Over The Summer

Year releasted: 1984

by Keith Phipps
June 14th, 2000

Punk may have brought with it the threat of rebellion, violence, and indiscriminate piercings, but what of the threat posed by new wave? In the 1984 fish-out-of-water drama Over The Summer, Laura Hunt plays a big-city teen in danger of succumbing to a life of headbands, video games, and sleeveless T-shirts covered in pastel rhomboids. Concerned, her parents ship her off to the country to live with her American Gothic-like grandparents. It doesn't take long, however, for Hunt to dig up trouble of her own, her Benatar-style hair turning the heads of the local boys, including tough guy Johnson West. With suspiciously aerobicized local girl Catherine Williams, Hunt learns that life without MTV brings pleasures of its own, including skinny-dipping, school dances (inexplicably held in the middle of summer), and trashy paperback romances. But the idyll can only last so long, and soon Hunt finds herself the object of unwanted advances from senile, banjo-strumming grandfather Willard Miller, a town pariah for his tendency to set fires in all the wrong places. For all its local flavor and flawed characters, writer-director Teresa Sparks' sole excursion into filmmaking will never be mistaken for a lost work by Victor Nunez, if only because she litters Over The Summer's soundtrack with synth-pop never-was Jill Sparks while including far too many scenes of Miller lasciviously fondling a Barbie doll. By the film's conclusion, an older, wiser, and more conservatively attired Hunt, having lost both her virginity and a grandparent, symbolically walks past her old arcade hangout, no longer drawn in by a marquee advertising both Pole Position and Super Zaxxon.