BEFORE: The whole linking system I use is a bit touch-and-go, I mean I have to both live by it and die by it. I noticed that a few people who were in the Billy Joel documentary were also in the original "Spinal Tap" film, like Artie Ripp and Danny Kortchmar, but knowing that gains me absolutely nothing, in the end it's just something I noticed which has no value. But since I've seen "This Is Spinal Tap" like 1,000 times at least, it's still mildly interesting, you can still learn something very minor about a film that you've seen so many times you can say every line as you view it. So instead I had to look at who was in the documentary that was also in the SECOND Spinal Tap movie, a couple of unknowns named Paul McCartney and Elton John.
I recorded tonight's film because I put that second "Spinal Tap" film on DVD, and I wanted to put something else in the empty space to fill up the disc more, that's my excuse. It's a little-seen, little-known film from the mid 1970's featuring mostly improv comics, some of whom went on to become very famous and others, well, not so much. It honestly looks terrible and maybe like a film that nobody knows what to do with, even the IMDB has confused it with a Jerry Lewis comedy with the same title that came out six years later and on THIS film's page, it runs clips of the Jerry Lewis film, which is just a bit bizarre.
But anyway, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer carry over from "Spinal Tap II: The End Continues" and this is something of a weird relic of a film, but let's clear it off the board tonight and see what we're dealing with, then tomorrow will be the FINAL film of the Doc Block, finally.
THE PLOT: California is devastated by a big earthquake and, in a series of hilarious vignettes, a television station conducts interviews with the survivors.
AFTER: Oh, how I wish this were a better movie - I thought maybe I'd stumbled on a little-seen comedy from the 70's with some hilarious gems on it, and that's just not the case. It turns out when you take three different improvisation troupes and put them together in the same film, the result is not greater than the sum of its parts, in fact I think it's much less than that.
There's a loose framework about a devastating California earthquake, and well, that sounds all well and good but it's just not very FUNNY, now, is it? And this is used to allow flashbacks where each group of players can perform one of their better skits, like in flashback, but then if we keep flashing back to funny-ish scenes, then we've lost the throughline about the earthquake, haven't we? What's even worse is that the comedy is deeply rooted in the novel things about the 1970's, so there's a whole segment designed to call out Polish people or Polish-Americans as being very stupid, the fact that the person being interviewed is half-Polish and half-Irish doesn't help much, it's still from a time when you could make sweeping generalizations along ethnic or gender or sexual preference lines, and nowadays that just wouldn't fly. There's a news reporter who is clearly a man in drag, and like, that's the joke, that a man is wearing a dress and trying to look like a woman, and he's not really succeeding at it.
In the meantime, injured people are stumbling around after emerging from the rubble of the disaster, and other people are wandering around and taking off their clothes for no reason, mostly women, duh. I mean, sure, it's set in California in the decade after free love and hippies, but people just didn't take off their clothes in the street for no reason, did they? I'm not sure, I mean there were nudist colonies, but they were separate from most people and not found in urban areas.
There's a sketch about a job interview where the interviewer and his boss and HIS boss all have various random seizure-like tics, and sure, let's make fun of disabled people while we're at it. That might play well on stage with an improv group, but in a movie watched by modern audiences, it's a non-starter, and not funny at all. Later there's a diner sketch where a man trying to get a hamburger is unable to do so, because the waiters are over-complicating the order, the tiny ratty diner suddenly becomes the place for a casino-like floor show and a giveaway raffle and the diner manager is suddenly like an emcee talking to a non-existent audience, and I don't think the customer ever gets his burger.
In another sketch, a mailman delivers a dead man's body to his brother, with no coffin, and that's not really a thing that could happen, the concept comes from nothing and goes nowhere. Another couple is having an intimate evening but the woman doesn't want to have sex unless the Tom Snyder show is on, I guess she just needs the sounds of an interview to either get her in the mood or distract her, I'm not sure which. The couple ends up hiding under the bed for no reason, except to explain why the woman was found emerging from a bed after the earthquake which happened before. No, wait, after? And a woman dressed as a cowboy appears in a window in a men's room so she can compliment them on their genitals while they're using the urinal - again, it's just a weird idea that comes out of nowhere and then goes nowhere.
There's really just one sketch I liked, but I've heard it before, it's from the group called the Credibility Gap and it has Harry Shearer playing a rock concert promoter, buying ad space in a newspaper from a salesman played by David L. Lander, and their conversation is a take on the old Abbott & Costello routine "Who's on First" about oddly-named baseball players. Here there's much confusion over the names of the three headliners in the concert, one of which is The Who, and well, you can imagine the confusion over the band's name, and it gets worse because the band Yes is also on the bill. I recommend tracking down the routine, it's really great, and I knew it as a kid but it became so much funnier when I grew up and liked more rock music.
Speaking of rock bands, the only one in the movie is The Tubes, and lead singer Fee Waybill also plays a weird seismologist with a German accent who explains that earthquakes are caused by a sort of jam that is found within the earth, as if the planet were a giant Uncrustable or something. Like most everything else here, that conversation serves no purpose overall and is also not funny.
I don't even understand the image on the movie's poster, it has a guy whose head seems to be in the shape of California all bandaged up, holding a crutch, and sitting on a bit of land surrounded by water while various California landmarks are drowning or in a flood, and that's about as confusing as the rest of the movie. How can the state of California be smaller than the buildings found in some of its cities? If those buildings are no longer in the state of California, then where are they? And isn't the film about an earthquake, not a flood? Did the whole state fall into the ocean? And if it did, how is it sitting on an island afterwards, all bandaged up? That whole image needed to be rejected and the artist should have been made to start over. But you kind of get the feeling that the whole movie was made on the cheap and there were no second takes or even rewrites.
I guess it's the kind of film that got approved two years after "Saturday Night Live" hit the scene, and suddenly comedians were in demand, and every improv theater group got the feeling they could be famous, all they needed was the right vehicle to appear in to show everyone how funny they were. Well, two of the comedians here did become mega-stars of comedy, but it took being in "Spinal Tap" and then joining the cast of "SNL" to get there.
Directed by Rowby Goren & Chuck Staley
Also starring Michael Mislove, Fred Willard (last seen in "Devo"), Paul Zegler (last seen in "Popeye"), Steve Bluestein, David L. Lander (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Jim Staahl (last seen in "Spies Like Us"), Tino Insana (last heard in "Belushi"), Phil Proctor (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Peter Bergman, Bob McClurg (last seen in "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie"), Leslie Ackerman, Rowby Goren, Neal Israel (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer"), Rickey Murray (last seen in "The Mating Game"), C.D. Taylor, Edie McClurg (last seen in "Cheech & Chong's Last Movie"), Mary McCusker (last seen in "The Incredible Shrinking Woman"), Christopher Pray (last seen in "The Candidate"), Ron Prince, Lynne Marie Stewart (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Stephen Stucker, Kurt Taylor (last seen in "Semi-Tough"), Fee Waybill (last seen in "Brats"), Dody Dorn, Jim Fisher (also last heard in "Belushi"), Joe Roth (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Paul Willson (last seen in "Alex & Emma") and The Tubes.
RATING: 3 out of 10 raffle tickets
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