Where the Boys Are

A remake of the 1960 film of the same name, Where the Boys Are follows four friends (Lisa Hartman’s Jennie, Lorna Luft’s Carole, Wendy Schaal’s Sandra, and Lynn-Holly Johnson’s Laurie) as they head to Fort Lauderdale for spring break – with the narrative detailing the characters’ exploits together and on their own (eg Jennie finds herself falling for a hunky musician, Sandra embarks on a relationship with a married police officer, etc, etc). There’s ultimately not a whole lot within Where the Boys Are worth embracing or getting excited about, as director Hy Averback delivers a sluggish, terminally uninvolving endeavor that’s rarely (if ever) as fun and breezy as he’s surely intended – with the pervasively stale atmosphere compounded by a generic screenplay and proliferation of one-note, one-dimensional characters. The movie’s lackluster vibe is undoubtedly compounded by an ongoing absence of over-the-top bits of comedic silliness (ie it’s all just so tame and forgettable), and it’s clear, too, that fairly endless finale, which includes a full-length musical number, ensures that the whole thing ends on as anticlimactic a note as one could envision – with the final result a justifiably obscure beach movie that certainly hasn’t aged well in the years since its 1984 release.

*1/2 out of ****

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