I Was a Teenage Teenager

By RICHARD CORLISS

Sure, there's a real generation gap these days. It's reflected in the debate over which decade is worthiest of feeling nostalgic for. People of the '90s flee from the saggy current Zeitgeist toward some more wired, more meaningful time. The '60s and '70s have attracted big cults, but to true devotees of deja voodoo, the golden age was the '50s. Survivors of that era rise from their golf carts and shout, "We don't need no stinkin' Woodstock! And Watergate nostalgia is for wonks! Listen, pal, I was a teenage teenager. I want the '50s -- Ike, Mad, duck and cover, the birth of rock 'n' roll. And films about teens in turmoil -- the cheaper and grungier the better."

In a flashy tribute to those movies and mores, Showtime is rolling out 10 teen features set in the '50s but with '90s attitude splattered all over, like the rotten eggs that used to decorate Dad's DeSoto on mischief night. The series, called Rebel Highway, is premiering a movie a week each Friday through Sept. 16. Taken together, this seamy decalogue shows the '50s as a neat place to visit -- a lovers' lane accessible from a killer drag strip -- but hell to live through. Each movie revives the battles between tough guys and sweet chicks; each recalls hot sex before the pill and those enduring teen compulsions: to rebel and to belong.

The idea was for 10 film directors of eccentric renown to take the title but not the plot of a '50s exploitation epic from the vault of American International Pictures and, on a miserly budget of $1.3 million, spin a hip variation on it. So Allan Arkush (Rock 'n' Roll High School) picked Shake, Rattle and Rock; Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat) selected Cool and the Crazy; Joe Dante (Gremlins) chose Runaway Daughters; Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn) took Confessions of a Sorority Girl; William Friedkin (The Exorcist) got Jailbreakers; Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused) chose Reform School Girl; Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary) took Dragstrip Girl; John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) opted for Girls in Prison; John Milius (Conan the Barbarian) chose Motorcycle Gang. The only youngster, 25-year-old Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi), got Roadracers.

None of the directors needed to feel awed by their source material. These weren't the signal teen films of the '50s (Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild One, Invasion of the Body Snatchers); they are forgotten schlock from the bottom of producer Sam Arkoff's Z-movie barrel. Maybe they were drive-in classics, but that's because kids didn't go to drive-ins for the movies. The A.I.P. films were moldy melodramas whose only nod to '50s spirit was in their titles. If they were to show up on TV now, it would only be as fodder for the brilliant deconstructionist raillery of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The one cheerful movie in the series, Runaway Daughters, written by Charlie Haas, provides its own subversive commentary, lightheartedly undercutting a harsh plot about a girl (Julie Bowen) who believes herself pregnant and, in her search for the perpetrator, enlists the daring town rebel (Paul Rudd). How cool is this guy? "I like bein' bored," he mutters. The film also has a nice parody of the hectoring speech every movie parent had to endure in a '50s teen movie. "Do you people ever sit down and talk to your kids?" a righteous detective asks the frazzled moms and dads. "I mean, really talk to them about sex and sexual diseases -- about the strange night world of twisted kicks and weird rituals and equipment, the whips and chains and rubber balls and dildos and handcuffs." (Rubber balls?)

The other Rebel Highway films hunker down to more serious matters of turf marking and pubescent angst. Motorcycle Gang revs up real terror, as some wild ones kidnap a restless girl and her dad gets really mad. Roadracers is a hyperkinetic assault on good manners. Dragstrip Girl, a Cal-Mex remake of Rebel Without a Cause, stars Natasha Gregson Wagner (Natalie Wood's daughter) as a bored teen lured by a handsome Chicano's threat and thrill. Confessions of a Sorority Girl uncovers the black-satin double-dealing of a teen queen spurned. Girls in Prison, with a script co-written by raw-meat auteur Sam Fuller, is a taut, tart fable of betrayal in stir and out -- there's no difference, ladies.

The whole series revels in misanthropy; it parades the bullish stupidity of your average teenager, your average parent, your average everybody. The only things these movies romanticize are cars, cigarettes (each character smokes about three packs a minute) and the cliches of old teen pix. "Rumble at the playground tonight!" The young actors, children of the children of the '50s, might be speaking Old English, but they give the words an authentic spin. They know that the '50s was the cauldron in which the modern language of rebellion was forged.

The best thing about these movies is their acrid sting. They say the Eisenhower years were too complex to be remembered as just Hula-Hoops and hair grease. And that is fine with us old '50s types. When nostalgia is true, it hurts, man!