The Party Animal

Spoilt Victorian Child is waxing rhapsodic over the imminent re-release of The Party Animal on DVD and why not – the movie is a little known 80’s college party flick obsessed with sex and featuring one of the best soundtracks this side of Repo Man. It is an absolute blast of a movie as long as you remember to turn off your brain while viewing. I don’t know if I would have liked the movie as much if not for its soundtrack which was filled with music I could have swore had been lifted from my own record collection. There were songs from R.E.M., The Fleshtones, Chelsea, The Untouchables, and many by The Buzzcocks.

I wouldn’t even have seen the movie at all if I hadn’t made a visit to Cookeville around 1988. It was summer and DD Blank and I were bored. When a couple of our old high school friends invited us to spend a weekend in Cookeville we decided to take them up on their offer. Clyde and Wildman were both attending Tennessee Tech and had an apartment off campus. DD, I, and another friend, Smooth, made the trip up I-40 ready to party as only college age knuckleheads can.

Clyde and Wildman told us we were going to take it easy on Friday night as they had made plans for us to go hiking at Fall Creek Falls State Park first thing Saturday morning. So they decided to go rent a movie late Friday night. We might not have been going out, but we were still drinking plenty of beer. By the time Clyde went out to find us a movie it was after 9 PM and the only store open that had movies to rent was a convenience store. They brought back The Party Animal which just looked stupid to me and DD. We were both up on our punk rock, intellectual high horses and while the movie isn’t exactly Citizen Kane it turned out to extremely funny and DD and I were stunned by how cool the soundtrack music turned out to be. So I can’t wait to see the goofy movie again as it will remind me of friends I haven’t seen in years, plus it’s just damn funny.

As for the rest of the weekend? We stayed up late Friday night watching the movie, got up around 6 AM on Saturday and we headed to a local donut shop to fuel up for the hike. The hike down to Fall Creek Falls is quite the incline and we all learned that DD was part mountain goat that day. We left the park late in the afternoon starved so we stopped and had a late lunch at the KFC in Sparta, TN. The rest of Saturday was spent drinking at some local Cookeville college bar whose name completely escapes me. I just remember the beer came in huge pitchers and that we shot pool most of the night.