Tuff Turf

Take one part “Footloose,” one part “Rebel Without a Cause,” and ten parts incredible stupidity, and you have “Tuff Turf,” a slick little new-kid-in-town, manhood-rites-of-passage picture that's just some clear thinking away from being good. Blame the writer; it's not that the characters are supposed to be stupid, but the writer keeps making them do stupid things, for no good reason at all. C'mon guys! The picture is colorful, and reasonably well acted, with a couple of good bits, and the leading lady (who, by recent reports, was the little girl in “Nanny and the Professor,” if you can believe it) is very good looking.

But this is definitely the first picture I've seen that is not a writer's picture, or a director's picture, or an actor's picture... it's an EDITOR'S picture. Seriously, if the picture weren't well edited it would have no hope of any success at all; the directing is no more than competent, it's the editing that keepd it going. The film is a landmark in one way, however: it introduces a new cultural stereotype--the macho preppie, or preppie stud. The gimmick here is that the hero was forced to move to seedy LA from posh Connecticut when his dad "lost his business." The hero looks and acts like every blond WASP you've ever seen, but he's also Joe Stud, you know, rough, tough, sly and cunning. But as an example of the picture's stupidity: the film's opening sets up the hero as only one step away from Spiderman when it comes to battling bad guys, but for the rest of the picture-right up to the end (where he is saved by a real deus ex machina, or in this case canis ex machina)--he doesn't win another fight; he keeps getting the shit kicked out of him. What's so smart about that?