Harry here.... I had free passes to this tonight... I was gonna go... I've decided not to... I am just not that big of a masochist... Freddie Prinze Jr is the jagged rusty razor blade of actors, and I'm tired of the shots and stitches it takes to innoculate myself and heal my brain from his terrible destructions of the film form. BTW... anybody catch Variety spoiling the entire point of the SCOOBY DOO movie today? Heh... and people call me a danger to film.... I would never give away the MYSTERY... the KEY FOCAL POINT of the movie in a headline. Jesus, what were they thinking?
Hey, Harry. Capone in Chicago here.
There are few sure things in life: the sun will always rise in the east, death, taxes, and Freddie Prinze Jr will waste 90-minute chunks of my life every few months. The first time I took notice of Junior was in 1997’s THE HOUSE OF YES, a fairly entertaining but ultimately overrated film that had the distinction of making me realize Tori Spelling could be funny. I have to admit, I thought Junior was going to surprise me with HEAD OVER HEELS, since it marked his reteaming with HOUSE OF YES director Mark Waters. Have I learned nothing?
HEAD OVER HEELS is the story of a Amanda (Monica Potter from PATCH ADAMS), a restorer of paintings at the Met in New York. She swears in her annoying opening narration that no one has worse luck with men than her. What-Ever! Of course she has horrible luck with men; she’s dating the guy from MTV’s “Jackass,” who cheats on her. She moves out and into a sitcom. Welcome her roommates: four aspiring models (Shalom Harlow, Ivana Milicevic, Sarah O’Hare, and Tomiko Fraser). I’m sure the idea here was that it would be funny to cast real models and have them act dumb. Nothing could be further from the truth. The level of humor here is having one model constantly running into things, having a waiting room outside their apartment where men converge in hopes of taking them out, and of course the obligatory sequence where they all give Amanda a makeover while ABBA music plays. If I had a nickel...
Anyway, Amanda eventually meets a new man (Freddie Jr.), who just happens to live across the street from her and whose window she can see into at all times. They fall in love, blah, blah, blah. Every movie like this has one scene where the leading man takes the girl to his “special place.” Sometimes its a major sporting arena where he knows the maintenance man and can get a key. Sometimes its a secluded lake or the roof of a building. In HEAD OVER HEELS, its an aquarium. “I know a guy,” says Junior as he explains why he’s just broken into the facility.
As the story progresses, Amanda believes she’s seen Junior kill a woman in his apartment...OR DID HE?!! What do you think? Anyway she still continues to see him, but in the guise of investigating her belief that he’s a psycho so she can turn him into the police. Oooo-kay. Suspending disbelief is one thing; this movie wants you to put plausibility in a cryogenic chamber for a thousand years. The bigger problem with HEAD OVER HEELS is that it can’t decide what it wants to be, a romantic comedy with a slightly dark edge, or a crude, gross-out movie. There are poopy jokes all over the place here, and they completely disrupt what little vibe this movie has as date-film fluff.
As we enter the final 30 minutes of HEAD OVER HEELS, the script tosses in the FBI, a Russian mob leaders, stolen diamonds, money laundering, and a fashion show. It’s a complete and utter disaster. What a mess. If I ever meet Freddie Jr., I will not only ask for all the money back I spent on his crappy movies but I’ll also insist that he let me do his girlfriend, Buffy, to pay me back for all the time a wasted in his shitty movies. Loser!
