Nic Cage Wins the #MeAt20 Challenge with ‘Valley Girl’ on VOD
Watch a young, New-Wave Nicolas Cage electrify this 80s cult classic, now available to stream.
On Thursday I noticed the 80s cult classic Valley Girl was trending. It had just dropped on streaming platforms for the first time. I was stoked ‘cause I’d never seen it and, as a lover of 70s/80s cult movies and Nicolas Cage devotee, been meaning to for some time.
Minutes later, I casually pulled IMDB up on my browser to see that a trailer for a Valley Girl remake had also just dropped.
Lol, doesn’t this look like a cheap, ill-advised cash-grab glazed with a Disney Channel-musical treatment and a shiny, Stranger Things-esque 80s nostalgia makeover — chasing several trends at once like three years too late?
Turns out it literally is. Valley Girl (2020) was originally scheduled for release in 2018, then delayed because “controversial” YouTuber Logan Paul is in it. YIKES.
Anyway, I knew I had to queue up the original Valley Girl right away, if only to get the bad taste of that trailer out of my mouth.
Turns out it’s a pretty sick movie. Maybe I was just out of the loop with this one, but all I knew going into the Valley Girl was that it was a) the earliest Nic Cage joint, and b) possibly a fun, goofy sendup of the affluent-teen mallrat culture of 1980s San Fernando Valley. I also assumed it came out in the mid-to-late 80s, when Hollywood had already mined the shit out of the decade’s relentless teen market trends.
But Valley Girl came out in ‘83, only a year after Fast Times at Ridgemont High (80s teen comedy ground zero) and about a year before our pop-cultural, retrowave idea of “the 80s” would really pop off. And the movie has a lot more in common with the likes of Fast Times and Dazed and Confused than it does with the self-parodies and knockoffs that populated the latter half of the decade.
Sure, it’s got plenty of early examples of the genre’s most familiar tropes — modernized Romeo-and-Juliet plot, blonde jock ex-boyfriends, big weird belts worn over everything, ALL the pastels, and it’s fair share of moments that haven’t aged well. But for the most part, Valley Girl feels like it’s capturing a living, breathing moment of a very specific time and place.
It’s electric stuff. The cast looks less polished and more like a group of real people than, say, the cast of Sixteen Candles or St. Elmo’s Fire. There are some great Once Upon a Time in Hollywood-esque driving montages down familiar sounding LA streets with gorgeous neon signs of Hollywood landmarks. During a house party scene, kids are putting peanut butter on sushi because it’s 1983 and nobody knows how to eat sushi yet. The New Wave soundtrack is fuckin’ fire. The slumber-party scene feels authentic, fun, and lived-in, not exploitative or male-gazy. Titular (and tubular) “Valley Girl” Julie (Deborah Foreman) has really cool, nice ex-hippie parents that run a valley health-food diner, and they’re played by former-Apocalypse Now co-stars Frederic Forest and Colleen Camp (I instantly added Forest to my mental pantheon of great movie dads and movie stoners).
I could go on, and I haven’t even gotten to Cage’s performance yet. Boy is he great, already showing that Cage-pathos and singular gonzo screen presence super early in his career.
And, get this, he’s a total cutie. Watch him in this dating montage set to “Melt with You,” which includes a great moment with Cage in a cheat-print button-up worn over a Tangerine Dream tee, sharing a froyo at the mall with co-star Foreman, and ends with him improvising an expressionistic, very Cage-like Singin’ in the Rain dance-move after he drops her off at home:
It’s like the guy was destined to become an a-list action star, famous weirdo, universal meme, and one of his generation’s greatest screen actors all at once. Maybe Valley Girl’s VOD drop this week was part of an elaborate scheme to make sure Cage won the “Me at 20” challenge on Twitter (I think Cage was only like 18 when he made this movie, but still).
Point is, watching Valley Girl made me feel like I’d finally found my 80s teen comedy. Not that I don’t have a soft spot for the genre as a whole, having grown up watching The Breakfast Club on VH1 and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on VHS. But Valley Girl is the first one to really tap into my movie-lizard brain. Even as I type this I’m listening to a “Valley Girl Soundtrack” playlist on Spotify, trying to recapture some small portion of that feeling I get every time I watch a new fave — like I’ve struck the main psychedelic nerve of the collective sight, sound, heart, and mind — a million miles away.