ANGST FOR THE MEMORIES........BQ RELIVES THOSE HAZY, CRAZY DAYS OF "LAST SUMMER"

Last Summer (1969)    We vaguely remember film critics going wild for this......for what they  believed to be a  brutally honest evocation of what teens are really like............

                 Yeah, right.    Cause looking at it again, it seems way closer to "Lord Of The Flies" than "Rebel Without A Cause".......

                   The setup: Three massively entitled, spoiled, unsupervised rich kids (Richard Thomas, Bruce Davison, Barbara Hershey) running wild during a hot, hot summer on Fire Island.....

                   (Imagine the grandchildren of "Gatsby"s  Tom and Daisy Buchanan......that might give you an inkling of what this trio's up to...........you can see the collateral damage coming from a mile away.....)

                   Into this this sociopathic adolescent spider's web comes the fly.......a painfully sweet dweeb (Catherine Burns), a studious kewpie doll aching for peer acceptance.....

                   Hoo boy, did she ever fall in with the wrong crowd.......

                  It's established early on that Hershey's character is wickedly cruel and borderline psychotic......she needs only give her two blonde prettyboys regularly scheduled views of her boobs to turn them into seduced minions.   With hormones ragin' and condoms burnin' a hole in their pockets, these gangly preppies drink deeply of the Hershey Kool Aid......

                   This, you may guess correctly, does not bode well for poor Burns, whom the script has doing everything except wear a huge T Shirt reading, "I'M A VICTIM. HURT ME. BADLY'

                   You could call director Frank Perry the early, early version of an independent film director........his modest little movies brought forth skilled performances from his casts, but he was fairly clumsy and technically incompetent as an actual filmmaker........his qualities and his flaws are both on full display in "Last Summer"

                   It's purely an actor's showcase and the kids are allright. Hershey, Davison and Thomas still have busy active careers to this day.......ironically Catherine Burns, who nabbed a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work here, dropped out of sight in the mid 1980's.  A damned shame......

                    Also ironic.........a major plot episode involving Hershey and the gang victimizing a young Latino man into a computer date.......(just insert "catfishing" and "facebook" into the dialogue and this ugly little scene is right up-to-the-minute.....)

                   (SPOILER ALERT COMIN' UP IN THIS PARAGRAPH, SO DON'T SAY WE DID'NT WARN YOU......)

                    The film makes a few earnest attempts to humanize Thomas's character, attempting the shy beginnings of a romance with Burns.......but finally, he proves too far gone under Hershey's spell.........and the film lurches into its notorious ending that has the much-abused Burns ganged raped by the entire unholy trio.........a climax that's less about teen angst and more about touching off debates as audiences left the theater........(imagine the mind-boggling Twitter posts this would have gotten today.....)

                     A good movie? Worthy of those glowing 1969 reviews?   We say......not quite. Frank Perry shoots and edits like he's clutching a "Directing For Dummies" book in one hand.......but the film remains compelling and watchable on the strength of its four actors.......and for them (and especially the long lost Catherine Burns..)   3 stars (***)   

                     How 'bout bringing Burns out of retirement or wherever and re-uniting her with Thomas, Hershey and Davison in "Return To Last Summer"?    

                     Nutty?   Hey, if there's an Emoji movie and Madea movies........then why not?  We'd take a "Last Summer" sequel over any of  the next 1,000 Marvel movies......