After new student Sarah T.’s (Linda Blair) hopes are dashed when she fails to make it into the glee club, she begins a staggering road to faux-drunkenness in the classic made-for-TV melodrama Sarah T. — Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic. Made at a time when open liquor was practically its own food group, it doesn’t help that Sarah walks around Hollywood with her deadbeat dad (Larry Hagman) as he’s slugging brews out of a paper cup.
Things start looking up when she duets with Mark Hamill on a Carole King song, but with congratulatory booze passed around at the wildest shindig you ever did see — they’ve got a party sub! — things get really crazy when Sarah T. smashes a plate of far too much potato salad into a rival’s chest after a rather cutting comment about Raquel Welch and how she eats all of her potato salad. While for most of us that would be a real popularity killer, but, because of her alcoholism, Sarah T. is now the most fun girl in school, especially among the chunky kids who carry their lunch in a ratty brown sack and still say “Far out!” Far out!
At home, though, things get worse as she’s not only busted for boozing while babysitting, but inadvertently get her nice old maid fired. Luckily, by the end of the film, Sarah T. goes to a teen-centered Alcoholics Anonymous and, after listening to a junior alkie spill his guts, mostly gets her life back on track — the drunken horseback-riding into oncoming traffic helped too, I’m sure.
Directed by Richard Donner in what feels like the one true sequel to The Omen — dominus tequilium — the facts about teen drinking are clumsily presented to the parents watching at home with their kids, while the kids are given plenty of great tips on how to score booze and not let Mom and Dad find out about it. Sadly, I had to learn that college. And it wasn’t booze, it was Doritos.
Just call me Louis F., I guess. —Louis Fowler