Lost Angels

In Hudson's characteristically flashy foray into the cinema of delinquency, Horovitz (of the Beastie Boys) plays an LA brat repeatedly driven to commit antisocial acts of violence by his middle class folks: mom and stepdad are assholes, the brother he idolises is already well on the road to ruin, and dad naturally is an ex-cop. No wonder the boy's a nihilist. Girls, for once, offer scant succour, since Locane, met at a corrective centre, is not only into drugs but suffers from hammily mobile facial grimaces. Salvation is at hand, however, in the hapless form of Dr Sutherland, the traditionally troubled good guy, a shrink forever at odds with the money-obsessed psychotherapy establishment. For all Hudson's determination to tell it like it is (inmates eat own shit - shock!), and his evident love of bombastic flourishes (craning camera, lotsa loud music, weirdo slo-mo), the film serves up only trite melodrama and hackneyed moral homilies.