its ok

It’s almost a rule in teenage coming of age stories, especially ones regarding sex, that you need to make it a little mix of childish and thought-provoking. The childishness for laughs and the thought-provoking to make it seem like we’ve learned something that if you’ve seen a movie like this before, you already know but respect the film anyway for being honest. “Little Darlings” isn’t very funny, nor does it contain great insight but at the very least it’s a little poignant.


It stars Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol as Ferris and Angel, two 15 year old girls on their way to summer camp who get egged on into a competitive bet to see which can lose their virginity first. The two are made into enemies right from the start, we assume because of their class. While many of the girls on the bus seem entirely too mature for their age and ready to chastise anyone who isn’t, Angel is something of a tomboy from the other side of the tracks who defensively frowns with her arms crossed, sucking down cigarette smoke to the degree that she already seems to be doing a pack a day. Ferris is different- arriving in her dad’s Rolls Royce, she’s uppity and the girls don’t like that either.


Many of these girls are already obsessed with the idea of sex, so much so that many seem to have already had (or made up?) their first time. They all talk about men like much older women talk about men (their moms?) and the joke is that none of them have a clue what they’re actually saying.

It’s a much better joke than some of the other stuff in the movie where a group of girls steal a bus to go over to the boy’s camp trying to steal condoms or when both Ferris and Angel try tricks so obvious to get guys to sleep with them. There is also the prerequisite food fight scene to tell us that, yes, these are still just kids at heart. It would have been nice if through all these trials to get laid if the girls were to learn a little bit- namely from their parents who often drop in for parent weekends but those scenes are usually played either arbitrarily or for cheap laughs, like the shocked face we get when mom sees how many condoms are in her daughter’s drawer. A scene like that basically cries out for a better one to follow but the movie lets it slide.


The more redeemable, thought provoking stuff doesn’t come til later. I liked the scene between McNichol and Matt Dillon, playing a young punk she’s attracted to and how nerves get the better of her. She begins to understand the weight of the situation and she buffers and there’s a nice bit of confrontational dialogue between them. Later, you can read it all over her face how she’s crossed into womanhood and she doesn’t know how to feel other than that she has lost something sacred. The scenes between O’Neal and Armand Assante, playing a swim coach at the camp, work in a different way- she is very funny in an embarrassing attempt at seduction and it’s the graciousness of Assante and his message of not rushing things that make her scenes work, too.


But then there is much of the rest of the movie, which tries too hard to be funny at times and never really establishes a competitive feud with enough bite to really make us care who wins, though I guess that’s not the point. In the end it’s a film that has its moments but there are a lot of teenage sex comedies and this one just doesn’t have enough laughs or genuine feeling to really make it into the upper echelons of the genre.