“Head Over Heels” technically marks teenybopper fave Freddie Prinze Jr.’s first “adult” starring role–a fact that may or may not be a reason for the film’s poor box office showing earlier this year. My personal opinion is that the reason is much simpler: it’s a bad, bad film. The likable Monica Potter, whose rising star is certain to stall if she keeps on racking up duds, plays Amanda Pierce, an unlucky-in-love art restorer who moves into an apartment with four “struggling” and stereotypically vain and ditzy models (Shalom Harlow, Sarah O’Hare, Tomiko Fraser, and Ivana Milicevic). Amanda thinks she may have found Mr. Right in Jim Winston (Prinze), the pretty boy fashion consultant whom she and her roomies spy in the apartment across the way; but one night they apparently see him do something decidedly un-right: bludgeon someone to death.
Yes, scripters Ron Burch and David Kidd (working from a story credited to them and two additional writers) have ripped no less than Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. And, yes, director Mark Waters has cast Prinze–who trades in his usual fixed mouth agape look for a fixed goofy grin–in the Raymond Burr role. That alone makes Head Over Heels a bad movie, but what makes it especially awful are the painful double-pronged attempts at comedy. When anyone’s not delivering the groaners that pass for zingers, someone bumps into something and has a “hilarious” pratfall. It’s even more labored and thuddingly unfunny than it sounds.
While not completely culled from electronic press kit material–some press junket interview segments are also thrown in–the DVD’s “Spotlight on Location” featurette is still the usual ten-minute exercise in back-patting. In this case, it’s especially hilarious, particularly some comments by producer Robert Simonds, who liked the script’s “witty, urbane, fast-paced dialogue” and actually admits that Prinze was his “first and only choice.” How sad and scary is that?
As humdrum as that featurette is, it’s still the only supplement of any note on this barebones disc. The theatrical trailer is included, as are those for the better films Bring It On, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, and Bowfinger; there are also the standard cast and crew bios as well as production notes. Even so, this just-average treatment is still better than this horrendous movie deserves.
Specifications: 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen; English DTS; English and French 5.1 Surround; English subtitles; DVD-ROM features. (Universal Studios Home Video)
