Summer Rental (1985)

There's a certain kind of movie you watched a thousand times as a kid on a VHS tape you personally wore out, and then discovered nobody else on earth remembers. For Steve, that's Summer Rental — the 1985 John Candy vacation comedy directed, improbably, by Carl Reiner. Mention it to people and they say, oh, the one with Dan Aykroyd? No. That's The Great Outdoors. Nic had the same crossed wires: he saw this one as a kid and liked it, but somewhere along the way his memory fused the two, so he showed up half-expecting the giant steak. Lobsters in this one. Mr. Surf and Turf himself.

It's Steve's pick, and it takes Nic about thirteen minutes to sour on the protagonist. Jack Chester is an air traffic controller in 1985 Atlanta, which means, as Nic works out in real time, he scabbed through the 1981 strike. "I don't like Jack Chester anymore. Not a man of the people." Steve's response: let's go ahead and end it now.

They don't. What follows is a tour of a movie that's at minimum a delight to describe — the hard-boiled egg that detonates across a car interior, a dash-mounted cup holder Nic sincerely admires, an Alan Silvestri score Nic awards a Steve point, and Richard Crenna as Al Pellet, a man Nic pegs as the villain on captain's-hat evidence alone ("that good '80s butthole look"). Rip Torn's Scully runs a floating restaurant where the fresh grouper, sautéed to a golden brown with a teasing hint of Dijon, comes out of a freezer chest as fish fingers that Nic figures have been frozen since the Carter administration.

They split hard on the frisbee-to-the-groin gag: Nic considers it an insult to everyone involved, Steve shrugs it off as hacky. Plus detours into Nic's fishing charter nemesis who would not stop saying "a three-hour tour," Steve's Disneyland norovirus, and Steve's dad-brain snagging on a three-year-old aboard a racing sailboat with zero life vests.

Mint-flavored toothpicks to hold us over. Welcome to Citrus Cove.