August 5th, 1994
It seems kinda crazy now, but AIRHEADS was a movie I was excited for ahead of time. Other than a couple of bit parts, it was the first time I saw Steve Buscemi after RESERVOIR DOGS made him an icon. Adam Sandler was still on Saturday Night Live, his biggest movie role having been in THE CONEHEADS, so it seemed novel for him to be a co-star. And I wasn’t really familiar with Brendan Fraser so I hadn’t had a problem with any of his performances yet. More importantly, director Michael Lehmann’s HEATHERS is an important movie to me, he’d since done MEET THE APPLEGATES and HUDSON HAWK, both weird and interesting if not great, so he was a director I followed. And the premise of a rock band taking a radio station hostage to try to get their song played seemed like it had potential for, like, satire or something. I don’t know.
Then I saw it and forgot everything about it. I don’t think I was impressed, but I was sure now it would at least be more interesting as a time capsule. Yeah, I guess, arguably.
Fraser (ENCINO MAN) stars as Chazz Darby (government name: Chester Ogilvie), the long-haired, ripped jeans and leather jacket wearing lead singer of unsigned band The Lone Rangers, who describe their music as “more like power slop, but with an edge.” Buscemi plays the bassist, Rex, and Sandler plays the drummer, Pip.
Chazz is already on a watch list at Palatine Records because he keeps sneaking in disguised as a delivery man to try to hand people his demo. There’s a good line where executive Jimmie Wing (Judd Nelson, THE DARK BACKWARD) tells him he can’t accept unsolicited material and Chazz says, “We’ve been trying to get solicited.” After seeing another band get a show and a record contract Chazz decides that what they need to do is storm the radio station KPPX and make them play their song. Now that I think about it that’s how Wu-Tang got Stretch & Bobbito to play “Protect Ya Neck,” as seen in the episode of Wu-Tang: An American Saga that turns into a fantasy based on THE KILLER. I think that would’ve been a year or so before this but I wonder if Ghostface ever saw AIRHEADS?
Old-timey-cool-guy-Hawaiian-shirt-wearing DJ Ian “The Shark” (Joe Mantegna, last seen in BABY’S DAY OUT) is weirdly mellow about these chumps breaking into his workplace to bother him, and it turns out (as I understand it) that it’s because he’s a Real One who’s feuding with the sleazy corporate programming director Milo (Michael McKean, D.A.R.Y.L.) and trying to be open to the youth or the true rock ’n roll or some shit. He lets them talk to him live on the air and Milo tries to stop it, and though they hadn’t planned this they get mad and decide to pretend that the the uzi-shaped water guns they have in a bag are real and take everybody hostage.
The Shark is going to just do what they want and play their demo, but Chazz only brought a reel-to-reel (because his vocals sound better) which leads to delays and technical difficulties and eventually the movie becomes about a search for the one cassette copy of the demo, given to his girlfriend Kayla (Amy Locane, CRY-BABY) but she dumped him for being a loser.
Of course you’ve got your police response and hostage negotiation. Fox Plaza, a.k.a. Nakatomi Plaza, is the filming location for KPPX, and I appreciate all the DIE HARD parallels. Sergeant O’Malley (Ernie Hudson, THE CROW) is sort of an Al Powell character, in addition to being pretty much the character he played in THE COWBOY WAY. Also a cartoonishly weaselly KPPX employee named Doug Beech (Michael Richards, PROBLEM CHILD) hides by crawling through a vent and calling out for help. It’s a good joke that SWAT officer Mace (Marshall Bell, DIGGSTOWN) misunderstands him saying he was an accountant in the Merchant Marines, thinks he’s gonna pull a John McClane and says, “No, you won’t be held accountable.”
That was my favorite joke. I also like when Pip hands over the demo tape at fake gunpoint and says, “Sorry about all this. Enjoy.” I don’t find very much of this movie funny, but maybe the best running gag is Pip making Black radio station employees Marcus (Reg E. Cathey, last seen in CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER) and Yvonne (Michelle Hurst, THE NIGHT WE NEVER MET) uncomfortable by trying to assure them he listens to rap so “I feel bad for all you guys have to put up with.” He mentions that he saw Public Enemy live with Anthrax, a good reference.
Later they demand a stage to perform for the people gathered outside and Chazz gets the crowd to chant “Rodney King.” Is this supposed to be a PCU style joke about people who care about politics? I don’t really know. This exchange here is funny…
…and lets us know the chant is meant to be nonsensical, but the point of nonsensically chanting about police brutality eludes me.
UPDATE: Elwood (@octsat17 on Twitter) tells me that he always took it as a reference to the “Attica” chant in DOG DAY AFTERNOON, and of course he’s right, so I feel a little stupid. But there are many other aspects of the movie where I’m still not sure what they’re going for.
Fraser mostly isn’t bad, but he keeps giving this “are you dumb?” look to everybody even though sometimes the joke is about how dumb he is. He’s very earnest, not a lovable BILL & TED type goofball, and I think we’re supposed to respect his passion, especially after his serious speech about how “I’m screwed up and average enough I could write a song that lasts forever.” But when Ian sympathetically gives him an opportunity to “be heard” on the air all he can think of to say is “ROCK AND ROLL!!!!”
Milo says, “That’s it? You’re gonna scream ‘rock ’n roll’? You’re gonna go to jail for that?” and it’s one of those things where the way he says it means he’s supposed to be wrong but of course he’s right. Chazz is “a bozo deluxe,” to quote a line in the movie. Most of the other tortured cool guy rock ’n roller speech centers on masturbation or anuses:
“I’m not pullin pud here, my entire life force is on this tape.”
“You look like half a butt puppet.”
“Are you yankin me!?”
“There’s always some meat spanker out there who lumps you together with the longhaired buttholes.”
I really tried to discern what the movie’s point-of-view is. I think The Lone Rangers are meant to represent some kind of admirably pure rock ’n roll spirit. This is supported by cool guy The Shark siding with them against obvious slimeballs Milo (who plans to fire everybody and turn KPPX into a soft rock station) and Jimmie (who tries to make them lip sync and whose record contract offer Chazz refuses on principle because he didn’t listen to the demo). Chazz’s artistic legitimacy means making cracks against easy targets like Milli Vanilli and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch (last heard in RENAISSANCE MAN) but also when someone calls in to the station and mentions a couple fake band names Chazz asks “You actually listen to that Seattle bullshit?” This, combined with the fixation on the Sunset Strip and Whisky a Go Go and discussions of David Lee Roth and Vince Neill and “the guy who did the Guns ’n Roses video” and “We are going to bury Lollapalooza!” makes me wonder if it’s supposed to be holding up the popular glam metal type stuff of the ‘80s as the real deal good shit. This would be an interesting point of view at that time, a few years after the culture at large had decided otherwise. I’m probly reading too much into it though, so maybe the more important point is that whatever it’s trying to say about music is incoherent.
As you’d expect there are some appearances by rock ’n roll figures. White Zombie (last heard on the LASSIE soundtrack) are briefly seen performing an original song called “Feed the Gods” at the Whisky. Kurt Loder does an MTV news report on the hostage situation. Lemmy Kilmister appears playing a character, I think, even though we’ve already seen him prominently on posters and heard him discussed by the band. I guess a band called Galactic Cowboys are playing the band The Sons of Thunder, who The Lone Rangers are jealous of. The weirdest one is that Mike Judge as Beavis and Butthead calls in to the station to tell them they suck. I guess this is supposed to mean that Beavis and Butthead are real people who really exist in this universe (and live in L.A. now)? I don’t know.
Ice-T is featured on Motorhead’s “Born to Raise Hell” during the opening credits, more in Body Count mode than rapping. Other bands on the soundtrack include 4 Non Blondes, Anthrax (covering the Smiths), Candlebox, The Replacements, Primus, House of Pain, and a Reagan Youth song that Brendan Fraser re-records as a Lone Rangers song.
Though I’ll always associate Lehmann with his great work on HEATHERS, his career went in a more normal-people direction, following this with THE TRUTH ABOUT CATS & DOGS and MY GIANT and lots of TV and commercials. Screenwriter Rich Wilkes isn’t exactly a counterculture figure either, but he’s an actual Gen-Xer and musician (there’s a documentary about his punk mariachi band Carne Asada playing the Vans Warped Tour) and there’s a definitely “guy who wrote AIRHEADS” throughline in his filmography. His next movie was the ‘70s-set comedy THE STONED AGE, and then he directed the autobiographical GLORY DAZE (where I think Ben Affleck plays his stand-in?). He wrote THE JERKY BOYS: THE MOVIE, xXx, the Motley Crue biopic THE DIRT, and he even has DTV sequel cred: in 2020 there was a Sandler-and-Wayans-less BULLETPROOF 2, I guess?
AIRHEADS did not make a profit in theaters, but “has since come to be viewed as a cult film” according to Wikipedia, citing a 2022 article from Metal Hammer magazine. Writer Joe Daly points out that “by 1994 the eruption of grunge had reduced perceptions of heavy metal to comedic punchlines and dim-witted stereotypes,” but he feels that Lehmann doesn’t make “a mockery of the characters or their music” and that “we root for them because of their pure intentions and their hopelessly-naive optimism. There’s a childlike innocence radiating through their irrepressible desire to simply play their song for people.”
Yeah, I like that description. I wish I could experience it that way. But for me it’s another summer of ’94 bummer. I’m glad someone got something out of it. We also got the Sandler-Buscemi friendship. I count 14 movies they’ve been in together since then.
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Pop culture references:
It’s got the old TV show references you always got in the ‘90s: Star Trek, The Partridge Family, calling a cop (Chris Farley, THE CONEHEADS) “Barney Fife.” More current shows come up when Rex is called “MacGyver” for using tools, and someone mentions watching The Simpsons. Pip is excited that Rex stole him an Incredible Crash Test Dummies doll, and they have a Sin City (the comic book) poster on the wall in their practice space. Of course there are numerous band posters and stickers all over, including Cro-Mags, Obituary, KMFDM, and tons of Megadeth.
Other notes:
David Arquette is in the movie, with bleached hair. This is his only movie with Sandler, but Alexis Arquette was in THE WEDDING SINGER and BLENDED and Patricia Arquette was in LITTLE NICKY.
The opening credits (which are kind of cool, and designed by Nina Saxon [FORREST GUMP]) indicate that drinking coffee at a diner or cafe is associated with the rock ’n roll lifestyle as much as guitars, amps, CDs, concert tickets, records and leather jackets. I wonder if Chazz would consider that some Seattle bullshit.
August 8th, 2024 at 4:35 pm
That poster tagline is making a strong case for the Oxford comma. Should rock and roll the genre get ready to laugh? Or should I be getting ready to laugh, in addition to rocking and rolling?