Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Snack Shack’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Gen X Nostalgia Comedy About Teens Coming of Age

Filmmaker Adam Carter Rehmeier funneled a little autobiographical brio into Snack Shack ( now streaming on Amazon Prime Video ), a teen-buddy romp and nostalgia-com set in the early 1990s. Notably, the film stars Gabriel LaBelle, the charismatic star of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans , alongside relative unknown Conor Sherry, and they play a couple of joined-at-the-hip BFF teen doofs who create their own summer job by opening the thing in the title. This under-the-radar outing charmed some of the few people who actually saw it (the box office take was less than half a mil), but seems to be ripe to earn a cult following on the streaming circuit; now let’s see if it’s worthy of that status.

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The Gist: They don’t look 14, not at all, but whatever, I guess: AJ (Sherry) and Moose (LaBelle) are ripping cigs and betting on the dogs. They ditched their school field trip to the zoo to cab over to the off-track wager station, then lied and sweet-shit-talked their way back onto the bus and back home where they hide their home-brewed beer so they can sell it for a tidy profit, or drink it as needed. The perfect crime! AJ and Moose are always hustling like this, busy busy busy, hoping to make money for no particular reason besides, I guess, because they live in a capitalist country that was peaking with the capitalism thing at the time, and possibly because the internet hadn’t hit the mainstream and turned brains to mush yet. They have old school brains, which are different from our newfangled brains rendered neurotic by tech and fresh existential threats. It was always better back then, right? No? OK, probably not. Certainly not. Doesn’t mean we can’t be wistful about it, though, at least a little bit.

Where was I? Right: NEBRASKA, 1991. These two guys, all they wanna do is get buzzed, get laid, get some money. They bike around their upper-middle-class neighborhood. We don’t meet Moose’s family, because he’s the colorful wildman here, and that might be too much stuff for the movie. So we stick with AJ’s family, with his big-haired mom (Gillian Vigman), judge father (David Costabile) and golden girl airhead little sister (June Gentry). AJ’s always fibbing here and getting busted there – freewheeling summer trouble – and sneezing over the lawnmower. Hay fever. It’s rough. He and Moose are tormented by two older bullies with mullets and/or muscles, who tear around in a T-top Trash Am. Yes, Trash Am. I did not typo. One day AJ’s mowing and loading a hanky with snot when he looks next door and there’s new neighbor Brooke (Mika Abdalla), who smiles at him and snaps his photo and calls him Shitpig. No reason. Just Shitpig. I think this is the kind of thing that girls in 1991 did when they liked the boy next door, not that I would really know. I was there in 1991 and life was not like the movies, and Snack Shack is definitely a movie.

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So. About that movie title. The beer biz gets busted, so AJ and Moose scrape up their gambling winnings and empty their savings accounts to take over the Snack Shack that’s situated alongside the neighborhood pool. They clean up the dead rat and the shit the rat shat before it died and before you know it they’re selling candy and hot dogs (with the word F— ketchuped on ’em for an extra 75 cents) and fountain sodas and raking it in. AJ’s older-buddy/big-brother-stand-in/advice-giver Shane (Nick Robinson) is back from the Gulf War, working as a lifeguard, and through him, AJ scores Brooke the same poolside gig. Not bad: A money gig with a view of the girl you like in a bathing suit all day. Dude. DUDE. Totally worth dealing with the bullies and the hordes of children clamoring for push pops and M&Ms. Any legit conflict here? Yep: Moose is the more confident of this goofball dynamic duo, the fast-talker who moves on Brooke with a speed that doesn’t occur to AJ, who’s gotten close enough to smell the lip gloss, but hasn’t overcome his own awkwardness. Well, shit. Another summer, another series of teenage triumphs and setbacks.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Rehmeier aims for a sweet spot among the crass yuks of Superbad , the lazy-days nostalgic yearnings of Dazed and Confused and the deeper-than-a-grossout-com poignancy of Adventureland .

Performance Worth Watching: Sherry is an able anchor here, and Abdalla shows some admirable post-Aubrey Plaza seriocomic screen presence, but LaBelle has the majority of the It in this movie. Without his high-energy charisma, Snack Shack might fall apart.

Memorable Dialogue: I dunno about some of this slangy Juno esque script, e.g., “Are you sad-sacking in the five-foot, Shitpig?” or “It’s feeling like a negatory on the biscuit front there, eagle.”

Sex and Skin: Just some teenage over-the-shirt/pants groping.

Our Take: It’s hard not to like Snack Shack , but loving it unconditionally is a tougher ask. There’s no shortage of coming-of-age cliches here – they start to pile up after a while – and characters function predictably within a plot that offers few real surprises. But Rehmeier blends a little raunch and tenderness into the more-sweet-than-bitter bittersweet tone, which bullseyes Gen X nostalgia zones (although Those Of Us Who Were There aren’t buying these haircuts — the ’80s hangover was still lingering in 1991). Can you truly be mad at a sun-drenched popsicle-slurping ketchup-bottle-burping poolside-fun montage set to EMF’s “Unbelievable”? Nah. It’s like lemonade and a PBJ before bicycling to see T2 at the mall after your mom bought the tickets for you since, of course, it’s an R-rated movie.

The biggest issue here may be the pacing; the film opens loud and frantic on a too-many-Coca-Colas-and-contraband-cigarettes buzz, then settles into a summer-heat lope that makes us feel like the long days are a touch too long (the film clocks in at a slightly tumescent 112 minutes). Snack Shack proves how difficult it is to balance snappy comedy and observant drama, and Rehmeier pens dialogue that aims for witty and lively but just feels like it’s trying too hard. None of my gripes are dealbreakers here, though. The laughs it inspires are real, and the good-natured warmth of the characters and performances saves the day.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Snack Shack isn’t unbelievable, but it is hangin’ tough enough to warrant a watch.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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