I hadn’t seen John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles in about 16 years. With changes to the culture happening so fast these days, I’d recently been wondering how this teen film has held up, especially with many accusations of Asian-based racism, possible date rape and so on.

The answer is “not great.”

I’m pretty sure we’re all familiar with the setup by now: Samantha’s (Molly Ringwald) family forgets her “fucking birthday” on the account of her sister’s upcoming nuptials, which sets into motion a series of event that includes giving her panties to a geek (Anthony Michael Hall) at a high school dance while, eventually, ending up with the quintessential hunk (Michael Schoeffling) of her dreams.

While the film is still riotously hilarious, some of these laughs come with pangs of guilt. One of the most troubling is foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe); while Dong has many of the film’s most memorable lines, his stereotyped character seems more like a one-note joke from one of Hughes’ equally troublesome National Lampoon pieces.

And while Samantha is a realistically relatable character at a time when some of the worst-written ones were often female, her dream guy — even more than ever — comes off more like the Patrick Bateman of date rapists. At one point, he brags how he could “violate” his drunk girlfriend “10 different ways” if he wanted to, and then gives the passed-out prom queen to the geek Farmer Ted, ostensibly to drive home.

Like her when she awakens, we’re not sure if anything happened between her and Ted, but she ultimately forgives him with a chance at a wholly unrealistic relationship. When I was a geeky youth myself, I thought it was the perfect situation; now I’m not so sure. He may be forgiven in and by the film, but it’s kind of hard for the audience, at least by today’s standards, to do the same.

I guess we can play it off with the trite “it was the ’80s” cliché, a different time with strangely lax mores when compared to today. Watched through that retrofitted eye, Sixteen Candles does stand up as one of the most memorable comedies of the time, but ultimately one you couldn’t get away with today and, honestly, why would you want to? —Louis Fowler

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From Coors Light commercials to Saturday afternoon horror flicks, the constant bosomy presence of Elvira on television did a real erotic number on me growing up, implanting a lifelong lust for buxom Gothic females fully loaded with a heart-ripping skill for double entendre and a heartbreaking like for me in their arsenal.

While those dark and stormy romances never turned out the way I devilishly hoped they would, when Elvira went to the big screen in 1988’s Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, it gave me an ironic glimmer of hope that someday a black-clad beauty would cross my path in her ever-lovin’ fight against demonic forces, real or imagined.

Working as a late-night horror hostess, Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) leaves her terrible job to collect an inheritance from a recently deceased aunt. Landing in the conservative town of Fallwell, Massachusetts, she soon learns her mother was the original Mistress of the Dark, which comes in handy when she also learns her Uncle Vincent (W. Morgan Sheppard) is an evil warlock with sights set on world domination.

But the real threat here is the small town, led by the stereotypical busybody Chastity Pariah (Edie McClurg), who, after eating a magical casserole, gets so aroused she sits on some guy’s face in a public park. With the help of the area’s equally horny teens, however, Elvira is able to win the town over and defeat her evil lineage.

With so many Mae West-ian jokes about breasts, fellatio and other sexually explicit acts, it’s amazing this film escaped with a PG-13 rating. But it was a different time, I guess — one where people could burn witches at the stake for surefire laughs. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a satanically overlooked comedy that should be rescued from the pyre. —Louis Fowler

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Sergeant Dead Head is what happens when American International Pictures forces the Beach Party formula to enlist in the military. With nary an Annette in sight, Frankie Avalon bumbles his way through the title role, pratfalling all over the U.S. Air Force’s Smedley Missile Base. It’s exactly the kind of locale you don’t want the accident-prone, where one might, say, plop his rear on the panic button sitting uncovered atop the general’s desk.

Despite never have expressing love for her, Dead Head is engaged to fellow enlistee Lucy (Deborah Walley, It’s a Bikini World). The nuptials are at risk when Dead Head catches a nap in a rocket, only to wake up as the spacecraft — commandeered by a chimpanzee in an astronaut suit and paid in bananas — lifts off (in black-and-white footage, mind you). It’s even stupider than it sounds …

… and gets stupider than that, because when he’s back on Earth, Dead Head and the chimp have somehow switched brains. Now he’s a stone-cold cad!

Avalon gives it his all, coming off like a cartoon character living in a cornball sitcom — purely on purpose, with frequent Jerry Lewis director Norman Taurog at the helm — even more so than the great Buster Keaton, who does his phys-com shtick! With lots of no-harm explosions and flowing water, Sergeant Dead Head hasn’t a mean bone in its body, but I’m afraid it doesn’t have much of a heart, either. Although every bit as colorful as its AIP brethren, the movie lacks that special something: unadulterated charm. And that’s with a cast that includes Eve Arden, Harvey Lembeck, Dwayne Hickman, John Ashley, Pat Buttram, Gale Gordon, Fred Clark and Cesar Romero, some of whom sing and dance.

Oh, did I mention this is also a musical? But its songs are lifeless and lackluster, plopped in like flung wall spackle to highlight how bereft of effort Louis M. Heyward’s script is. I can’t help but wonder if the movie was greenlighted just to get in the “JAMES BOND WILL RETURN”-style plug of the then-forthcoming Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine in the end credits, because Heyward and Academy Award-winning Taurog clearly saved the goods for that one. —Rod Lott

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