If you’re not of a certain age, you’ve probably never even heard of Savage Steve Holland – or if you have, you may be under the impression that he was a professional wrestler back in the '80s. Well, you got the right decade: for a little while there, Holland was second only to John Hughes as American cinema’s foremost purveyor of comedic teen angst. I honestly couldn’t tell you whether I’ve seen one of his movies in its entirely (though I’m sure I’ve channel surfed through them hundreds of times), but some people my age still swear by the guy.
An animator who studied at CalArts (and who, according to wikipedia, designed the Whammy on the game show Press Your Luck), Holland’s legacy rests entirely on two movies he made with John Cusack: Better Off Dead (1985) and One Crazy Summer (1986). In the former, Cusack gets dumped by his girlfriend, makes several suicide attempts, then hooks up with a foreign exchange student. In the latter, he’s a cartoonist who spends an eventful summer on Nantucket with the likes of Bobcat Goldthwait, Demi Moore and Curtis “Booger” Armstrong. Neither movie set the box office on fire, but both were cult hits with long afterlives on video and cable, thanks to 80s-style wackiness like Cusack’s creation of a claymation Van Halen hamburger:
Or Bobcat Goldthwait wreaking havoc in a Godzilla costume:
Alas, the magic could not last. Holland’s third directorial effort, 1989’s How I Got Into College (which he did not write), was a certifiable box office bomb, and that was it for Holland’s movie career. He found a niche on television, however, directing episodes of Encyclopedia Brown, Shasta McNasty, Lizzie McGuire, and my one-time late night guilty pleasure, V.I.P. But as Indiana Jones is here to remind us, all things '80s will return to haunt us, and that includes Savage Steve Holland. He has no less than three comeback vehicles in the works: a straight-to-video sequel to Legally Blonde, a National Lampoon movie called Ratko: The Dictator’s Son, and The Big One 3, described by the director as the sort-of third part of the Better Off Dead/One Crazy Summer trilogy. But that’s not all. Holland is attached to yet another project, one that can only be summed up by its three word title:
Howard Stern’s Porky’s.
Didn’t I say something about all things '80s returning to haunt us?