Take Me Home Tonight

This 1980s-set life lessons film has a few funny one-liners, but is just like any other weak teen movie and an excuse for a 1980s soundtrack.

Topher Grace stars in stars in Relativity MediaÕs TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT.
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Take Me Home Tonight
Director: Michael Dowse
Starring: Topher Grace, Anna Faris, Dan Fogler

Take Me Home Tonight, a scattershot 1980s-set comedy about life lessons learnt during an all-night party, begins in a record shop beneath looming posters of Duran Duran, Eurythmics and Lucky Star-era Madonna. This scene, in which the anodyne white-bread hero Matt (Topher Grace) confesses to his zany buddy Barry (Dan Fogler) and his loyal sister Wendy (Anna Faris) that he's still in love with his college sweetheart Tori (Teresa Palmer), is somewhat foreshadowing of the nature of what follows. For what unfolds is nothing less than 90 minutes of wall-to-wall 1980s rock, pop and occasional hip-hop standards (Hungry Like the Wolf, Bette Davis Eyes, Video Killed the Radio Star etc) loosely hung together with some scratchy dialogue and intermittently funny one-liners. In other words, Matt and Barry arrive at the movie's central party, in suburban Los Angeles, in a whirling montage of NWA's Straight Outta Compton. Tori walks into the party to a slow-mo Bette Davis Eyes montage. She dances with Matt to a Safety Dance montage, and the party hits its wild heights in a Come on Eileen montage. The suspicion here is that the relentless mix-tape formalism of the movie is ultimately hiding the complete lack of plot (there is none, other than Matt's fumbling desire to finally connect with Tori). While the greatest irony of all is that, bar some bad haircuts and a few misplaced shoulder-pads, there's nothing terribly 1980s about this movie in the first place. With the sound down, it would just be another misfired teen flick.