Movie of the Week: Get Crazy (1983)

Allen Arkush's highly underrated and supremely entertaining followup to Rock and Roll High School is finally on Youtube in its entirety, lucky you. As far as I know, it's otherwise only available on VHS. Why is that? Music licensing issues? And why didn't it catch on the first time around, when it played theaters? It should have become a midnight movie. 

But maybe it was too late, because I personally consider Get Crazy to be the last studio movie of the counterculture, before the Reagan era destroyed everything fun. After this film, 80's pop culture was all about materialism and complacency and conformity and wealth. So it's a little out of its time, maybe, but that makes it all the more exceptional. A threadbare plot about a New Year's concert serves its purpose to throw as many jokes as possible onto the screen. It's Rock and Roll High School on speed, and I think it's the bee's knees.

Allow me to describe a small portion of the cast:

Lou Reed, poking fun at himself for a change

Malcom McDowell drops acid and hears voices from his penis

Ed Begley Jr. as an archetypal 80's yuppie

Lee Ving, who steals the whole Goddamn movie

Paul Bartel and his movie-partner Mary Woronov

Lori Eastside, front woman of Kid Creole and the Coconuts

Robert Picardo of The Howling and one of those Star Trek television series

Linnea Quigley as a groupie

Derf Scratch of FEAR as Reggie's guitarist

Plus the little sister is played by the hottie "tsatske" from Halloween III: Season of the Witch, who, as a teenager, dated Woody Allen and was the inspiration for the Mariel Hemingway character in Manhattan.

Also keep an eye out for Dick Miller, Clint Howard and Fabian. There are a bunch of other faces I'm recognizing here, but I'm not going to look them all up.