Review: Valley Girl

Image courtesy of MGM.

Martha Coolidge's 1983 cult hit "Valley Girl" was a surprisingly sweet teen movie that was sensitively written, featured a fantastic soundtrack and included a great early performance from Nicolas Cage. The new - well, sort of, considering the film has been shelved for two years - jukebox remake of "Valley Girl" has taken all the wrong lessons from Coolidge's original film.

The 1983 picture featured satirical elements and boasted a punk-rock attitude, whereas this new version - which basically tells the same story, but with musical numbers - is more sanitized and glitzy. It's one of those movies that takes every element of what make cheesy movies from the 1980s charming and over-stylizes them in a way that makes them feel grating.

The film starts with a young woman in the modern era arriving home late at night to be greeted by her mother (Alicia Silverstone), who regales her with a story from her own youth in which she was a - you guessed it - valley girl in the 1980s. Julie Richman (Jessica Gothe) utilizes "omigod" and "like" in typical San-Fernando-circa-mid-80s fashion, but she's slightly smarter than most of the rest of her crowd.

She has a dopey jock boyfriend (played by controversial web presence Logan Paul) and a group of young women with whom she pals around - mostly at the mall. At the beach one day, she meets a punk rocker named Randy (Josh Whitehouse), and he and his two bandmates - a spiky-haired drummer and a guitarist played by Mae Whitman - show up at a party where Julie is attending later that night.

Julie and Randy hit it off, she ditches the dopey boyfriend and her valley friends don't seem to know what to make of the situation. In Coolidge's original version, some actual drama was drawn from the scenario. Here, it's used as an excuse for the cast to break out into a variety of '80s radio hits - such as "You Might Think," "Take On Me" and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

Despite the abundance of sing-a-long classics, the film attempts to replace actual storytelling with decades-old lyrics that are supposed to stand in for what the film's characters are thinking. Yes, I know that's what a typical musical often does - but in this case, it's stealing old songs and trying to repurpose into a story, and it rarely works.

Also, "Valley Girl" nearly follows Coolidge's original film beat-for-beat in terms of plot, right down to the limo sequence at the end. The 1983 film is a real charmer - this new version opens with "We Got the Beat," but rarely does the film actually do so. This remake is a case in point for the phrase "leave well enough alone."