Where George Lucas's American Graffiti captured the late 1950's/early 1960's thanks to incredible costume design and social/political undertones of the time period, Mel Damski's Mischief settles on replicating the time period of the 1950's by way of a costume party. Mischief is one of those raunchier comedies that rides on the coattails of nostalgia, and instead of crafting its own characters or replicating ideas from its respective period, the crew behind it buys some old duds, rents a few classic cars, reads the first ten pages of a book on the lingo of the time period, and proceeds to grab a camera and start filming.
The film opens with the same "A long time ago..." title card from Star Wars, only to say the galaxy "far, far away" is Nelsonville, Ohio. This is a peculiar opening sequence to say the least because, being that the film is set in 1956, its narrative predates Star Wars by more than twenty years. After the questionable opening, we are introduced to the shy and clumsy Jonathan Bellah (Doug McKeon), who has a crush on the beautiful Marilyn McCauley (Kelly Preston). Marilyn is the poster-child of women in the 1950's, equipped with a dress that looks like a cross between a wedding dress and bridal lingerie, angelic blonde hair, and personality traits that find themselves eclipsed by her effervescent smile. She's not a character in the film - she's an object of affection. Because of his incompetence around women, Jonathan looks towards Eugene Harbrough (Chris Nash), a rebellious jock, to help him win the heart of Marilyn. Eugene has a crush on Marilyn's friend Bunny Miller (Catherine Mary Stewart), whom he uses as a way to get closer to Marilyn in order for her to recognize Jonathan as more than a face in the hallway.
Despite the title, the most mischief these meathead characters get themselves into throughout the course of the film is finding new and riveting ways to damage their vehicles, largely time-apt Studebakers that they use to trade paint, rear-end one another, or basically do anything other than drive like sane human beings that are capable of possessing a license to drive. Jonathan and Eugene constantly find themselves at odds with Kenny (D.W. Brown), a tough-talking bully who instigates the men in front of Marilyn and Bunny whenever he gets the opportunity.
The situational comedy in Mischief is as downright atrocious as it is improbable. First off, I simply cannot accept how much we see Marilyn by herself in the film. I cannot accept that a woman this beautiful in school isn't surrounded by a gaggle of girlfriends or doesn't find herself socializing at the mall, malt shops, or parties. I also can't bring myself to reason why she'd find anything attractive about Jonathan and his conflicting aura. Consider the scene where Jonathan slips and falls right before Marilyn, who is walking on the sidewalk. Jonathan's lip is bleeding, and being that Marilyn is such a caring angel, she helps wipe the blood of his lip. While she is cleaning him up, he slowly reaches for her breast and caresses it with his hand. "Why did you do that, Jonathan?," she asks in the most relaxed and unfazed way, to which Jonathan replies, "I don't know, I didn't know what I was doing." Smooth as a gravel road, kid.
Or consider when Jonathan and Marilyn go to have sex and Jonathan doesn't even have a condom. He justifies his lack of preparation to Marilyn by saying that if he brought a condom, he thought she'd view him as a "sex fiend." Nonetheless, with Marilyn's consent, they still have sex, but Marilyn implores Jonathan to pull out; let's just say he fails to follow the simple directions and is met by the calmest, most nonchalant reaction a woman has ever given to a man following his failure to follow simple directions.
Throughout the film, I didn't know which character was dumber. Was it Jonathan for being so naive to Marilyn's own personal feelings and his lustful tendencies taking over to the point where, by the time he actual does have sex with her, he can't name a single thing she likes, dislikes, or appreciates in life? Was it Marilyn, who never seems to have any shred of self-awareness as to what she's doing or how she's being treated throughout the entire span of her friendship with Jonathan, if you can even call it that? Was it Eugene, for perpetuating this kind of macho-arrogance in Jonathan and bringing him out of his shell to be a contemptible character? It's all very debatable, but I'd rather not split hairs over a film that's already so improbable when it's positioned as realistic.
This is another kind of nostalgia comedy that thinks if you continue to play music by time-specific artists like Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley that, eventually, you'll feel you have transported back in time. While the 1950's cars, clothes, and music are all accurate, from what I've read and can tell, what's the point of going through the trouble to recreate the time period if you're not going to do anything with it in a thematic sense? There's no reason this film really had to be set in the 1950's; being shot and released in 1985, it could've been your average eighties comedy that might've seen its longevity and relevance increased thanks to the prominence of the teen comedy genre during that time. In an attempt to do something different, Damski and screenwriter Noel Black take a direction that does nothing but find poorly written characters trapped in a cartoon of a comedy, stripped of their humanity and their rational decision-making.
Starring: Doug McKeon, Kelly Preston, Chris Nash, Catherine Mary Stewart, D.W. Brown, and Jami Gertz. Directed by: Mel Damski.
