Heaven Help Us

I don't know a whole lot about Catholicism (strange way to begin a review, isn't it). I was brought up Baptist, where you go to church for a while, then you and God reach an understanding that you're a sinner, and the only way to get around that is to confess your sins and accept Christ as your saviour, then you get baptized and you're then a Baptist. Pretty simple really; believe, repent, accept, get wet, and become another name on the Nursery list. But Catholics, that's pretty mystical to me. You get sprinkled as an infant, then when you're older, you go to classes, where you learn what you need to know to be a good productive member of the church (an idea most Baptist churches should think about), partake of your first communion, go to confession, recite prayers and penitences, and become another name on the Nursery list. This is all hearsay (that's Here-Say, not hair-ess-ee, don't get confused) to me though, cause most of my knowledge of Catholicism comes from movies like Nuns On The Run and Heaven Help Us.

Heaven Help Us is labeled as 'Porky's gone parochial' on the box, which is a disservice to this movie, because it's much better than that. Porky's is about the most disgusting aspects of adolescence the filmakers could dredge up, while Heaven... is about good and bad in an early '60s Catholic school. The film stars Andrew McCarthy as a quiet teen who transfers midterm from one Catholic school to another, when he and his sister move in with his grandparents. His Grandma wants him to be a priest, but he isn't sure what he wants. So he goes to his new school, where the school headmaster (Donald Sutherland) tells him what to expect, how to act, and sends him to class. There he meets the school loser, the school hood (Kevin Dillon), the new teacher (John Heard, the dad in Home Alone), and the sadistic Brother Constance. Dillon pulls a prank on wimpy, which Andrew sees, but doesn't tell about, which gets him in trouble with Brother Sadist, but also earns him the dubious honor of friendship with Dillon. After school they go to the soda fountain / newsstand run by Mary Stuart Masterson (what a cutie!). She runs the place because her dad suffers from melancholia caused by his wife leaving him. Andrew and Mary hit it off, once she figures out that he's not like the rest of the Catholic school kids that regularly trash her shop (especially when the monks and nuns come to take names of the 'evil' kids hanging out there). The monks finally get the store closed, by calling in the police who cart off Mary's catatonic dad to the funny farm, and send Mary to a relative far away. Andrew is devastated, and his friends, in an effort to cheer him up, get back at the school for him. They get caught though, and this leads to the big confrontation between Andrew and Brother Sadist. After the dust settles, Andrew and his friends are suspended for a week, Brother Sadist is transferred out where he won't be working with kids anymore, and, in a closing credit voice-over telling the 'where they ended up' stories, everyone lives happily ever after. Interspersed throughout the film are the type of gags that you would expect from a comedy about growing up in a Catholic school: Wallace Shawn delivers an hilarious speech on lust before a dance with a sister school (this was before the age of coed schools), various hijinks in and out of the confessional booths, the usual sort of stuff.

Unlike Porky's, there isn't gratuitous nudity (unless you count a bunch of bare male butts before a swimming class), and there is actually a serious element to the plot. Ok, it's not The Boys Of St. Vincents, but I think it's worth seeing. It certainly beats Porky's.