Little Darlings (1980)

Little Darlings is the movie that I kind of expected from Foxes, a lot of indecent behavior without the common curtesy of being a good movie.  I don’t mind a raunchy comedy, but at least give me characters with an extra dimension so that I have a reason to like them.

The characters in Foxes worked for me because I felt that their lives had been modulated by broken homes and unhealthy choices offered to them by their immediate surroundings.  Little Darlings is more about hijinks.  Now, of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but personally I just like a little something for the grey matter.

Set at a girl’s summer camp, the film revolves around the uneasy relationship between Angel (Kristy McNichol) who chain-smokes and has a mother who screws around and Ferris (Tatum O’Neal) the daughter of a wealthy couple who are going through a divorce.  Naturally, when they first meet, they hate each other, a but a bond forms when one of the campers named Cinder (Krista Errickson) they that are both untouched.  So, Cinder offers up a bet to see which one of them can lose their virginity first.

This premise, I will admit, stopped me cold.  This the kind of thing that middle-aged movie executives rub their hands over – young girls and their sexual problems.  It is fodder for exploitation, but the strange thing is that it wants to be more sensitive about this subject then we might expect.

That’s not to say that this is a good movie.  It’s too awkward, too talky and has way too much emphasis on practical jokes.  It’s not nearly as salacious as the ad campaign promised.  But it wants to have something serious to say about the way in which kids are pushed into having sex way too early and how they feel about peer pressure.

The problem is that the filmmakers aren’t confidence enough to take the movie one way or the other.  Either it could have been a raunchy sex comedy or it could have been a serious film about the pressures of teenage girls discovering sex.  Instead, it still blissfully in the middle while trying to decide which side to fall on.  It’s not a bad movie, but not an especially good one either.