change that will split them apart. There are moments in life that are special. Most people think about their youth framed, usually, in two different time frames – their high school years or their college years. This is the time when people have responsibility, but not too much to not be able to have a great time with friends and, maybe most importantly, dream of what the future will be like before reality punches you in the dick.

If only this movie opted to be more of a comedy-drama instead of something that ultimately smells more of a boner comedy, I think this could have been a forgotten classic, or gained a cult following… or both! Susanna Hoffs is not great as an actress, but it’s forgivable in her first (and really only) major acting job. I think she does kind of stand out as a non-actor because of the experience (and in Joan Cusack’s case, the talent) around her in the rest of the roles. The movie isn’t serious enough to attempt to be good, and it’s not crazy enough to have a few hilarious moments. It’s just a dud.

Here’s the thing… This movie is really kind of inoffensive in its below-mediocrity quality. I CERTAINLY do not believe this movie is gross, like Leonard Maltin’s review of it. In fact, his saying this is offensive in the world of AIDS is, in and of itself, kind of gross and offensive. This movie doesn’t really have enough sex to be debaucherous. It’s really a movie about finding the right people, specifically for CJ and Molly. Molly is trying to have a whirlwind romance, and CJ is immature and needs someone who will bring out his better instincts. Val needed to get away from a guy who treats her like a trophy and infantilizes her. She wasn’t leaving him because she wanted to jump into bed with someone else. So, no, this is not a movie that promotes sex in the time of AIDS. That’s a really stupid take, Leonard.

Still, the movie is a miss, but it could have been something much better. “Something much better” is not really on tap for next week, though. However, I do think there is something quaint and kind of charming coming up on B-Movie Enema. Join me next time for the very first review of a movie from Edward D. Wood, Jr. Yes, ol’ Eddie has never been covered here. I mean, what could I possibly cover? Glen or Glenda? Who hasn’t already said all there is to say about that one? Plan 9 from Outer Space? That’s already got ALL the words spoken and written about it. No, we’re doing the one in the middle of those two.

Grab something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue because, next week, I’m reviewing Bride of the Monster!