There’s nothing quite so pleasantly surprising as going to see a film you know will be awful and having it turn out to be actually pretty darn good (for a movie reviewer, that is), and that’s exactly the case with Wacks’ (Powwow Highway) new Mystery Date. Taking the overwrought premise of the supposed Date From Hell, Wacks and cast have ingeniously managed to turn the whole mess around and force the silliness of this early-eighties sub-sub-sub-genre to work in a whole new way. Hawke stars as Tom McHugh, a young kid who simultaneously lives in the shadow of and idolizes his successful older brother Craig, a lawyer (McNamara). When Craig shows up for the weekend, Tom confesses his inability to land a date with the girl of his dreams, and before you can say “Teen Comedy,” Craig kindly sets everything up for his younger sibling. From here on out, the movie takes on the feel of an out of control roller-coaster ride through the bowels of the archetypal Date Nightmare. Having borrowed Craig’s car, clothes, I.D., and credit cards, young Tom soon discovers that his brother is a less-than-revered member of the community: flower salesmen, old girlfriends, and even the Chinese Tong Mafia suddenly mistake Tom for Craig, and no one is being very friendly here. Wacks is smart enough to keep the pacing just short of frantic so that the few existing plot contrivances become barely noticeable. Mystery Date has the feel of an early Jonathan Demme picture, say, Something Wild (there’s even a clip from Married to the Mob), where humor and horror collide to create something altogether new. Granted, there’s very little new or original in this film — in fact, the whole thing seems like it would have been more timely had it arrived in 1984 — but Wacks and Co. manage to make it seem fairly fresh, which is no small trick in itself. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll have forgotten Mystery Date completely in a week or two, but for now, this is one of the better youth-oriented comedies to crawl out of Hollywood in a quite a long time.
This article appears in August 23 • 1991.