
Sixteen-year-old Michael Dunn arrives at St. Basil's Catholic Boys School in Brooklyn circa 1965. There, he befriends all of the misfits in his class as they collide with the repressive faculty and discover the opposite sex as they come of age.... (Full plot summary below)
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Sixteen-year-old Michael Dunn arrives at St. Basil's Catholic Boys School in Brooklyn circa 1965. There, he befriends all of the misfits in his class as they collide with the repressive faculty and discover the opposite sex as they come of age.
Leave your thoughts about Heaven Help Us.
| Chicago ReaderDave KehrA pleasant surprise, Michael Dinner's film manages a mild redemption of the conventions of the horny teenager movie by taking its characters with a grain of seriousness and injecting some light romance and melodrama. |
| The New York TimesJanet MaslinThe director Michael Dinner, making his feature debut, and the screenwriter Charles Purpura have an unusually good feeling for the time, the place, the characters as kids and the adults they later turned into. |
| Washington PostRita KempleyThis wonderfully touching and funny reminiscence of life in a Catholic boys high school in Brooklyn circa 1965 went mostly unnoticed by critics and moviegoers alike. HEAVEN HELP US is a refreshingly honest portrayal of teenagers. No character is stereotyped, and events turn out differently than expected. |
| NewsweekJack KrollHeaven Help Us has assembled a lot of the right elements for a movie about a Catholic boys' high school - the locations, the actors, and a lot of the right memories. But it has not found its tone. Maybe the filmmakers just never did really decide what they thought about the subject. For their penance, they should see "Rock and Roll High School." |
| Los Angeles TimesMichael WilmingtonIt's an unambitious, derivative but engaging little comedy...It's hardly original. It's hardly deep. But, in contrast with much of its genre ("Porky's" and its progeny), it's a model of sophistication, decorum and even taste. It has crass moments and cheap shots, but it's still good: cleverly thought out and gracefully filmed by first-time film director Michael Dinner, who directed the PBS "Miss Lonelyhearts." |
| Spirituality and PracticeFrederic and Mary Ann BrussatA partly funny and occasionally toucing coming-of-age flick |
| Chicago TribuneGene SiskelThere are a couple of potentially interesting movies lurking inside Heaven Help Us, a film that, sadly, doesn`t have the guts to push any one of its elements to the hilt. The result is a picture that is sort of a comedy, sort of a romance and sort of a condemnation of parochial schools, all wrapped up in a nostalgia piece about the mid-`60s. |
| User ReviewMatthew KClassic "Catholic Boys" film! Brilliant. one of my favourite childhood film! |
| User ReviewThe Critic (Great flick showing the sadistic and oppressive side of catholic schools in the 60's. The characters are all funny and real, even the homophobic bully Rooney (Kevin Dillon) is endearing, which we find out he's not really homophobic just clueless. You better what this fagots! - as Rooney would say. |
| User Reviewdavid tThis is another classic that gets forgotten!Cracking! |