Okay, let’s start with the title card: “The Lord’s of Flatbush.” ACK! So, there’s that. There’s also the faux-fties music, which is so cheesy and wedding-band bad, and I don’t get it — you paid for the rights to clips from From Here to Eternity, but you couldn’t cough up enough to get some actual doo-wop on the soundtrack instead of that seventies-filtered shite? And finally, there’s the fact that the movie is weird and bad. It’s really short, and yet it drags for the first hour, and then there’s this flurry of characterization out of nowhere in the last ten minutes that’s like, okay…wait, what? Stanley hangs out all Birdy-style in a pigeon coop and reads maps? Butchy is an artist? And thanks for the exposition, High-Class Blonde Girl Who’s All Conflicted About Dating Chico, but we’d take you a lot more seriously if 1) your hair didn’t have hilarious continuity issues, 2) you weren’t a thirty-five-year-old trying to do high school, and 3) we cared. Weird, weird little movie. And the sound is awful. Pluses: it’s short; Perry King is a fox; Stallone has a couple of scenes where he’s hilariously good and quite sweet. Check it out if it’s on IFC or something, it’s sort of fun if you don’t care about little bagatelles like plot and audible dialogue. (6/1/04)

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