Beverly Hills Brats Reviews

Jeffrey Miller (Martin Sheen) is a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. While he spends his evenings making intimate house calls on former patients, his wife (Terry Moore) amuses herself with a Latino artist. Meanwhile, son Sterling (Ramon Sheen, son of Martin) fences stolen goods and daughter Tiffany (Cathy Podewell) carries on with a wealthy East Indian. Sensitive youngest child Scooter (Peter Billingsley), however, spends his time alone with his computer feeling neglected. Accordingly, the film goes to work on Scooter's problem by having a soft-hearted burglar, Clive (Burt Young), stumble into the Miller homestead one night. Scooter and Clive concoct a phony kidnaping designed to make the latter rich and the former's family more attentive. Martin Sheen is reported to have said that he got involved with BEVERLY HILLS BRATS mainly to prove that he could do comedy, and--though the film itself is a comedy in intent only--neither he nor his son Ramon does a bad job here. But the cast is done in by a feeble script. The film has the ingredients for a sharp, corrosive farce, but to do so, it also needed a sharp, corrosive sensibility behind the camera.