The Allnighter (1987).

I have all of my physical media in a deep closet that I’ve repurposed as my own little film vault. When I moved into the house, I built some custom shelves, put up a Steelbook wall, and some movie posters, and honestly it’s one of my favorite little rooms in the house. But…it’s filling up, and that leaves me with two choices…either I stop buying movies altogether, or…I purge those that might not deserve a spot in the Kleeberg movie library. So I’ve began an exercise in watching those films in my collection that I have never seen so that I can decide if they deserve to stay in the closet or get put on eBay and going in alphabetical order, first up was 1987’s The Allnighter. This ended up in my collection because Kino Lorber, who put the disc out, always has a few sales during the year when everything is extremely discounted and I picked it up as a blind buy during one of those sales.

The Stage.

Five students from the fictional Southern California Pacifica College are about to graduate, but as they prepare for one final party and pass into the official world of adulthood, emotions run wild.

The Review.

The Allnighter is one of about a thousand Southern California student beach comedies that came out in the eighties, although this one is much more harmless than films like Hardbodies and The Beach Girls as it’s rated PG-13 and runs slight on risqué situations and certainly on language.

The story focuses on five students. Gina, who is documenting the final days of school with her enormous Olympus video camera. Molly, the beautiful class valedictorian who’s wrestling with whether or not to tell her crush about her true feelings. Val, who’s engaged to be married and is questioning if she’s making the right decision, and finally, Killer and his friend CJ, two surfer meatheads who only care about catching women and waves.

The standout in the cast is Susanna Hoffs, who plays Molly. The film was written and directed by Hoffs’s mother Tamar Simon Hoffs and was probably intended as a starring vehicle to transition Susanna Hoffs from music to the big screen, as she was the lead singer of the Bangles at the time. If that was the intent, unfortunately it didn’t translate into much as she didn’t do much else in the film world aside from bit roles in Austin Powers films which were directed by her husband Jay Roach. She has one of the bigger emotional lifts here and gets to show off her acting skills. Although she’s not perfect, she’s serviceable and miles ahead of anyone else in the cast. Joan Cusack is also here as Gina, the group film nerd who I definitely identified with. Unfortunately she doesn’t get much screen time.

The film is listed as a comedy but it doesn’t feel like there are any deliberately comedic situations until a gag about an hour in in which the some of the girls are mistaken for hookers by some overly vigilant staff members at the prestigious Hotel Playa Del Mar, which leads to a bunch of miscommunications, an arrest, and the best moment in the movie when Pam Grier shows up as a police officer. Even then, the payoffs aren’t as good as they could have been with a stronger script and more comedically gifted actors.

The End.

The Allnighter is a cute, harmless 80’s romp that could have been a whole lot better if every character was smarter. As is, I don’t know what Pacifica College was teaching people because everyone on screen is dumb as hell. The movie doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but I still had a decent time with it simply because of how charming Susanna Hoffs was. The music is pretty good throughout the film, a perfect 80’s time capsule (although it’s curiously missing anything from the Bangles), but the film score, produced by Charles Bernstein (who’s a very capable composer, having done the scores for classics like Nightmare on Elm Street and Cujo) is absolutely terrible.

The purpose of watching this was, as previously stated, to see if it deserves a place in the great Kleeberg film vault, and the verdict is - this one is going up on eBay. It’s just not a film I see myself watching again and it’s not important or memorable enough to want to show my kid later.