Here Come the Tigers

The saddest part of this is the fact that these are 87 minutes I'll never get back. I knew this was terrible from the get-go, with the guy dressed as a lunatic Indian chief on top of the roof. (See if they could get away with that in 2008). My 10-year-old boy is really into baseball right now, so we decided to rent it on a rainy day. Even though he seemed to enjoy parts of it, I had to cringe when I heard all the needless foul language. Bad, bad movie. This was an awful ripoff of Bad News Bears. Completely shameless and completely predictable. I don't mind a predictable movie if it's done well, but this one absolutely was not.

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen, but seeing it did give me a funny story to tell people. Usually, before seeing a movie, I know quite a bit about it from reviews, etc. I decided one day to go out & see a movie that I knew nothing at all about, just as a kind of change of pace. And the movie I selected was "Here Come the Tigers". Was it a nature documentary? An environmental horror story? A jungle adventure? Who knew?? Well, as it turned out, it was nothing more than a cheap, vulgar rip-off of "The Bad News Bears" made by people who apparently saw nothing attractive in that film but the obscenities. So "Here Come the Tigers" is filled with "funny" scenes of children cursing and engaging in "hilarious" infantile hijinks. This movie was so awful that I was on the verge of leaving the theatre & the few other people who were enduring it with me were openly making fun of it. I was *really* *really* regretting the money I had just laid out for this junk (money being short supply for me back then). Just then, magic happened. One of the reels somehow got put on the projector wrong so that the film suddenly began running backwards!! Since most of the last part of the film concerned the dramatic "big game", scenes of backward baseball players making weird squeaky noises was hysterical. It took the theatre people about 15 or 20 minutes to notice what was going on and, since they weren't able to rectify it, everyone in the theatre was given their money back!!! So I may be one of the few people to have seen this movie to get any enjoyment out of it.

Two years before cashing in on the great success of John Carpenters' "Halloween" with his own memorable slasher film, "Friday the 13th", filmmaker Sean S. Cunningham did a similar thing within the family-oriented sports movie genre. Capitalizing on the success of "The Bad News Bears", "Here Come the Tigers" tells of a hapless Little League team whom the coach (Richard Lincoln) tries to turn into contenders. Predictably, the kids are a colorful bunch who constantly spout colorful dialogue and include such characters as a nose-picker and another whose flatulence is clearly deadly.

Considering the formulaic nature of "Here Come the Tigers", and the fact that it has no good ideas to call its own, this viewer wouldn't dismiss it as readily as most movie watchers. At least the kids are reasonably appealing, and the adults reasonably solid. (James Zvanut plays Lincolns' bumbling, goofy partner turned assistant coach, and Fred Lincoln of "The Last House on the Left" infamy has a quick cameo as a drunken bum with key knowledge to divulge to the coach.)

Written by "Arch McCoy" (actually "Friday the 13th" scribe Victor Miller), this is obviously a shameless cash-in and not exactly a classic, but this viewer found it likeable enough. Overall, it's fairly harmless (with the exception of some of the language), and may entertain the less demanding members of your own family.

Cunninghams' son Noel plays one of the Tigers; longtime Cunningham friend Wes Craven was the stunt gaffer!

Followed by another Miller / Cunningham kids' sports comedy, the soccer film "Manny's Orphans".

Six out of 10.

Have not watched kids films for some years, so I missed "Here Come the Tigers" when it first came out. (Never even saw "Bad News Bears" even though in the '70s I worked for the guys who arranged financing for that movie, "Warriors," "Man Who Would Be King," and "Rocky Horror Picture Show," among others.) Now I like to check out old or small movies and find people who have gone on to great careers despite being in a less than great movie early on. Just minutes into this movie I could take no more and jumped to the end credits to see if there was a young actor in this movie who had gone on to bigger and better things--at least watching for his/her appearance would create some interest as the plot and acting weren't doing the job. Lo and behold, I spied Wes Craven's name in the credits as an electrical gaffer. He'd already made two or three of his early shockers but had not yet created Freddie Krueger or made the "Scream" movies. Maybe he owed a favor and helped out on this pic. More surprising was Fred J. Lincoln in the cast credits as "Aesop," a wacky character in the movie. F.J. Lincoln, from the '70s to just a few years ago, appeared in and produced adult films. He was associated with the adult spoof "The Ozporns," and just that title is funnier than all of "Tigers" attempts at humor combined. Let the fact that an adult actor was placed in a kids movie be an indication as to how the people making this movie must have been asleep at the wheel.

In 1978 I was in a drum corps that played the marching band in the movie. The movie was made in October they wanted you to think it was summer but look at the actors and steam is coming out of their mouths . The drum corps members played as people sitting in the stands. A friend of mine took off his shirt to make seem like summer I was standing next to him he got a close up a screen we thought that cool back than.When the corps play the national anthem on screen we were really playing the theme from rocky.Also look at the trees no leaves. The movie was made in Westport Connectitcut. That day it was cold around 40 degrees.Another friend got a close doing a big cymbal crash at the end song that was the national anthem but not really.