My 10 star rating is about enjoyment of this, not its cinematic quality.
This is a stage play that's been filmed on the budget of a stage play - it's barely a movie. The 3 actors in the film wrote the play, fyi.
The story is 3 kids (roughly 6 yrs old each) and their parents go into a bomb shelter in 1963...the parents die soon after...the kids raise each other in the bomb shelter. This is NOT about them getting out and seeing the world as fish out of water. It's the world and mythology and culture that they've created within their tiny fish bowl. Microcosm of our reality, and all that.
Shelf Life is commentary upon religion, ritual, entertainment, society, and all the Things. And it comments with a deft and endlessly charming hand. O to be a child forever! One would become quite mad.
It's really dang funny and loveable - provided you're up for watching a silly theatrical production with zero budget.
Director Paul Bartel's added ending is Freudian, literally 4th wall breaking, and cute - but does undercut the actual, rather dark yet meaningful ending of the play. Oh well. It's still cute and lovable!
(Most everyone I've shown this to didn't like it, fyi. Bunch of Scrooges, imao.)
Plot summary
On November 22, 1963, Mister and Misses St. Cloud hear about the tragic assassination of the President of the United States John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Consumed with paranoia and believing that WWIII is now inevitable, they take their small children Tina, Pam and Scotty and hide with them in their fallout shelter, never to leave it again. By 1993, the parents had died but their three grownup manchildren still live in the nuclear bomb shelter alone without any human contact. They've developed their own rules and rituals based on their fading memories of the life above, their old records that still work and whatever they catch on TV, when some station's signal reaches them now and then for a few moments. Most of their day is spent in play sessions, in which they act out various common activities like going to school, eating out or staging musical numbers. They love to dance, sing and on occasion wrestle. Sometimes they even play their parents and reenact the parents' speeches to them. At one point, Tina and Scotty even pretend to be boyfriend and girlfriend but in a quite innocent manner. They play many other bizarre games that only make sense to them and tell each other stories that are amalgams of things they heard about like the Bible, Superman or the Pledge of Allegiance. Scotty even has a make-believe superhero alter ego - Supercar. The movie uses vignettes to tell the story but there's also a thin central plot that revolves around the fact that Mom and Dad gave the only key to the vault with food to Pam. The story is based on a stage play
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An unusual busrt of (mostly) pure joy
Great, but not cinematic
This is a charming and sometimes uncomfortable play with great and convincing performances, but it cannot overcome being a stage play, and it is not cinematic. Most of Bartel's work is fairly cerebral chaos, and this is no exception. The story goes somewhere, but the camera does not. Lots of angles and the cutting cannot set the camera free of the confines of the fallout shelter.
Think of this as the prequel to "Blast from the Past." Most of the script is the shelter occupants replaying scripts they have written for themselves with snippets of misinterpreted stuff they have got from the outside world. This leaves many fill-in-the-blanks-for-yourself holes in the storyline, which is the source of much of the humor.
If you really like Bartel, you will like this. But if you need everything spoon-fed and all the bundles tied up, this won't be your cup of tea.
Disclaimer: this review is based on a VHR copy of the director's cut which was a gift from the director before it was released on video.