Tom Berenger must have been desperate for work when he signed on for this embarrassment of a film. It has the feel and tone of the kind of made for television movie you might watch out of sheer boredom and exhaustion on a Sunday afternoon when you're too tired either to locate the remote or to fire a bullet at the television screen. The acting is wooden and unnatural, and the music, which is supposed to be awesome, sounds curiously like a bad rip-off of Springsteen, even though the flashbacks in the film are set, for the most part, in 1963, when NOTHING sounded like Springsteen. Worse yet, the sets do not look at all like anything reminiscent of "1963." This is very clearly a cheap production, doomed from the start by an awful script, terrible acting, and a devil may care attitude about capturing the feeling of an era. Here's the premise of the film: years after Eddie, the tempestuous and dumb (can he spell Rimbaud?) lead singer of the Cruisers, has disappeared (he died in a car accident, but his body was never recovered), a reporter decides to write a story about the band. She has a theory that Eddie is still alive and believes that the band may be on the verge of a renaissance, if the missing final recordings, named A Season in Hell, can be located. She forces her presence into the lives of the remaining band members, who are, by the way, dull as dirt, to piece together the band's history. This reporter is so creepy and annoying that she'd probably have a restraining order slapped on her, nowadays. Ironically enough, A Season in Hell describes the viewing experience quite accurately.
Review of Eddie and the Cruisers
