Modern Girls (1986)

Directed by Jerry Kramer. Starring Cynthia Gibb, Clayton Rohner, Daphne Zuniga, Virginia Madsen, Stephen Shellen, Martin Ferrero, Rick Overton, John Dye. [PG-13]

One of those fashionable 1980s “long, crazy night on the town among shallow twenty-somethings” movies where nothing seems to go right, and not one of the more memorable ones. Gibb is a bored but earnest young woman, newly fired from a dead-end department store job, who goes out Friday night with her bored but cynical roommate (Zuniga), trying to catch up with a third roommate (Madsen) who took off to try and hook up with a DJ. It’s not fresh, almost never funny, and it treats its characters with a mixture of indifference and hostility; Madsen’s starry-eyed rape-victim-to-be is especially abused by this attitude. Those waiting for a payoff to Rohner playing two separate significant roles—the lovelorn wimp who’s used by the girls as a chauffeur and shares in their misadventures & an inscrutable punk rocker Gibb is chasing—will be left waiting; it’s apparently just a meaningless dual performance.

34/100