My Reviews of Grease and The Thing With Two Heads

from August 27, 2007

“Endless summer” my ass. According to the NYC DOE, summer ends on August 30^th. Thanks Randi.

To commemorate the season, a couple of quickie classic summer movie reviews.

Grease

This is a documentary about a year in the life of students at Rydell High, a school in South Africa during apartheid. There are no black people in Rydell High.

Rydell High is a last chance school. It is populated by 30-year olds who have severe psychological complexes in which they believe they are teenagers and wear plastic looking leather jackets in a vain attempt to act tough.

Bobby Wheeler plays Ken Ickie, a Japanese exchange student. It is good to see him working. Bobby Wheeler was once a taxi driver in NYC who took small parts in low budget productions by day and drove a cab by night. This is his biggest role, a twenty-eight year old acting sixteen. Way to go!

Ken Ickie is the leader of the T-Bones, a gang who likes barbeque. Their girls are the Pink Ladies, led by Pinky Tuscadero and her sister Leather, who was in a rock band back in Milwaukee.

This is their senior year. Most of them are looking forward to a life of extended juvenile delinquency, but Ken Ickie is working on restoring a car which he thinks will get him a spot on the Tokyo Drift circuit. Nicknamed “Greasy Lightening,” the gang has totally tricked it out: custom rims and chrome, neon, GPS, the works. Greasy Lightening looks great, but since the T-Bones all flunked shop class it has no engine. Looks great, though.

Grease is renowned for its soundtrack, with many of its songs becoming pop hits. These songs receive continual airplay, and in 2002 “Beauty School Dropout” was covered by Marilyn Manson.

Overall, Grease is the perfect summer film- silly and distinctly not thought-provoking. From the early scenes of Master Thespian Sid Caesar as the gruff but loveable coach to the finale where the gang piles into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and flies away, this reviewer had only one thought- where’s Adrian Zmed? I know he’s in the sequel, wasn’t he in this one too?

Did You Know? This film featured a small cameo by future “Battlefield Earth” star John Travolta.

The Thing With Two Heads

While not technically a summer movie, I watched it in the summer so it counts.

There are many great big-screen duos- Bogart and Bacall, Hepburn and Fonda, Butch and Sundance, Statler and Waldorf- but none of them lit up the screen like Ray Miland and Rosie Grier in 1971.

It has a premise as old as time- take a pair of opposites and stick them together. Ray Miland is a bigot, Roosevelt Grier is a very big black guy, what could be more natural than to stick Miland’s head on Grier’s body?

“Grierland,” or “Milier,” whichever you prefer, is the titular two-headed transplant. Rich old guy is dying, and to keep him alive he is put on the black guy’s body, without the benefit of first removing the other guy’s head. Hi-jinks ensue.

To quote Ray Miland from early in the film, “Is this some kind of joke?” Sadly no, it is not.

Overall, Grease and The Thing With Two Heads perfectly sum up the feel of summer. How, I don’t quite know, but somehow they do. If they don’t they should.