Laying down the template for many, many mad affairs to come, 1988’s Fresh Horses could very well be the first example of Tennessee Williams-lite drama that’s actually set in the North. From here onwards, any starlet wanting to be taken seriously would start to drop her g’s and act as a runaway from a broh-kan, you-can’t-fix-me nameless town. Or, for that matter, any pretty boy wanting to account for more than being a pretty boy would just try the junkie/bookie/victim/angel/lunatic angle.
So, let’s get to the plot, fast:
“A Cincinnati college student breaks off his engagement to his wealthy fiancée after he falls in love with a backwoods Kentucky girl he meets at a party. She says she’s 20, but he finds out she’s 16 and married to an abusive husband.”
Yeah. Everything you need to know, tidily compressed into a 1’ trailer. Except Ben Stiller. And the abuse-y bits. Neat.
Ringwald gives off a distinct “Southern Gothic dame lost in a maze of negatives” vibe here, which should never, ever sound like a backhanded compliment, but it sort of does.
Keeping up with yesterday’s dosage of Boy, The Nineties Did It Wrong On So Many Levels, I thought I’d pick another little something younger generations might just skip on their drama-free way to adulthood: 1994’s S.F.W.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: the Nineties just didn’t work.
The longer trailer manages to do a decent job, though. First 30” function as a subtle parody of the “TV special within the movie” technique that was favored by pop storytelling at the time. Shades of Natural Born Killers are swiftly neutered, and the overall pace/look is pretty close to what they must have thought about while still in pre-production, the biggest clue being a then untested, emotional song as a character/audience bonding tool (hallo, Radiohead), whereas the choppy period-specific editing choices fill the coveted “anything can, and probably will, happen” spot (hallo, monumental spoiler).
And how Nineties are those big flickering words? Aww.
Still, the shorter, raucous trailer is much closer to the actual movie - disjointed as they come, trying to hit way too many targets and laying it all on Stephen Dorff’s alleged leading man potential.
True, I shouldn’t rag on him, since my girl just loved him in Blade. But one exploding vampire can only atone for so much (hallo, Norman Reedus).
Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “1:43 it was for you !”
Confession time: I never managed to sit through more than 10’ minutes of Joel Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s Fire, even though at a certain critical point of my pre-teen years a local cable network was playing it on a daily basis. Had I known my pre-teen self was so in tune with the global zeitgeist, I could have tried to get some money out of it. Oh, well.
As Jonathan Bernstein would say, the amount of times St. Elmo’s was showcased on pay-per-view channels might suggest it was a hit movie (it wasn’t) and/or it somehow conveyed the spirit of the time (it didn’t). What it actually managed to do was:
b) introduce general audiences to the notion that Judd Nelson’s perf in The Breakfast Club was mostly a stroke of luck;
c) mindfuck us into embracing the fact that Demi Moore would be around for a loooooong time;
d) give many of us our first shot of Young Actors Overcompensating For Being Desperately Out Of Touch With Their Peers.
To this day, I suspect it mostly works like a Brat Pack yearbook. And the “interconnecting storylines” thing (which is edited all out of sequence here) was hardly a new trick in the Eighties. Still, two things cannot be denied: the script set the template for ensemble TV dramas such as Melrose Place, and the theme song’s clip was still on the air months after the film had died at the box office.
