Cry-Baby

Welcome to Fifties' Baltimore. The Squares dance to timeless classics and sit up straight at school. The Drapes will never fit into civilised society. They want to play by their own rules and spend all night cavorting like wanton gypsies in a redneck bar, teetering on the outskirts of town. All would be well, had a playwright named William Shakespeare not penned Romeo & Juliet several hundred years ago. For a Square has fallen for a Drape. Perhaps, this time, their love will blossom and the housewives in the neighbourhood can finally express their fondness for the Drape and Square union by knitting patterned curtains. Wait.... what's this...a Square isn't happy about the Drape dating "his girl"? A war is about to begin, a war in which the weapons are songs and the bullets high notes of a ditty on the hit parade. Let's do social commentary Broadway style!

On first inspection, Cry-Baby appears as a parody of Grease, but one soon discovers that writer/director John Waters is taking the subject matter seriously and intends the film - putting the musical numbers aside for a moment - to be a detailed, informative commentary on juvenile delinquency in the Fifties.

A very young Johnny Depp, before he mumbled for millions in Pirates Of The Caribbean and long before strutting his stuff as the far too overtly camp and sinister Willy Wonka in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, is Cry Baby Walker. Amy Locane appears as the love interest Allison and spends the majority of the movie as little more than a poor man's Sandra Dee. The lovebirds meet as a nurse vaccinates the school. They gaze at one another and the close proximity, coupled with the playfully macabre situation in which they find themselves, forces hearts to pump and desire to flow.

Cry Baby ends up being arrested, leading to a musical number outside the gates of the state penitentiary, while Allison's ex-boyfriend shows his true colours as he tries to get "his girl" back by any means necessary. Allison does not blossom from "good girl" to "bad woman" before our eyes, as we suspect from the very beginning that she is a wolf draped in lilac.

Depp looks more like a male model than a dangerous deadbeat on the wrong side of the tracks and Cry Baby's friends prove to be little more than vacuous tramps, played for comic effect. The musical numbers are breathtakingly stunning but, at times, feel tacked on when a simple "OK" would have been a better than a full-scale opera.

This will become your favourite waste of time. It is great fun to watch, but the social history lesson is stopped halfway and the audience forced to focus on the predictable, frankly silly, love triangle between the Drape, the Square and the Girl.

Cry-Baby is an interesting diversion that entertains, but disappears into the memory in seconds. Dry your eyes and walk away.