Cry Baby (1990)

I said I was going to do it. I promised I would watch a musical and here it is! This film was handed to me by a very drunk Miss Jenkins, who then proceeded to bully me via the medium of Twitter until I watched it. Odd barely begins to cover this.

Any film that feels the need to erupt into song at any possible opportunity is usually enough to rile me. Why do it? Aren't words good enough? I love music in films (proper songs I mean) but I hate it when they fill every other scene with a Broadway like production of people singing average songs with smiles pinned to their smug faces! Arghh I'm getting angry just thinking about it. When one character feels the need to soil my eardrums with their bleating a whole host of random extras soon join them, full of stage school eagerness. I find myself searching for my shot gun, and then I remember I don't own one. I have seen perhaps two musicals in my life I could tolerate, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Little Shop of Horrors.

Thankfully Cry Baby follows these into a very exclusive club. A musical that didn't make me want to move to America and join the NRA! Johnny Depp stars as Wade 'Cry Baby' Walker, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, known in this crazy film world as a 'Drape'. He meets Allison (Amy Locane) who is the social opposite, a 'Square', so of course they want to be together despite the class divide. Sound familiar? This is very much a parody of Grease. It is set in the 50's, has two opposing gangs and even a drag race between hormonal teenagers.

Right from the opening scene this film started to surprise me with its irony. A school hall full of suspiciously old looking 'kids' queue up to get their immunisation jabs. The overacting is brilliant and is kept up throughout, really sending up the musical genre. The script is cheesy but always knowingly so. One hysterical scene sees Allison singing 'Teenage Dream' to a group of squares and imagining Cry Baby's head on all their bodies. All the typical musical conventions are mocked here, from the lusty beginnings of their relationship, to the inevitable fall out and a climax in which all their problems are solved through the power of song.

The film is full of crazy characters. Cry Baby's group of Drape friends includes a pre-diet Ricki Lake (who we see heavily pregnant and playing drums... I'm not even making this up!), porn star Traci Lords (who reacts in a horrified way when a sleazy bloke asks her to pose naked) and Hatchet-Face (a rubber faced girl with zombie eyes and a fondness for licking knives and terrifying squares). Cry Baby's family are an even stranger mix of hillbilly biker Goths. Everyone overacts as the story tumbles from one hectic scene to the next. Every shot seems full of people crashing and bumping into each other, which really adds to the sense of frenzy.

I still got a little bored with some of the songs dragging on, but that is my prejudice against musicals resurfacing and doesn’t change the fact that this made me laugh. There is a lot to take in as things rush along barely giving the viewer time to register the mental story or weirdness of some of the characters. If you doubt that Americans know what irony is then you could do a lot worse than watch this to debunk the myth.

7/10