John Hughes has a lot to answer for. While he certainly didn’t invent the teen-appeal movie - they’ve been around for decades - he almost single-handedly wrote the rulebook for the teen movie genre back in the middle of the ‘80s, a rulebook that’s been used by other teen-genre filmmakers as a how-to guide ever since.
You know how it goes. Incompatible boy and girl meet and hate each other. Secretly, though, they like each other, but would never admit it even to themselves. Much malarkey happens as they pursue their “dream dates” only to realise in the end that the freak they’ve been avoiding is actually a rather nice person and so they kiss and canoodle and live happily ever after. The end.
No, it ain’t rocket science. But that’s the genre. Many of these films, especially more recent ones, claim to have been “inspired” by some classic piece of literature - Jane Austen’s Emma or Will Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew, for example. The ones with the boy and/or girl from the wrong and/or right side of the tracks who end up falling for each other, well, that’s the George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion tribute. Except of course we really know that what they’re using as a blueprint is a litany of films, from Grease to Pretty In Pink, that have explored in depth the drama and tragedy of what we’ll call the Railway Melodrama - the location may change, but there’s always The Metaphorical Tracks and there’s always two people, one of each side of them.
Drive Me Crazy doesn’t hold up well under analysis. But then, it wasn’t made for people over the age of 16, so anything we’ve got to say about it is not especially relevant anyhow. Put it this way: the star is Melissa Joan Hart. If you know who she is, you’ll probably love this movie, and won’t get the least sense of déjà vu about the story. (For those still scratching their heads in puzzlement, she played the title role in the TV teen comedy Sabrina the Teenage Witch).
High school ra-ra girl Nicole (Hart) is all geared up for her school’s Centennial celebrations, and school spirit is running high - much to the disgust of the Uncool Grungy Subclass (in an ‘80s film, they would have been nerds) for whom the term “school spirit” is a blatant contradiction. Nicole’s planning on taking clean-cut basketballer Brad (they’re always called Brad) to the Centennial Dance she’s dutifully organising - but Brad falls on top of another girl and asks her instead, leaving Nicole with a dilemma - who to take along as her partner. She makes a deal with Uncool Grungy person and former childhood friend Chase (yes, Chase!) Hammond (played to the hilt by Adrian Grenier) - she’ll spruce him up and make him all shiny and pretend to go out with him in order to possibly win back the girl he’s just broken up with by making her jealous, and in return he’ll go with her to the dance to make Brad jealous. No prizes for guessing how it all turns out in the end.
It’s a big furry ball of predictability, but director John Shultz and writer Rob Thomas (working from a novel by Todd Strasser) do their best to keep things quirky enough to be interesting while playing a teensy bit with the Teen Movie Rules to get the audience thinking they’re in the presence of something entirely new. It’s not, of course - it’s hard to be anything close to original in this genre any more - but it does have a certain warmth that many other recent teen films have lacked. The cast, too, are generally very good, if somewhat unchallenged by their roles.
There’s plenty of pop culture within to keep it relevant and to feed the soundtrack album - and there’s an amusing division with the music here. In this high school, the cool people listen to Britney and Backstreet Boys while the uncool are into The Donnas and Deadstar, but the musical battle ends in a bizarre scene - good music and bad music merged in a perfectly dreadful cover of REO Speedwagon’s Keep on Loving You - played in person by The Donnas without a hint of irony! Elsewhere, though, there’s some surprising soundtrack appearances by Australian artists like B(if)tek, Charlotte Grace, Area 7 and the very wonderful Montana, all licensed from Festival Records - owned, not coincidentally, by the same Murdoch that owns 20th Century Fox.
Oh, and the film’s title? It’s actually got nothing to do with the story at all - but it does happen to be the title of the Britney Spears single that’s all over the movie as well as the end credits (which also offer some very odd musical surprises for those who stay around).
Unexpectedly presented in a pan-and-scan 4:3 transfer that quite literally chops some actors out of scenes entirely at times, Drive Me Crazy looks perfectly awful on DVD. Riddled with grain (which seems to have been made even worse by some overbearing digital image sharpening) and lacking in detail, the image throughout is covered by a gauzy veil of noise, behind which lies a transfer that looks like it was done on ‘80s vintage equipment - remarkable for a major studio film made in 1999. More commendable is the solidly saturated colour throughout, but otherwise the image quality here is only marginally better that you’d expect from a good-quality VHS rental tape.
Ironically, the static menu screens are all in 16:9 widescreen.
A single-layered disc is used, perfectly adequate for the film’s short run time.
The film is available on DVD in region 1 is its correct 1.85:1 aspect ratio (and 16:9 enhanced); why that transfer isn’t offered here is a mystery. Reports on the US disc seem to indicate that the widescreen transfer is slightly disappointing quality-wise as well, but with this full-screen version seemingly locked onto the middle of the frame at the expense of whatever happens to be going on at the edges, it’s surprising that this is the master that’s been chosen for DVD. Yes, yes, it’s only a teen movie, but those that like this film deserve as much respect as anyone else - their money is, after all, the same colour.
Drive Me Crazy may be a kind of reversed Revenge of the Nerds for the next generation, and it’ll doubtless have many people running away in terror screaming “not another teen movie!” But it’s a watchable and strangely likeable entry into this tired genre, and its target audience, who lap up anything Melissa Joan Hart appears in anyway, are gonna love it.
Fox’s region 4 DVD of the film, though, is a big disappointment.
