Once in a Lifetime

This week's film brings us to the heady days of the late 1980's with a made-for-TV film. But it's not just any film. It stars Christina Applegate (from 'Married with Children'), Tracey Gold (from 'Growing Pains') and Alyssa Milano (from 'Who's the Boss?'). They were the three reigning teen queens at the time. On top of this, you also had Alan Thicke and Kelsey Grammer. And don't look now, but is that a pre-Friends' Matthew Perry? A cast like this only comes along once in a lifetime and what a cast it was.

Dance 'til Dawn first aired in 1988 at a time when sitcoms ruled the airwaves and the cast in this film were the crème de la crème of the sitcom world. The plot is pretty basic. Hoover High School is having it's prom night. That's the whole plotline. Seriously. It's filled with so many clichès, you could pretty much take a ticksheet and mark them off as you come across them. There's the snobbish girl who gets her comeuppance, the nerdy boy who gets the popular girl, the bookworm wallflower who gets the popular guy, etc. The whole film plays out like an extended sitcom show, sans the laugh track. And that's a good thing.

But what makes this film so fun is that it doesn't take itself seriously at all. It makes no apologies for being what it is, and that is just to have a good time. This film won't change your life nor will it cause you to have any grand epiphanies, but then it's not trying to do that. It is just mindless entertainment, which it's very good at being. So we at FilmQuest are giving this film a rating of 6 out of 10, which is extremely high for this kind of film. And did we mention that spectacular cast?