
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have firsthand experience dealing with the misery that comes from being a smoking-hot, 18-year-old girl (but if you do, please feel free to email us — with an attached photo). Luckily for us, though, we have Just One of the Guys to share with us the insight our own lives thus far have failed to provide.
Terri (Sandra Bullock lookalike Joyce Hyser) is a high school reporter who believes she isn’t taken seriously because of her impressive rack. In order to test her theory, she decides to transfer to a nearby school and pose as a male student (where she is accurately described by female admirer Sherilyn Fenn as looking, “like the Karate Kid”).
Speaking of a certain Ralph Macchio movie, professional ’80s asshole William Zabka shows up to play the school bully who picks on “Terrance” and her new friend, Rick (April Fool’s Day’s Clayton Rohner), whom she inevitably falls in love with and has to flash in order to prove she’s a lady-girl and not a really cute gay dude.
While lacking the verisimilitude that made the concurrent John Hughes films so special, Just One of the Guys has a fun, timeless quality that keeps it from being another dated ’80s teen comedy (and as a bonus, it has a much happier ending than Boys Don’t Cry). Hyser is a genuinely charming lead, and it’s a shame her work here didn’t allow her to go on to bigger and better things. —Allan Mott



Eurotrip aims for crude laughs and earns some in gags involving a cymbal-playing monkey, David Hasselhoff and the aforementioned Armisen. But much of it is just being vulgar or stupid for vulgar and stupid’s sake. I guess either you find a near-incestuous encounter between inebriated brother and sister incredibly humorous or you don’t. Ditto a kindergartener who apes noted Jew-killer Hitler, or a impoverished girl peeing while standing up on the sidewalk. I’m sure the kids will eat it up.
Unlike the film within the film, the sight of Julie Andrews’ breasts didn’t cause anyone to rush to the box office, but that doesn’t mean S.O.B. isn’t a classic satire of early ’80s Hollywood culture. While occasionally overly broad and at least 30 minutes too long (I would have cut most of the last 20 minutes and everything to do with Loretta Swit’s gossip columnist), the movie is often laugh-out-loud funny and features an amazing cast doing what they do best.
As played by Dennis Price, Louis Mazzini is so upfront and charming about his crimes and his reasons for committing them that it’s only in retrospect you realize there might be something wrong with him. It’s easy to imagine yourself in his place, doing exactly the same thing. The only reason he isn’t considered one of the greatest villains in film history is because writer/director Robert Hamer so expertly presents him as its hero, it’s impossible to think of him as anything else.