Heaven Help Us
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Heaven Help Us
Director: Michael Dinner
Starring:
Andrew McCarthy
Mary Stuart Masterson
Kevin Dillon
Malcolm Danare
Kate Reid
Wallace Shawn
John Heard
Donald Sutherland
Released: Feb 8, 1985
Budget: No Info
Box Office: $6 Million ($16.7 Million in 2022)
Ratings: IMDb 6.9/10 Rotten Tomatoes 29%
Metacritic 64% Google Users 83%
Here art thine Awards My Lord Tucker the Wanker second Earl of Wessex. Lord of the Furries. Heir of Lord baldy the one eyed snake wrestler. Protector of Freedom units. Step Sibling with funny feelings down stairs. Entertainer of uncles. Jailor of innocent.
No awards
Plot of the movie
In 1965, Boston teenager Michael Dunn and his young sister Boo have been sent to Brooklyn to live with their Irish-Catholic grandparents following the deaths of their parents. Michael Dunn is enrolled at St. Basil's, a strict all-boys Catholic school. His grandmother is determined to see him fulfill his parents' dream of him joining the priesthood. Dunn befriends Caesar, an overweight, bespectacled student who enjoys reading and excels academically. Caesar helps Dunn catch up with the rest of the class, but because of their association, foul-mouthed bully and school troublemaker Ed Rooney pranks Dunn outside of the soda fountain across the street from school.
After Rooney pulls a prank on Caesar, teacher Brother Constance attempts to get Dunn to identify the prankster by striking Dunn's open palms with a paddle. Fed up with Dunn's refusal to rat out the perpetrator, Constance shoves him to the floor. Dunn lunges towards Rooney and the pair are separated. Dunn and Rooney are sent to the office of the headmaster, Brother Thadeus. Rooney, impressed by Dunn's refusal to snitch, attempts to patch things up between them, but Dunn wants nothing to do with him. After school, Rooney tells Dunn that if they do not become friends, he will have to continue in his harassment in order to save face. Reluctantly, Dunn befriends Rooney and his friends, sex obsessed Williams and naive Corbett.
Dunn also befriends Danni, a teenaged girl who runs the soda fountain across from the school and cares for her mentally infirm father. Danni's fountain shop is raided numerous times by the Brothers, who wish to catch St. Basil's students misbehaving. The raids leave the shop in a shambles. After one raid, Dunn helps Danni clean things up, sparking a romance.
At the sacrament of confession, Caesar enters the confessional, but Father Abruzzi becomes preoccupied with another student's misbehavior. Rooney enters the priest's booth and hears Caesar's confession, giving him the penance of befriending Rooney and making sure he gets passing grades. As a result, Caesar tutors and befriends Rooney.
The relationship between Dunn and Danni further develops, culminating in a kiss under the boardwalk at the beach. One day, during one of the Brothers' routine raids, Danni takes a stand and locks them out. The Brothers leave, but later contact social services. A few days later, Dunn and his friends see police cars and a few of the Brothers surrounding the soda fountain door as Danni's father is led out in handcuffs. Dunn rushes in and finds that social workers are preparing to take Danni away. A shaken Dunn takes Danni in his arms. Weeping, she wants him to promise that he won't be sad over her departure.
An angry Rooney develops another prank with the help of Caesar, Williams and Corbett to get back at the Brothers for having Danni taken away. The boys sneak onto school grounds at night and cut the head off the statue of St. Basil. During a school assembly the next day, Rooney presents Dunn with a duffel bag containing the missing head. Brother Constance sees the bag and accosts the boys into the gym, where Constance hits Corbett and Williams with a leather strap in an attempt to extract a confession for the vandalism. Caesar presents Constance with a doctor's note, presumably to exempt him from corporal punishment. Constance drags the cowering Caesar to the floor, beating him with the strap. Dunn angrily shoves Constance to the floor and then flees, with Constance and the other boys following him. The chase ends in the auditorium during the assembly. Constance backhands Dunn and calls him a bastard. Dunn then retaliates by delivering an uppercut to Constance, knocking him to the floor and causing pandemonium as the student body rises to its feet and cheers.
Thadeus suspends all five boys for two weeks. He then presents Constance, who he claims started the altercation, with an order that he be transferred to another assignment where he will not work with children. The five boys walk out of the school downtrodden, but then joyfully realize that they will not have to attend school for two weeks.
TOP 5 Facts
1: Film debut of actors Kevin Dillon, Patrick Dempsey, Stephen Geoffreys, Yeardley Smith, and Maggie Wagner
2: Nancy Cartwright and Yeardley Smith both appeared in this movie years before they were both cast as the voices of Bart Simpson and Lisa Simpson respectively.
3: The working title of "Heaven Help Us" was "Catholic Boys". The latter became the film's actual theatrical release title in such territories as Europe and Australia.
4: Modern audiences may be shocked at the nude swim class depicted in the film, but this was fairly common at the time. Because swimming pools didn't have adequate filtration systems, the American Public Health Association (APHA) required male public school students to swim nude between 1926 and 1962. However, since many schools were unable to afford the upgrade to their filtration systems, this tradition continued in some areas until the 1980's.
5: The name of the Catholic religious order was the real-life Order of St. Basil aka the Order of Saint Basil the Great, who was born in 330 AD and died in 379 AD.
**TRIPLE LINDY AWARD**
**REVIEW AND RATING**
Trey 1 beer
Chris 1.5
Stephen 2
Tucker
TOP 5
Stephen:
1 Breakfast club
2 T2
3 Sandlot
4 Color out of space
5 Mail order brides
Chris:
1. sandlots
2. T2
3. trick r treat
4. rocky horror picture show
5. hubie halloween
Trey:
1) Boondocks Saints
2) Mail Order Brides
3) Tombstone
4) Very bad things
5) She out of my league
Tucker:
1. T2
2: Tombstone
4: My Cousin Vinny
5: John Wick
National treasure
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