Cage #2: Valley Girl (1983)

Valley Girl, the story of a popular hot girl who trades down to be with a social misfit who has bad teeth. I can’t imagine that this is the movie that spawned a thousand imitations of the cheesy high school romance culminating at the prom. It cannot be true, for that would be giving it some credit. It’s got to be something from the silent era with Harold Lloyd which holds that honor. Tell me where this cliche structure came from. I have to know. Wikipedia tells us that this was a very low budget film that shocked its financial backers when it turned out to be somewhat watchable. They just wanted to see some tits, then they got an actual releasable movie. So that’s where we’re starting from, plot-wise.

Nicolas Cage at his goofiest looking plays Randy, a punk rocker from Hollywood who catches the Valley Girl’s eye at the beach. The beach? Punk rockers spend a lot of time at the beach, do they? Fine. Anyway, the timing works out well for Loryn (with a Y!), said Valley Girl, who has just dumped her boyfriend for basically being a dick to everybody all the time. Why his other friends don’t dump him too is a question worth asking. Randy shows up at a party and hits it off with Loryn only to get kicked out by Mr. Jealous Ex-Boyfriend. But he goes back because “Nobody is gonna tell me who I can score with!” I think Randy isn’t exactly a poet at heart.

As Loryn succumbs to the filthy cesspool that was Hollywood (as opposed to the glamorous cesspool it is today), her friends begin to worry for her safety and that of her social status. On the verge of becoming an outcast, she ditches Randy immediately and gets back with the dickhead. Because I guess if they stayed together, the story wouldn’t end with your typical physical confrontation over the girl. The worst thing I can say about Valley Girl is that it’s all very average and expected, right down to the slumber party scene with most of the female cast dancing around in their skivvies. Boy meets girl, gets girl, loses girl, defeats other boy, takes girl to hotel for ceremonial post-prom deflowering. Pretty simple stuff. Along the way it’s not particularly funny, not sufficiently dramatic, and not all that interesting beyond its use as a time capsule of the era. I think the soundtrack is better than the rest of the movie. Valley Girl earns four toothy Nic Cages out of ten. Remember, just because it isn’t the worst example of the genre doesn’t mean it is worth watching.

Check out the trailer, if only for the final line: