One of those curios whose absolute inexplicability nearly justifies any of its rather significant insufficiencies, O.C. and Stiggs is, plainly put, Robert Altman’s celluloid contribution under the National Lampoon masthead, in which the filmography of Kansas City’s finest is intermarried with the house of European Vacation and Loaded Weapon. The result is just about as odd and awkward an amalgamation as you might expect (Altman himself, in a taped introduction, calls it a “mutual failure”); buckshot-broad social satire and acrid disgust—this director’s always been more-than-usually inclined to make American Movies, not movies that just happen to take place in America—meets idle suburban teenage skullduggery in the ‘burbs of Scottsdale, AZ.

Shot in ’84 but sat on by MGM/UA until three years later, when its limited release was probably overshadowed by another (far funnier, even canonical) Arizona-set comedy from the Coen brothers, the film is based on an issue-long yarn from the Lampoon, concerning a vendetta of vandalism undertaken by the title’s duo of anarchic High Schoolers (Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry, both launched from here to undistinguished careers) against the model suburban gentry Schwab family, reigned over by Paul Dooley’s insurance salesman patriarch, a blustery shit who calls his Asian son-in-law “Chop Suey” and clusters his flock around the entertainment center to bask in the wisdom of conservative commentators.

When trying to diagnose what went wrong with O.C. and Stiggs—and literally nobody outside of Janet Maslin seems to deny that something did—you don’t have to look past the film’s title; Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie and Mark Stiggs never crackle as a twosome, consistently muffing their back-and-forth, more shrill than snotty, and usually upstaged by their matching get-ups (loud tourist duds, sombreros, tuxes-and-tails, American flag button-downs, sheik headdresses). It seems like someone behind the scenes, presumably Altman, wants his audience to dislike these appallingly self-satisfied twerps and their smarmy racial approbations—they show up to bring a black neighborhood drunk to a concert of African musicians, assuring him it’s “YOUR kind of music”—while the script demands they’re cast in a heroic mold.

The movie compensates with notable periphery performances from a crackerjack cast, including a slightly wound-down but still very funny Ray Walston; Jane Curtin’s Mrs. Schwab, an undercover alcoholic who swigs from a score of inventively-hidden stashes and struggles to grin past that scorchingly miserable wince of hers (watching her dazedly reading her son’s filched sex magazine in the kitchen with a glass of bourbon-laced milk is a close as this film gets to sublimity); Martin Mull as a flaccid, winking poolside decadent in koal eyeliner; Melvin Van Peebles as the aforementioned wino-in-residence (“enough of this folklore, picturesque, Uncle Remus bullshit”); and a bitchin’ Bob Uecker cameo to top it all off. And props belong to the props department, thanks to whom O.C. and Stiggs roll in the best automobile-personification-of-teenage-social-hostility this side of Bud Cort’s chop-top hearse in Harold and Maude, a junked-out ’51 Studebaker hefted sky-high by monster truck wheels and hissing hydraulics (“if we could combine really frightening noise with the ugliness of poverty, we’d have the ideal car”).

O.C. and Stiggs clicks nicely into Altman’s “genre deconstructionist” rep, aided by his mission statement of “takin’ a shot at all the teenage movies out there,” but the whole exercise just seems folded against itself. There’s an underscored homosocial aspect to O.C. and Stiggs friendship; they’re seen smooching on surfboards in an opening montage and remain conveniently girl-free, aside from a schmaltzy courtship with a young Cynthia Nixon and the occasional appearance of two unsexed gum-snapping “sluts”—it almost seems like a wry, deliberate swindle from the filmmaker, serving up so much male skin in an ostensible t & a comedy while limiting the glimpses of female physique to a couple of luminously tan-lined backides. All this contrasts rather oddly with the boys’ harassment (and blackmailing) of two closeted High School instructors—including, yeah, an ascot-wearing drama teacher—caught on Mexican holiday together. The idea, I guess, is that O.C. and Stiggs go sniping after middle-class hypocrisy regardless of specifics, but it’s still an uncomfortable, unlikable moment, and the fact that those same teachers are later allowed a sort-of moving moment of human commiseration only increases the sense of authorial schizophrenia.

Altman’s style—counterpoint cutaways, insistent zooms, and carefully-tiered sound design—is as fluid as ever, but the arm’s length feeling of the flat, shallow widescreen, which suits some lovely moments, like the boys’ innertube pilgrimage to catch Nigerian juju rock mob King Sunny Ade and His African Beats (one of those odd Eighties World Beat crazes, filling yuppie LP shelves alongside Zydeco collections), otherwise saps insouciant immediacy from scenes that seem to demand it. At the exhausting end, when Dennis Hopper (as a gung-ho survivalist, explicitly referencing his Apocalypse Now role) floats in a helicopter above the rows of ranch houses and makes the inevitable Malvina Reynolds observation, “Every house looks the same down there,” I was pretty ready for the whole mess to be done with. Which makes the re-watchability of the movie, like everything else about it, even more inexplicable.
—NICK PINKERTON