Movie Madness

So I see this movie mentioned as an all-time stinker and come here to discover I gave it a 2 rating. I had no recollection of this film. So I watch it and as I do so the memories start rushing back. The fascinating thing is - I liked the movie! I have no idea why I gave it such a low rating or even when I saw it. I must have not been in the mood for it that day. Anyway, here's my review. The movie is in three segments. The first spoofs those movies from the '70s where couples split up to "grow" and bang other people. Siskel & Ebert loved those types of films. It's a funny start to the film but not for all tastes I suppose. I like Peter Riegert in most things. This is no exception. This segment also features great turns from Teresa Ganzel and a very young Diane Lane, as well as funny stuff from the child actors playing Riegert's kids. The second segment stars Ann Dusenberry as a * who seeks revenge on the butter industry. I won't spoil why but it's hilarious. This segment has lots of quotable funny lines. I will say it goes one joke twist too many and ends with a bit of a phfft. Still, it's a good one. The last segment is the weakest. It spoofs police procedurals with a rookie (Robby Benson) paired with a cranky old cop (Richard Widmark). Christopher Lloyd is also in it. I didn't find this segment too funny, outside of a great Henny Youngman cameo. Overall it's a fun movie. I'm not saying it's a classic but it's a nice way to pass the time. Probably the best Lampoon movie after Animal House and the Vacation films.

"Growing Yourself" is a segment that features a guy leaving his wife to raise his kids on his own. What fascinates me about this is that the movie is just so boring. I think this may in fact be the most boring comedy I've ever seen. That probably does make it one of the worst. I can't even tell if there were supposed to be jokes in this. I was almost asking for a laughtrack. "Success Wanters" features a woman who starts off as a * and then becomes rich by marrying into the margarine industry. She eventually marries the President. What is this supposed to be satirizing? Apparently, this is a parody of soap operas. I have no clue what this even has to do with anything as the plot is so random. The jokes are all forced and garner no laughs. "Municipalities" has Christopher Lloyd, easily the most recognizable actor here. This segment is seemingly a parody of cop movies as it features a guy tracking down a serial killer. I guess I haven't seen that many cop movies. This was still pointless, with unlikeable characters and the same unfunny jokes over and over. I guess this was the first truly awful spoof movie. National Lampoon had fallen even back in 1982. *

Despite the actors who starred in this movie, there was no hope, including Christopher Lloyd who is a big name and is a very talented man. It started out pretty slow, and my husband asked me when was the movie supposed to get funny! We continued and managed to watch the first story. The second story started and we decided to turn it off after about five minutes. My husband and I thought we were taking advantage of a Black Friday sale at a bargain store chain and decided to add some more movies to our collection. So, we bought this DVD for $1.88, but that was still $1.88 too much!!!

One of the strangest comedies ever made, and unfunniest. Trailing NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE by five years, you'd expect the boys to try for… something. But this movie lacks madness and couldn't be more sterile and uninteresting. Consisting of three tales, the first has ANIMAL HOUSE alumni Peter Riegert going through an early midlife crisis. He dumps his wife, quits his job and raises his children by himself: while dating a fourteen year old (Diane Lane) and not caring about anything… especially humor. The second is the most bizarre: SUCCESS WANTERS has JAWS 2 ingénue Ann Dunesburry as a beautiful college grad who becomes a * – she's raped by horny businessmen using, of all things, margarine and then marries a margarine Mogul and soon becomes a monopolizing widow. Then she's the first lady of the U.S. President and the real first lady's lover. Sounds more enticing than it really is, but Dunesburry looks great as usual. Then we have the last and worst story – although an indie film icon Henry Jaglom directs it (Bob Giraldi helms the first two). In MUNICIPALIANS a starry eyed Robby Benson plays a rookie cop who, unlike his gruff and lazy veteran partner Richard Widmark, wants to take the job seriously. He gets shot and beaten and just about everything else in the Wile E. Coyote tradition and… What does it matter? What does any of it matter? But like a train wreck, you might wanna take a peak. (And the magazine's cartoon artwork between the stories are actually pretty cool.) For More Reviews: www.cultfilmfreaks.com

The first two of the three segments in this film consist of an almost alien sense of humor to most people. It's so bizarre, it's essentially an acquired taste. So, people going into this movie expecting the style of humor in Animal House and the Vacation movies are going to be disappointed, but it isn't without merit. The third segment, however, I thought was downright hilarious...which is strange, because it's the one that seems to get trashed the most. It doesn't help that some versions, for some weird reason, censor the hell out of the language-but leaving the nudity intact?-killing some of the jokes...the newer DVD is uncensored, thankfully, but I can see why people might not like it if they're only familiar with the edited version. Benson, Lloyd and Widmark are charming in this segment, and Benson and Lloyd's duet of "Feelings" is wonderful (with a ragtime rendition of it playing over the last shot, paying homage to silent cinema). What's unfortunate is, Henry Jaglom (the director of the third segment) also shot a fourth segment that was cut from the film...given that the segment he made that is in the film is the best part of the picture, this makes me sad. I would've loved to have seen the deleted segment. It's also unfortunate that, according to an interview I read with him, he is so embarrassed by the final cut that he refuses to speak about the film on the whole....it's a shame because he did some nice work here. The movie probably wasn't what people expected from National Lampoon, but it's nowhere near as terrible as most people make it out to be, and deserved better than to sit on the shelf for two years, and then only a direct-to-video release.

Hey, this was a parody, and I thought it was pretty funny in parts. It was arranged in order from weakest to best episodes. I didn't care for the first episode at all. It just seemed pointless, and the parody elements were over the top. I guess I missed the redeeming feature of Teresa Ganzel's T&A scene because I saw the movie on TV, where they censor anything good. The second episode about the corporate climbing rags-to-riches story was better, but I really didn't get into it until just about the end, where the First Lady relinquishes her marriage and position to Dominique. that's when it struck me that this whole story was just a parody of a feminist's wet dream. Then I thought the story was pretty funny, but fairly predictable and linear. The third episode I thought was great! I loved the parody of every serious cop coming-of-age flick ever done, and I liked Robby Benson's acting. Yes, I said that. I thought his smarmy, sensitive young cop fresh out of the academy was just sickening enough to avoid being over the top, and then I absolutely loved the way he suddenly became a rude, burned-out, unkempt, obnoxious cop. It was a great juxtaposition and I gained respect for Benson right there. The plot of the third episode was tight, and it even had a twist at the end after the burned-out Falcone kicks Nagursky out of the car to attend to a dangerous domestic dispute, and then Falcone ends up getting shot (again), even though he stayed in the car this time! Actually, I saw the end of this movie several years ago and I remembered the little closing shot of Benson doing some Buster-Keaton-like prat-falls down the road as the iris fade closes in. I was impressed by his physical acting (if that was indeed Benson and not a stunt double).

I'll keep the review of this program as short as possible. Skip it. Low budget, not funny, lousy script. Acting not quite as bad as the writing, but still bad. That's all you need to know, but I will continue for the sake of writing more than necessary. This is a film with three segments, each one parodying some other type of movie. A MUCH funnier film with this same exact idea is "Movie Movie," with George C. Scott. Very obscure, but worth searching out. MM parodied films of the 1930's, and did it with elegance, precision and dry wit. This movie did not. It parodies three types of films, supposedly from the late 70's, early 80's era, only it is parodying films I've (almost) never heard of. The first is, I guess, a parody of "Kramer Vs. Kramer," in a way. Peter Reigert does his best with a dirt poor script. The second is a parody, of, I don't know what...a Danielle Steele novel? I mean, you might see a story like this on Lifetime TV, but in a movie theater? I mean, I remember the 70's, I was there. This is a soap-opera type parody about a fetching young woman who sleeps her way to power. These type of things usually parody themselves, so I don't see how this was even necessary. We are on somewhat easier ground with the third segment, "The Municipalians," which parodies cop movies. I noted elements of "The New Centurians" and some "Dirty Harry", both of which were almost 10 years old when the film was created. Yeah, nice and current. Robby Benson plays the idealistic young rookie (over-the-top wimpy) while Richard Widmark plays the grizzled veteran cop who drinks whiskey while sitting in the police car (OH! Stop! My sides! He's actually drinking booze in the Police car! How irreverent!) Note that this was the first film after "Animal House" to have the "National Lampoon" name attached. Wow. To go in five years from that classic flick to this pile of dung is nothing short of shocking. I could go on for hours about the sad decline that caused one of the most cutting-edge and original voices in American humor (that would be National Lampoon, the original magazine for about its first 10 years or so) to sell out and begin a long, slow slide into a world of crap, where now the magazine is long gone and it only exists as a brand name to slap on low-budget "comedy" films for a fee. Yet another reason why capitalism (and cocaine) sucks so bad. Anyway, this movie is a serious time suck. Don't waste your 90 minutes. I want mine back. On the positive side, Fred Willard's in it!

National Lampoon's Movie Madness (1982) 1/2 (out of 4) Extremely bad and embarrassing comedy is perhaps one of the worst that the decade had to offer. This film has three different spoof's of popular movie genres but none of them are funny. The first has Peter Riegert (NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE) playing a lawyer who asks his wife to leave him so that he can go through some personal growth. The second story deals with a woman who was gang raped with a stick of butter so she sets out to bring them down by making margarine the item to use. The third film has a stupid rookie cop (Robby Benson) tries to track down a serial killer (Christopher Lloyd) who likes to leave a copy of his driver license on the body of his victims. All three stories are incredibly bad but if I had to pick the best one I'd go with the first. It at least has Riegert and his certain style of comedy getting a few laughs and we also have some rather strange nudity. The second film seems to be spoofing TV shows like "Dallas" but it doesn't get any laughs. The third film is just downright annoying because it keeps going and going and never appears to know what it's trying to do. The major fault of this disaster has to be pointed at the screenplay, which just isn't funny. Non of the spoofs are that far out there and one could argue that none of these items needed to be spoofed because their own films did a good job at that. Did we really need this cop comedy when there was something like POLICE ACADEMY out there? The performances are all fair to bad but acting isn't what people come to a film like this for. The second and third films are without any laughs and what's really scary is that there was a fourth film spoofing disaster movies that was cut before the movie was released. With these three shorts being so bad you can't help but wonder how bad the fourth one was for the studio to decide that was the one to leave on the cutting room floor.

I can well appreciate who so many people don't like this film. First time I saw it, the first episode made no sense at all to me as I didn't understand what was being parodied, although I must admit that any movie with Candy Clark will certainly get my vote. Up to that time, however, I'd never seen a personal growth film or advertisement. Now I really enjoy this segment. I've always loved the spoof of the Greek tycoon. In this one, however, it's the lovely Ann Dusenberry on whom the camera really shines. (I was surprised to discover that she has made so few movies to date, preferring TV by a very wide margin.) However, my favorite of the three episodes is most definitely the third. Going right against his usual trademark, Richard Widmark is absolutely priceless as the do-nothing cop.

I just saw this Movie on a local TV Station (TV8's "Big Chuck and Little John" in Cleveland, Ohio) I had never heard of this movie and decided to watch it. I know of no thesaurus that can even come close to aiding me in describing how bad this movie really is. The script is awful. The acting, well other than one of two exceptions, is pointless since there is nothing in this material that merits any real effort. It looks like a bunch of little ideas, leftover from various writing sessions, that where thrown into a blender. It's not just funny. The "parody" aspect is strained at best. Some references where almost out of date (even for the time of it's release). No wonder I had never heard of it, it's really bad, worse than anything Saturday Night Live, MAD TV or even In Living color put out in their worst days. If you see it on TV, it is a great example of how NOT to make a movie. Whatever you do DON'T WASTE A CENT. Adam