Caffeinated Clint
Before he was Grey’s Anatomy’s resident Dr. Mc Dreamy (I still can’t figure out who Ronald ‘The Donald’ Miller gets to be the biggest stud on Television? I mean, didn’t he only give Amanda Peterson a $1000 bucks to make him popular? – Surely that wouldn’t have lasted this long?!), Patrick Dempsey was the 80’s answer to well, Freddie Prinze Jr. He was Mr. Teen Rom-Com…. Mr ‘Mr Dorky’ if you will.
Patrick Dempsey, Beverly D’Angelo, Talia Balsam, Michael Constantine, Betty Jinnette
Before he was Grey’s Anatomy’s resident Dr. Mc Dreamy (I still can’t figure out who Ronald ‘The Donald’ Miller gets to be the biggest stud on Television? I mean, didn’t he only give Amanda Peterson a $1000 bucks to make him popular? – Surely that wouldn’t have lasted this long?!), Patrick Dempsey was the 80’s answer to well, Freddie Prinze Jr. He was Mr. Teen Rom-Com…. Mr ‘Mr Dorky’ if you will.
From “Can’t Buy Me Love” to “The Woo Woo Kid” and “Loverboy” (“Meatballs III” was in there too somewhere), he was the youngster making all the digits for playing dorky. He essentially played the same geeky schmuck in every movie – a nerd who inexplicably catches the eye of a beautiful woman.
In “The Woo Woo Kid”, now hitting DVD for the first time, he catches the eye of beautiful women – plural. He’s 14-year-old Sonny Wisecarver, a youngster who married two married women in their twenties in the high times of World War II, and shared tabloid covers with Hitler and D-Day. He, of course, married them out of love – but nobody much saw it that way.
Phil Alden Robinson’s film doesn’t really belong in the same category as say “Can’t Buy Me Love” or “Loverboy” if only because it’s set in the 50s and is actually a ‘true’ story. As far as the tone is concerned, it’s the same bag, but the storyline’s as different to Dempsey’s previous films as could be – mainly because the almost ‘history lesson’ approach to this one places it in a different box.
Dempsey is his warm and naive best as Carver, whilst Beverly D’Angelo and Talia Balsam offer weighty support as his ‘cradle snatching’ wives. The only person that really let the film down was Robinson (he recently did “The Sum of All Fears”) who seems determined to play the film as more ‘fluff’ than ‘fact’. A nice combination of both – possibly weighing more on the ‘real life’ facts of the case – might’ve seen it work better.
The DVD looks and sounds about as good as you’d expect a late 80s small-time comedy that nobody much gives a hoot about to look.
Rating : 
Reviewer : Clint Morris
