Product Description

What do you get when you mix T-Birds, Bermuda shorts, bubble-flip dos and incredible dancing? You get Shag, The Movie a comic free-for-all (The New York Times) that Variety calls fun and breezy and you'll call a blast! Carson (Phoebe Cates, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) is all set to marry respectable but boring Harley (Tyrone Power, Jr., Cocoon) until her best friends Melaina (Bridget Fonda, Single White Female), Pudge (Annabeth Gish, MysticPizza), and Luanne (Page Hannah, TV's Fame ) whisk her off for a last-fling beach party where all the girls have the time of their lives! A charming bad boy throws Carson's marriage plans intothe spin cycle. His nerdy sidekick whirls Pudge through some dazzling dance steps. Sultry Melaina learns some sexy moves from an Elvis-like teen idol. And even straight-laced Luanne whips off her horn-rimmed glasses and tosses her innocence to the wind!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2663 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-05-22
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.com
It's not too surprising that Shag flopped on its 1989 release but found a devoted cult following on cable TV and home video. This featherweight comedy looked like a waste of space on the big screen, but it plays very cozily on the tube, where it lends itself to popcorn breaks and pajama parties. (The lousy title must have had something to do with the movie's initial failure, a problem worsened by the film being marketed as Shag: The Movie, a truly dumb idea.) Shag is in the tradition of Spring Break pictures, a thoroughly formulaic stroll through the conventions of the minigenre: beachside romance, a wild party, one tender deflowering, and lots of rock & roll. The time is 1963, as three gal friends trick their soon-to-be-married pal (Phoebe Cates) into one final all-girl fling in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Cates is engaged to a local well-bred stick (Tyrone Power Jr.), but soon she's tempted by a beach boy (Robert Rusler) bound for Yale (mm-hmm). The so-so material is buoyed by lovely Annabeth Gish, as the supposedly pudgy one in the group, and Bridget Fonda, as a prematurely sophisticated sexpot. After a while it's easy enough to relax and enjoy the girls' breezy adventures, which are served up without the soap opera melodrama of the similarly tooled Where the Boys Are. Oh, and Austin Powers notwithstanding, the title refers to the dance, not something else. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

It is IMPORTANT that you get the ORIGINAL on VHS
I love love love this movie, but you have to make sure you get the VHS version (where the VHS cover is the cast riding in the car.) Lucky for me, this is the one I own. By mistake, I purchased the "wrong" version for a friend and we sat down to watch it together. The music in the DVD version is TERRIBLE compared to the original (don't even get me started on the c.d. soundtrack.) Whoever made the blunder of re-doing this for DVD re-release needs to be fired!

1 star for the DVD, five stars for the VHS!
I guess I was lucky enough to get my hands on a VHS copy of this movie with the original music, which did not include any Chris Isaak or K.D. Lang songs. If this is a period movie (and it should be), then period music should be used in all the versions. It sounds like they couldn't get legal clearance to use all of the original music for the movie, so they replaced songs like "Another Saturday Night" by Sam Cooke with a song by K.D. Lang, who was probably still in diapers in 1963. That's where the movie took a dive for me in a big way on the DVD version and it only got worse as the movie went on. Other songs were swapped out and music was added in scenes, like at the Carnival and the "Wild Night" scene, where the original version had no music.

Maybe if enough fans of this movie complain, MGM will blow the dust off their checkbook and pay the original artists (or their estates) to get the rights to use their music. Some bonus features would be nice too. The least they could do was to allow 60 Minute Man to finish playing in the credits, like it did on VHS. If you are lucky enough to own an original VHS copy, you'll notice MGM did not run the full credits like you would normally see in a movie, which would include the music credits.

Y-E-L-L-O-W. You will marry Bullwinkle and have 5 kids
What a brilliant movie, with the exception of the end where the girls sing together on the porchsteps of the sentator's summer home in Myrtle Beach. That little Dirty Dancing ripoff was really, really lame. But the rest of the movie was great! Robert Rustler, who didn't act in a billion other movies like I thought he would, gave the performance of his lifetime. Tyrone Power Jr looks like his daddy. You already know Phoebe Cates, Bridget Fonda, and Annabeth Gish. Great eye candy for a really, really fun movie. It's a beach movie without the stupidity.

I've probably watched this movie 50 times. Nothing like watching a summer vacation in Myrtle Beach to put you in a good mood. Hanging out at the Grand Strand...shaggin' and drinking bevos (oddly enough, a bevo was a non-alcoholic beverage in prohibition days...a fact that has nothing to do with this review)...that's the life!

Shag has great music, fun dialogue, famous speeches, some hot shaggin', Elvis impersonators, and great party scenes that make the movie flow really fast while a smile is on your face the entire time.

For the DVD, I didn't think the sound quality was very good. I have 50's movies that had better sound. I own Annette Funicello's Pajama Party on DVD. It has MUCH better sound. So that was disappointing, especially considering there's music throughout the entire movie. But even though the sound is a little disappointing and there's no special features in this movie (aside from a trailer), this movie is still one you should own.

After about 50 views, I finally picked up on something that I thought I'd share, since I feel a warm sense of accomplishment.

In the car ride, Melaina was giving Caroline (Pudge) her fortune. Caroline picked yellow. No idea why, since she wore a blue dress at the end of the movie. Anyway, she picked Yellow, and the fortune was: You will marry Bullwinkle and raise 5 kids (or however many kids; that's unimportant). Fast forward to the party scene...underneath the table that had booze sprinking off the tablecloth. Chip (her love interest in the movie) does a Bullwinkle impression! He blows Pudge away with it! From that point, it becomes a standing joke. HER FORTUNE WAS PROBABLY CORRECT! Isn't that something? Watch it again. Dance with it. Tie nylons to a bedpost and shag with yourself. It deserves the 5 stars I gave it for fun, nostalgia, music, and girls. It's the most fun!

Don't get caught with your rooster showing. Buy the movie!