Don’t you just love it when something you somehow looked forward but were afraid that might fail. And then the whole thing turns out to be much better than you anticipated? This is what happened here. I was kind of hoping for Off Beat to be a nice little silly comedy with one or two laughs, but it turned out to be so good it’s now one of my favourite comedies of the 80’s.

Judge Reinhold’ plays Joe Gower, an under achieving librarian so low in the food chain he even gets bullied by the library’s nerdy staff. After totally unbelievable and silly events he finds himself imposing a cop in a dance show, in a love triangle between two cops and in danger of being thrown in jail for impersonating a police officer.

Reinhold was often typecasted as a goofy manchild in the eighties and this movie is no exception. Think Billy Rosewood in Beverly Hills Cop and you get the picture. Here his naive and overly optimistic do-gooder attitude works perfectly again. Other notable actors here include Harvey Keitel as a bank robber and Penn Jillette in one of his small eighties roles with his awkward eighties hairdo.

An fairly underrated and forgotten comedy that provides a few laughs and has its heart in the right place. What more could you want?

80s-o-meter: 82%

Total: 90%