The mid-80s had Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer, and I saw both of them innumerable times on home video. They were just so much fun, and they completely matched with my sense of humour.

I hadn’t watched One Crazy Summer in years, so it was definitely time for a revisit, and damn if I didn’t laugh my way through its entirety.

Hoops McCann (John Cusack) has just graduated from Generic (can’t believe I never caught that before) High School with his buddy, George Calamari (Joel Murray). Hoops, despite his name, isn’t much of a basketball player. He is a great artist; however, he’s stuck on a project needed for a scholarship, an illustrated story about love, but what does he know about that?

After picking up George’s little sister, they are off to spend the summer in Nantucket, where wackiness will ensue.

The always relevant baddie, the rich developer, Aguilla Beckerstead (Mark Metcalf), wants to own all the property he can and set up a restaurant on a hilltop that is currently owned by Cassandra’s (Demi Moore) grandpa.

Beckerstead’s son, Teddy (Matt Mulhern) has it out for Hoops, and all of his new friends, including Ack Ack (Curtis Armstrong) and the Stork brothers, played by Bobcat Goldthwait and Tom Villard.

What follows is a pretty basic story of boy meets girl, and boy takes on rich baddies to save girl’s home, and fall in love over the course of One Crazy Summer.

There are tons of visual gags, cartoon logic (as well as cartoons), and just incredibly funny moments. This one hit hilariously for me when I was a teen, and it still sends me now with the added nostalgia factor. It’s got tons of needle drops, almost all of which are vintage 80s tunes, and damn, it just works.

This is where I fell in love with Demi Moore. She just seemed to be the perfect girl in this film. Cusack is absolutely charming, and it bothered me to learn that he didn’t trust Holland after seeing his cut of Better Off Dead. Still, they did this film immediately after; I love both of them. My teen years wouldn’t have been the same without them.

Though now that we’re talking about both films, that leads to the Diane Franklin or Demi Moore question. Diane Franklin.

Holland showed that offbeat humour could work and that visual gags, if executed right, could be priceless. This film was great. I remember the first time I saw it, and how it affected me.

Smart and goofy, silly and playful, One Crazy Summer remains an important film from my nostalgic past, and I can’t believe it took me this long to watch it again.