Wayne's World / Wayne's World 2 [DVD]

Garth Algar and Wayne Campbell are two small-town, Anywheresville USA overgrown kids who have an amateur cable-access TV show on which they clown around, make fun of their guests - and each other - and are just out for a laugh. In both films they are pitted against two scheming executives from the twin media of TV and the corporate music industry, who successively have their eyes on the beautiful Cassandra, an Asian babe singer in a heavy-metal band that they bump into at their local nightclub. It's good clean fun in both films - the sex is simulated if it's there at all, and no knickers come off - but it works simply because, in both films, there are just so many in-jokes, cameos, homages to cinematic legends (such as "The Graduate", or the behaviour of actors at award ceremonies, or schlock endings from any one of a number of genres) and asides to make every minute worth watching closely for any little references you can spot. Revealing any specifics would spoil the fun, but this is how great comedy movies are made - you start with a rather facile and rudimentary plot, and spend the time building on these skeletal remains a body which is all padding - and none. There is not a single wasted minute in either film, and while by the second film they may have been running out of jokes specifically about heavy metal, they could afford to push the envelope a bit more with direct homages to "bad kung-fu movies" and - as mentioned before - "The Graduate".

The main characters are also fully fleshed out - Garth is the nerd before nerds were invented and insecure without Wayne to back him up, which leads to one of the most painful scenes in the film for those with an excess of empathy; Cassandra is the grunge-queen continually tempted by fame, fortune, and handsome smoothies with "babe-magnet" pads, and Wayne is the reluctant hero of the whole thing, always wanting to impress Cassandra and show up her suitors - and succeeding in his failure to do so. But this is really irrelevant as you will be so busy having a good time that the message of the film seems obvious. The directors explain - this is a movie for the kids, whether they are 15 or 55.

As the director of the first film explains, she was approached to make "This Is Spinal Tap" and turned it down because she was so involved in the rock world that she could not stomach making fun of it so mercilessly. The Wayne's World films laugh with the world, not at it - and so succeed not only as cultural satire but as a genuinely funny film. It's like all comedy, satirical or not, should be - not the cruel arrow of mockery but the warm bath of good humoured joking. And the endings are just hilarious. All six of them ;-).

The DVDs both come with director's commentaries and a separate "Extreme Closeup" set of cast and crew interviews, which are fascinating. The length of time between filming and the release of the DVDs actually allows the directors to comment on the changes in technical methods of filmmaking - and the film was done before CGI came on the scene in any great sense, so those people in those crowds - they're real. Which just of course adds to the genuine feeling of the movies and stops them being cold fish.