O.C. and Stiggs is a movie about two people so pathetic that they cannot even succeed at being annoying. The picture is considered by just about everyone to be one of the worst films by Robert Altman, if not the worst. It was so bad that the studio didn't even release until two years after it was completed. It is so boring that I dare anyone to sit through it without financial compensation.
The two title characters are so similar and interchangeable that it's difficult to tell them apart. Oliver Cromwell (Daniel Jenkens) and Mark Stiggs (Neil Barry) are two teenagers who just want to have fun and get laid. There definition of fun (other than sex, of course) is to play practical jokes and insult people. They are not unlike Hawkeye and Trapper John from M*A*S*H, except for the fact that the characters in that film were adults acting like teenagers, instead of teenagers acting like cartoons characters (that, and Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould are actually talented). Stiggs and O.C.'s pranks, like the characters themselves, are not only unfunny, but uninteresting. We are supposed to sympathize with the protagonists because they mock and unfair and cruel world (a standard teenage vision of life) but their victims are so stereotyped that it's impossible to feel any antipathy towards them. This results in scene after scene of boring people making fun of other boring people in a boring way.
In the DVD documentary, Altman claims that he intended the movie as a satire, because he hated the teen sex comedy genre, and all movie suggests that he only made the film to try establish a reputation as being director. I don't know if either statement is true, but the movie totally fails as satire, and also fails as a sex comedy (or any kind of comedy for that matter).
Writing this review, I had difficulty in expressing the absolute brick-wall like experience the movie is. It's the kind of film that is more interesting to talk about than to watch. But think of it this way- it kind of says something when you can say that Fast Times at Ridgemont High is artistically superior to a film in the same genre by Robert Altman.
O.C. and Stiggs (1985)