Cinema Sunday: Airheads

In a world of streaming platforms that provide the option of watching whatever you want to watch whenever you want to watch it, the idea of cable movie channels programming their schedule throughout the day is intriguing to me.  

For example, a couple of weeks ago someone at HBO thought that at one given random Friday morning at 9 AM, someone might want to watch Airheads.  

I can't say I wanted to watch it but I had the day off, it was there and I wound up watching Airheads. 

From 1994, Airheads is a comedy about how a band of loser musicians hijack a radio station to force them to play their demo tape of their totally awesome song.

In Los Angeles, Chazz, Rex, and Pip start a band called  "The Lone Rangers".  How 3 people in a group can be called "lone" anything is a constant topic of confusion and ridicule with everyone who hears the name of their band. 

Besides issues with their name, the band can't get any record producers to hear their demo tape, they decide to get local rock station KPPX to play their reel to reel tape on the air. 

They manage to sneak into the station and make it the control room where DJ Ian "The Shark" decides to chat with the boys on the air. Shark's a pretty laid back dude but station manager Milo has a major stick up his ass and keeps insulting the band.

The guys pull out guns and hold the station hostage until the stations plays their demo reel.

Spoiler: the weapons are realistic looking water guns filled with hot sauce. 

Shark plays the demo reel but the song barely gets started when the reel begins to unspool and catches fire. 

OK, Chazz's girlfriend Kayla has another copy of the song on cassette. 

Except.... Kayla is pretty mad at Chazz right now, flings the cassette out of her car into a very busy street and disappears into the LA club scene somewhere.

Outside the station, a crowd of hard rock heavy metal heads have gather to cheer on the Lone Rangers. 

And the cops have shown up. There's the hostage negotiator trying to hold shit together while reaching a peaceful solution. And there's the SWAT leader who thinks the simple solution is a barrage of heavy artillery. 

Good news! A cop finds Kayla and Kayla recovers the cassette from the busy street. But in a kerfluffle inside the station, the control board is damaged beyond use.

A record producer arrives to actually offer the boys a contract and even sets up a stage on the roof of the radio station for the boys to perform. Except it's to lip sync to their song and the guys aren't happy about that. 

That ain't rock 'n' roll, bro! 

In protest, the band wrecks their instruments and dives into the crowd of metal heads.

The movie ends with the Lone Rangers playing a gig inside the prison which is shown live on MTV. Now their manager, Ian the Shark says the Lone Rangers will start touring in six months.

Or "three months if they behave themselves".

A postscript states that The Lone Rangers served three months for kidnapping, theft, and assault with hot pepper sauce with their album LIVE IN PRISON going triple platinum.

Brendan Fraser (Chazz),  Steve Buscemi (Rex)  and Adam Sandler (Pip) head up the movie as the Long Rangers. They are not that bright (they only have 1 copy of their demo and it's on a reel) but no so stupid to be unsympathetic. Yep, they are doing stupid stuff like holding a radio station hostage but they are aware it's stupid, it's just the situation as spun out of their control and they just have to go with where that situation takes them. 

The "It's That Person Who Was In That Thing" Department  

Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters is Sergeant O'Malley, the police officer trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the hostage crisis.   

Michael McKean is Milo Jackson, the smarmy station manager of KPPX who is conspiring to change the format to easy listening.  McKean was on the other side of the rock 'n' roll equation in This Is Spinal Tap. He is the duplicirous witch hunter in Good Omens.  McKean is literally "That person who was in the thing" in hundreds of movies and TV shows. 

Yep, that is Kramer from Seinfeld.Michael Richards is Doug Beech, the KPPX accountant who spend the movie scurrying around the air vents.    

Joe Mantegna is the KPPX DJ Ian "The Shark".  Mantegna starred in Criminal Minds and is the voice of mob boss Fat Tony on The Simpsons.

Nina Siemaszko as Suzzi, the KPPX receptionist, had a recurring role on The West Wing and did an episode of Tales From the Crypt I once saw. 

MTV News guy Kurt Loder appears as himself.  

Mike Judge voices Beavis and Butt-Head who call in to the radio station.

When Airheads came out in 1994, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone was something of an outlier giving the film a rare positive review "Fraser and Buscemi are deadpan delights. And Sandler, Opera Man on SNL, is a red-hot screen find."

Most other reviewers of the time came to the consensus Airheads was simply not a good movie with the film making various year end worst of lists.  

I would concur that Airheads is not a good movie but then what do I know? I was watching this thing from my sofa still in my pajamas on a Friday morning and what the hell, it killed approximately 90 minutes I otherwise had not made plans for.