Meet The Hollowheads

Year releasted: 1989

by Noel Murray
December 28th, 2005

Also known as: Life On The Edge

Tagline: "Sometime, somewhere, the Hollowhead family is having a bad day."

Plot: In a futuristic world connected by tubes, John Glover is dealing with an old-school sitcom problem. His new boss at United Umbilical has invited himself over for dinner, on the same night that Glover's musician son Lightfield Lewis is rehearsing on a hideous-sounding tube-instrument, his teenage daughter Juliette Lewis is off to a wild party, and his youngest son Matt Shakman is making a splattery mess all over the house. To make matters worse, the boss all but demands the right to sleep with Glover's wife Nancy Mette, if Glover wants to keep his job.

Key scenes: Juliette Lewis sings and dances with her older brother before flitting off to her room to apply "softening jelly" and "femme-stick" for her big date. When the date ends in drunken mayhem, policeman Bob Goldthwait drags Lewis home, explaining that her escort was "all hopped-up on butt-polish." And in her final film appearance, Throw Momma From The Train star Anne Ramsey cameos as a surly sewage supervisor, growling lines like, "Stifle your hole, ya skuzzy pumpsucker, or you'll find yourself back on the ream gang," in a voice so ravaged by throat cancer that she has to be subtitled.

Can easily be distinguished by: The makeshift slang, which has the kids hurling insults like "pipe-squeak" and "pint-pipe," and saying goodbye with a terse, "Next time, tube-slime!"

Sign that it was made in 1989: The old-school rap over the opening credits (sample line: "They weren't just like you and me / This family fell out of a different tree"), plus a fisheye-lens-heavy mise en scène cribbed from a David Lee Roth video.

Timeless message: Glover's boss puts it best: "You have to know when to flap it and when to cap it. That's the tale of the tube, in one short squirt."

Memorable quotes: Glover and Mette marvel at how far culture has come, with her saying, "We don't have to push things through a tube any more," and him responding, "Now it just sucks by itself."

 

Available on DVD from St. Clair Vision.