BEFORE: Ah, there was a bit of a chill in the air today, and football season started, so fall is on the way. Soon milkshakes will be replaced with dunkaccinos, I'll start growing my fall facial hair, and business films will give way to Jack Nicholson movies. First, I've got to clear out the last of these silly summer comedies.
One might ask, but why watch a film that you just KNOW is probably a stinker? How do you justify watching a crappy Carrot Top comedy, when a classic such as "On the Waterfront" remains unwatched? It's a valid question, and I can think of three reasons to watch a "bad" film - first, to confirm that it is, indeed, a crapfest. Second, as Andy pointed out, I should be able to learn just as much from a bad film as I can from a good one - why, exactly, does it suck? And finally, to get it the heck off of my list.
THE PLOT: A surfer becomes the head of a major company.
AFTER: Chairman of the BOARD - get it? Like, surfBOARD? These are the jokes, people (unfortunately).
It turns out this film, while terrible, was exactly on topic - essentially, it's got the same plot as last night's film. So it makes sense to watch them back-to-back for comparative purposes. An experience man with ideas for wacky inventions becomes the head of a company, in a very unlikely manner, while a rival executive tries to make him fail, to lower the company's stock value. Wanna bet that the wacky ideas are a huge hit, so the plan fails, the hero succeeds, and gets the girl too?
But there's way way WAY too much slapstick - it's wall-to-wall physical comedy here, except for the parts that seem like an extension of Carrot Top's stand-up comedy act, which features crazy invention-like props. See Carrot Top wear a chicken suit, see him accidentally drink motor oil, and see him fall down - a lot.
To be fair, the inventions proposed here are at least original ideas, unlike the one in "The Hudsucker Proxy". But the movie can't decide if its main character is a genius or a screw-up - you've got to pick one or the other, and run with it. Then again, Albert Einstein was known to leave the house and forget his pants...
Also starring Larry Miller, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Raquel Welch, and more of my favorite character actors - Jack Warden (last seen in "From Here to Eternity"), Estelle Harris (last seen in "Stand and Deliver"), Taylor Negron, Jack McGee (last seen in "Thirteen Days") and M. Emmet Walsh (last seen in "The Mighty Quinn").
RATING: 2 out of 10 tennis rackets
In my own version of Blockbuster, there'd be a whole special shelf dedicated to that rich movie genre of comics who got _just_ hot enough for a studio to throw a low-budget contract his way.
ReplyDelete"Weird Al" Yankovic in "UHF." Yahoo Serious in "Young Einstein." Pee-Wee Herman in "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure." Chris Elliot in "Cabin Boy." Some are more successful than others.
"Chairman Of The Board" has been floating around on premium cable for the past few months. I was surprised not only by how bad the movie was, but by the awful choices that the filmmakers made. They wound up with a flick that was so colorful and random and kinetic that adults wouldn't really be interested, but filled it with so much dope and grownup gags that parents would never take their kids to see it. They also failed to pull of the trick that Pee-Wee Herman and Chris Elliot did: they didn't build a world in which this character made any sense.
Well, anyway, it's an interesting historical document of how surprisingly normal Carrot Top looked before he took up bodybuilding and before whatever the hell it is that he did to his face.