Midnight Madness (1980)

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Five teams of Los Angeles college students compete in an all-night, city-wide scavenger hunt in this comedy from writer/directors Michael Nankin and David Wechter. Midnight Madness isn’t a laugh riot, nor is it anywhere as puerile or naughty as you might expect with a college comedy. There’s no nudity, no foul language, no sex… It’s an odd duck of a movie, closer in tone to a ’50s/’60s sitcom than to any of the lurid teenaged sex comedies that were about to hit the screen in the early ’80s.

It was produced by Walt Disney Pictures, but since it earned a PG rating, they didn’t put the Disney name on it. The studio was floundering at the time — desperate to reinvent itself at a time when their family-friendly brand of entertainment was dead on arrival at the box office. Unfortunately, Midnight Madness is too mild for grownups and too mature for children. The only audience for a movie like this would be young people who pretend to be more innocent than they are.

It’s not all terrible, though. The laughs don’t work for me, but the game mechanics do. I was surprised to find myself caring at all about where the scavenger hunt led the characters — Griffith Observatory, a piano museum, a pinball arcade, L.A.X., etc. There are a few pleasantly recognizable faces. The main character is played by David Naughton (An American Werewolf in London), a student who doesn’t realize his gal pal (Debra Clinger) is interested in being more than just friends. Michael J. Fox (Back to the Future) makes his big screen debut as Naughton’s younger brother. Naughton’s character has forgotten that it’s Fox’s birthday, and that’s the emotional lynchpin of the movie — a younger brother seeking attention and validation from his older brother. Midnight Madness is that kind of cheese, sitcom scoring and all.

With Stephen Furst (Animal House) and a cameo by Paul Reubens (who would later become known as Pee-Wee Herman).