‘Grease 2’ or — Too Smart for its Own Good?
Like many other people I love the musical ‘Grease’ (1978) so the thought of watching the critically maligned sequel, ‘Grease 2’ (1982), always seemed totally unthinkable. But when I recently discovered ‘Grease 2’ has, apparently, developed something of a cult following over the years, with some even claiming it’s superior to the original, I knew I had to finally check it out so settled down to watch it last night. And what did I think?
Well, colour me pink and label me a fan!
But first, let’s make a couple of things absolutely clear — ‘Grease 2’ is not a particularly ground-breaking musical or a particularly original sequel. For one, none of the songs move the plot forward in the slightest (in fact, they actively stop it dead in its tracks meaning it’s more like watching a family of baby ducklings crossing the road at random intervals and bringing traffic to a halt than anything else) as well as a comparative dearth of truly memorable melodies. Also, what paper-thin plot is here is nothing more than a gender-flipped retread of the original with the innocent Sandy role now taken by her English cousin, Michael Carrington (Maxwell Caufield), and the more sexually active Danny part by Michelle Pfeiffer’s Stephanie.
Yet ‘Grease 2’ pulls-off two important elements with considerable gusto in that 1/ — it delightfully wallows in its own highly self-aware ‘Grease-ness’, and 2/ — it then sets about deconstructing that “Grease-ness’ to spectacular effect. This means that, in terms of sequels, ‘Grease 2’ has more in common with ‘Gremlins 2: The New Batch’ (1990) than anything else, and considering ‘Gremlins 2’ is the greatest sequel ever made this is far from a bad thing. And even if ‘Grease 2’ doesn’t go anywhere near as far as Dante’s film in tearing itself apart (but, then again, what film does?) there’s still a cleverness at play here.
Instead, ‘Grease 2’ takes what made the original work — i.e. sex and singing — and ramps those ingredients up to ridiculous levels. A great example is the number ‘Reproduction’ where biology teacher Tab Hunter leads his class in a song and dance number about sexual attraction with lyrics such as — ‘Put your pollen tube to work’ and ‘Make my stamen go berserk’. It’s a song so sexually outrageous it makes the original’s erotically charged ‘Hand Jive’ (a number I once broke down shot-by-shot in order to demonstrate how insanely filthy it is) seem tame in comparison.
And don’t even get me started on Pfeiffer’s ‘Cool Rider’.
Although my favourite number, and also the film’s most intentionally problematic, is ‘Do It for Our Country’ where a member of the T-Birds takes one of the Pink Ladies into a fallout shelter only to then have his fellow T-Birds sound an air-raid siren outside thus making her think the world is about to end so she’ll have sex with him so she won’t die a virgin. Yet what follows is less a song about a hideous attempt to get laid and more a critique of American sexual hypocrisy and its military and cultural hegemony, with lyrics such as — ‘Yeah, let’s do it for our country, the red, white and blue. It’s Uncle Sam who’s asking, so your mother will approve.’ Although the moment I completely lost it was when they sang ‘It would be like as if we were doing it for Disneyland’.
Fortunately, the Pink Lady soon figures out it’s a ploy before anything can happen and so immediately scarpers but it’s so knowingly distasteful I couldn’t help thinking that if this had been in a John Waters movie people would now be hailing it a classic.
And it’s when ‘Grease 2’ is functioning with that hilariously camp John Waters-esque transgressive energy that it transcends the original and becomes its own unique hysterical blast because whilst it might not be as good a film as ‘Grease’, and it’s certainly not a better musical, it’s without a doubt the better comedy. And THAT’S why people love it.
