She’s Out Of Control Review

She's Out Of Control
When single Dad Doug goes outta town, his mousy 15 year-old daughter Katie gets herself a makeover, and has all of the boys lining up, which Papa is not pleased about when he gets back home.

by Jack Yeovil |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1989

Running Time:

90 minutes

Certificate:

PG

Original Title:

She’s Out Of Control

What we have here is an old Hayley Mills plot with added thigh-snap, two-inches-of-pubescent-skin-revealing white stockings to give it contemporary relevance.

Danza, of Taxi, is an L. A. widower who manages a golden oldie radio station that litters the soundtrack with The Kinks, has been non-commital-ly dating barbie doll Hicks and drives a flashy red sports car to show he's not old. His daughter (Dolenz) turns 15 and gets her braces removed, her old glasses switched for contact lenses, has her hair made over and spends about a third of the film's budget on sex bomb clothes, whereupon she starts getting real popular with all the testosterone-driven local boys and he feels the need to consult with manic child psychiatrist Shawn to get his jealousy under control.

By carefully avoiding the question of repressed incest or teenage humping, this manages to be a thoroughly innocuous tease of a comedy. When Shawn tells Danza that 51 per cent of girls his daughter's age claim to be virgins and he replies "Thank God my daughter is one of those" only to have the shrink squash him with "Ah, but 96 per cent of them are lying" it's just not as funny as it ought to be, because in a movie like this we know that squeaky clean, rather vacuous Dolenz is certainly not the sort of girl to do "it" before she's been married six months and had a good, strong talk with her doctor and her priest. So, with all the sex junked, we're left with Blake Edwards-style jokes about trashed cars, riotous parties and embarrassing falling-over.

It's watchable enough in a nothing-better-to-do sort of way, but comparison with a contemporary movie, say, Uncle Buck, shows just how thin it really is.
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