The Hollywood Knights

Directed by Floyd Mutrux, The Hollywood Knights charts the activities of several characters on the same night that a beloved local drive-in restaurant is set to close – with a particular emphasis placed on the ongoing exploits of a prank aficionado named Newbomb Turk (Robert Wuhl). It’s Mutrux’s decision to stress the latter’s progressively tedious shenanigans that ultimately transforms The Hollywood Knights into a distressingly lackluster bit of nostalgia-based filmmaking, as Wuhl delivers a nails-on-a-chalkboard performance that’s compounded by the growing realization that Turk is just about as unpleasant and unsympathetic a figure as one could possibly envision. (The viewer can’t help but hope, to an increasingly palpable extent, that Turk receive a comeuppance from any one of the many authority figures he torments over the course of the movie’s padded-out running time.) The picture is consequently unable to achieve the loose, freewheeling vibe for which Mutrux is obviously striving, while the inclusion of a very earnest, very melodramatic subplot involving Tony Danza and Michelle Pfeiffer’s struggling couple, as well as their heading-to-Vietnam friend, feels entirely out of place and as though it’s been shoehorned in after the fact. (Neither Danza nor Pfeiffer interact with any of the movie’s other characters, which only heightens the awkwardness of their scenes.) The Hollywood Knights ultimately comes off as a mostly-ineffectual attempt at cashing in on the success of American Graffiti, and it’s difficult to envision contemporary viewers finding much of anything to wholeheartedly embrace more than 40 years later.

** out of ****