Crystal Heart (1986) User Reviews

full-on cheese fest

[SnoopyStyle · 4/10 · 5 April 2015]

Christopher Newley (Lee Curreri) lives in medical isolation. He is a big fan of upcoming singing star Alley Daniels (Tawny Kitaen). She comes to visit and falls in love with Chris despite the separation. His father is supportive but his mother fears the new girl's influence. He asks to marry her but it's a volatile romance. Her sleazy manager lies to him and he breaks out of his bubble in anger to find her.

This is fully loaded with cheesy 80s style. Tawny Kitaen is hilariously as a rock star. It does have one of the hottest bubble sex where neither can touch each other which is also a full-on cheese fest. Tawny jumping through glass in a dream is both disturbing and sexy at the same time. This is a bad movie but it's not really a funny bad movie. The movie basically fizzles out after he breaks out of his glass cage anyways.

A bad film with good heart and meaning

[videorama-759-859391 · 4/10 · 19 December 2016]

Only one can imagine, what it would be like, living with such a rare asthmatic condition, where you're confined to a glass walled room. Hey, John Travolta, did in a bubble, many years earlier. This time in a rather dull, and very cheesy late 80's effort, poor young Chris (Curreri from t.v. series fame) a brilliant songwriter, is the victim, and it's a sad and grim thing to behold. For me, this movie clearly posed the question, "Is life worth living the rest of it behind a glass wall, or for a few short days, out there in the open, before the guy upstairs takes you". Crystal Heart is far from a good film, though it's is a different and interesting watch, but really just falls to below average movie fare. Hottie Kitean, is the rock singer who's fallen for Curreri and his music, and it's a fatal, short lived love. As Chris, Curreri is just average, though likable, where Kitean, a good but under appreciated 80's actress whose career fell, after a few movie roles (she actually ended up on Celebrity Rehab) adds much more spark. It was Dynasty's Bochner's performance though, I really liked, as Chris's very supportive Dad, while Heatherly was solid as the Mother. Too, I liked Saura, an Emma Thompson looking woman, as Chris's carer. Her line after Chris breaks out of the glass, and vacates, is the one that stays with me. A brilliant acting moment on her part. A sincerity that's scary. Yes, some of you will be drawing tears in the short lived finale, such little precious time, shared between our lovebirds. There have been, many more effectively tragic endings, than this, but this is a cute little drama/time passer, but just isn't a good film. The whole film kind of has the air of a much shot video, with some nice bikini clad babes. One shot involving doggie do do in the gutter has never been a more favored shot. Jean Claude as Kitean's much older lover and agent is a hoot, where I just can't say the same for the slightly dreary, under par film. Kitean's finale song and scene, I really liked though.

Bloody Awfully Good!

[velvoofell · 29 August 2005]

The curly-haired pianist from 'Fame' is a multi-allergic teenager in a plastic bubble. Tawney Kitaen is a pop star and the object of the bubble boy's desire.

His millionaire parents vow to bring the pop star to the boy, her gradually falling in love with him and making love by rubbing against each other through the plastic bubble.

She incurs the wrath of her sleazy Spanish agent-cum-boyfriend, who has a terrible time with dog dirt all through this movie.

The Bubble Boy thinks he has just been used by the pop-star to further her career and escapes his confines to meet up with a jive-talking forty-year-old paper boy in a jeep, through whom he travels to the girl's house and dies, struggling to fight against his allergy, in her arms.

The film is god awful, but it is an unintentionally hilarious classic. Someone who thinks they have all the early eighties cinema ingredients - an Italian production team in fact - get it hilariously wrong, including a sub-Moroder synth soundtrack, one of the most embarrassingly unerotic sex-scenes ever filmed or participated in by mankind and the aforementioned Spanish-Italian villain whose every line is a phonetic fart.

Real beer+pals+junk-food fare. Buy or rent immediately if you find it!

Good one

[joy-131 · 7/10 · 29 January 2006]

Saw this movie many years ago. Heard a song on the radio recently by U2 that I'm sure was in this movie soundtrack, sung by the female lead or a voice-over...Desire. Song struck a chord back then and now. Recall the lead performances in this film to be decent but not befitting either actor, but it's a nice if not quite believable story about a young man who has spent his life in isolation "crystal" or Plexiglas enclosed room due to some kind of nonspecific immune deficiency disease, said to be a congenital anomaly. He admires an up and coming female rock star, meets and forms a relationship with her. I recall a steamy love scene that takes place with the glass wall between them, innovative for its time. Good chick flick. I would recommend seeing it now, even though it's older and not worthy of the term classic. I wouldn't mind seeing it again, the soundtrack was memorable, apparently!

One of the buried treasures of the 80s

[Macholic · 10/10 · 14 November 2005]

One of the all time great music-melodramas. Christopher falls in love with the beautiful singer Alley, but he got a problem: He must stay inside a sterile plastic dome due to rare disease. This is a modern day "Love Story" with a gender-twist. Colorfully shot in L.A. with concert and music clips of a handful of very catchy tunes. Tawny Kitaen is very, very cute and sexy as Alley, this is her best movie, so if you're a fan, step right up. A gory dream sequence has been cut on UK video, however it got a few scenes in it not included on the Danish video. It certainly looks as if the screenwriter have seen Cinderella '80, another excellent movie, as it shares a lot of elements with that one (minus melodrama). This movie needs a DVD release. My almost 2 decades old VHS tape can do with a replacement.

Rock and Roll Love Story of the 80's

[areacode111 · 9/10 · 14 January 2007]

Entertaining, rather bizarre concept to make a love story out of a bubble boy and a rock star but the movie "Crystal Heart" rather pulls it off. Based after a Spanish novel, the movie stars Tawney Kitaen at her sexiest. She probably could have had a singing career. Lee Curreri of "Fame" falls for for Tawney through her videos, as so many of us did back in the 80's.

Erotic love story mixed with rock music and melodrama creates an entertaining mix. Soundtrack is excellent. The movie was shot in Los Angeles and Mexico with an international crew. When it was first released theatrically it was in the top ten films released in Spain that year. Producer Carlos Vasallo went on to produce a Penelope Cruz movie years later.

9 out of 10 stars...for all the wrong reasons...

[terrywatt375 · 9/10 · 19 May 2023]

Well, if one is looking for a Tawny Kitaen...er...'star' vehicle...here it is.

Fresh off of her role as the female lead in Bachelor Party and a couple years before she appeared in the Whitesnake videos, Kitaen starred in Crystal Heart. Sort of a hybrid of A Star Is Born and The Boy In The Plastic Bubble, Crystal Heart concerns itself with the unlikely story of an aspiring female dancer/singer and a young man with severe immune deficiencies who by necessity lives in a hermetically sealed environment. The young man is also a musician and the aspiring starlet is searching for music with "meaning".

Girl meets boy and against all odds love blooms!

On the plus side, for whatever else can be said of Kitaen in terms of talent (she was never much of an actress and while she was at one time physically fit she never was a singer as her 100% lip-synched performances - miming to someone else's vocals - here display), back in the day Kitaen WAS a knockout. I mean, absolutely gorgeous. In Crystal Heart, Kitaen is here in all her ravishingly beautiful glory, before the silicone implants and decades of drug abuse and elective cosmetic surgeries ruined her looks. Literally, stunning to look at and she bares it all (and I do mean all) in Crystal Heart.

As to the rest of it, well, Crystal Heart is perhaps the ultimate archetypal 1980's movie. Chock full of moussed-up hair, lots of scrunchies and loud colors where the clothing is concerned. Synth-heavy pop tunes with lyrics borrowed from Hallmark greeting cards that the movie tries to pass off as "meaningful" without an ounce of self-consciousness or irony. Couple all of this with one lovemaking scene involving the leading actors separated by plexiglass and another nude scene featuring Kitaen writhing alone on a shower floor bleeding from cut glass...oh, it needs to be seen to be believed because a mere written description doesn't do any of it justice.

The fact that, as mentioned, Crystal Heart really seems to believe it is a touching, sincere love story chock full of wisdom and heart makes it all the more enjoyable for the schlocky cinematic cheesefest it actually is. However, this also inhibits it from getting 10 out of 10 stars: the lack of self-awareness this turkey displays makes it so cringeworthily embarrassing that I had to deduct one star. While Kitaen has sadly passed away, fortunately Crystal Heart lives forever in my snarky heart. RIP, Whitesnake girl!