Movie Madness

"National Lampoon Goes to the Movies" is the worst movie ever made, surpassing even the witless "Plan 9 from Outer Space." At least that movie was just inept; the Lampoon film, on the other hand, is both inept and mean. Once upon a time, movies used to respect their audiences' intelligence. This one, however, holds a fetid, rotting carcass up to our faces -- and then tries to rub our noses in it.

Another reviewer on this site wrote that the only good parts of the movie are the nude scenes; and I agree, Misses Ganzel and Dusenberry do flash a bit of flesh, and very nice flesh it is. But the directors seem not to realize that even T&A needs a good story to surround it. There's none of that here.

Perversely, the film makers save the worst for last. The third of the three segments is the ugliest of the trio. In this vignette, Robby Benson plays an eager-beaver young police officer reporting for duty on his first day on the job. He is paired with a weary, cynical oldtimer played by Richard Widmark. For just a moment, we are given hope that this film will end triumphantly. Surely, we think, the youngster's spunky attitude will rub off on the cynic and change him for the better.

Forlorn hope! Instead, the cynic wins the day -- and the youngster's spark is doused forever. "National Lampoon Goes to the Movies" and heads right for the toilet, asking us to follow it down the drain. Nominally, this is a comedy. But where's the humor?

Wow. I read about this movie and it sounded so awful that I had to see it, and my gosh, I can smell it in St Louis. Where do I start? National Lampoons was trying to follow up 5 years later on the success of Animal House, but they completely missed the mark. I'll go chronologically with these short flicks.

Short Film #1

Poor Peter Riegert (Boon from Animal House). Apparently, he wasn't working back then, so the boys at National Lampoons probably called and said "hey, we're making a c**ppy movie, wanna be in it?" Peter was like "well, I'm not doing much these days, why not?" He was a great side character in Animal House, but he couldn't carry this sorry short flop for 5 minutes.

POSSIBLE SPOILER The premise is funny enough, with Jason Cooper (Riegert) telling his wife to leave him, she needs to find herself. It's too weird that they're actually in a happy marriage. So he chases her off, there she goes, and Cooper is in charge of the kids. This, off course, leads to him burning the house down, losing several of the kids, and sleeping with an assortment of New York bimbos (including an ever so young Diane Lane). Then the wife comes back, wants the kids, and the film ends with a coin flip that'll decide the fate of the children. The idea was actually somewhat clever, but the director stunk. The characters all seem like they're falling asleep, they HAD to be doped up. Sorry Boon, your legacy was tarnished with this flop.

Short Film #2

MORE SPOILERS

Enter Dominique Corsaire. Pretty girl, recently finished college, not sure what to do with her life. So she becomes a slut, starts sleeping around with some mega rich guys, takes their money when they die, and she doesn't stop until she beds the most powerful man in the world, Fred Willard (Ooops, I mean the president of the United States). Once again, it could have been funny, and though I was happy that Corsaire (Ann Dusenberry in real life) wasn't afraid to bare all, her acting was horrible. What a waste of time.

Short Film #3

I can't believe I made it this far. Here's the rookie cop Brent Falcone (Robby Benson) with veteran Stan Nagurski (Richard Widmark). Falcone is young, naive, thinks he can really help people, though he becomes cynical after being shot several thousand times. Nagurski, really, has just given up caring. He watches muggings, assaults, you name it, and never intervenes. He figures the world is lawless and he'll probably get sued if he does anything. Even Christopher Lloyd (at the end of Taxi's run) gets in on the action, getting the police called on him, committing a crime, but having his lawyer there to protect him. God bless America!!

Once again, could have been funny, the performances were intentionally campy, but goodness, no energy whatsoever. Henry Jaglom and Bob Giraldi should be ashamed of having their names on this schlock. I think the writing wasn't bad, the ideas were there, but the execution was pulled off as well as the rescue attempt in the Iranian hostage crisis. If I had been a part of this film, I would want my name removed, it's horrible. Then again, that's why I watched it.

The only good thing about this garbage is that Dr John did the film score (repeating "Going to the Movies" over and over again) and the film isn't much longer than an hour and a half. Show this one in film classes with the heading "what you should NEVER do in film-making." This script should have been left on the shelf because yep, it's that bad.

This barely watchable film was a bit of an ordeal to sit through. None of the segments are good, but at least the first one was mildly amusing, and the middle one was somewhat imaginative. The final one was just plain brutal, and after sitting through two weak comedic shorts, the third one was truly painful to watch. Even by the low standards of a National Lampoon movie, this one seemed especially boring and joyless.

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.

National Lampoon was once a funny magazine. Whether you liked the stoner hippie days of the late sixties or the smug and sassy coke-head days of the seventies (when the comedy was fortified with plenty of naked babes) depends very much on your date of birth, but everyone agrees that by the early eighties, middle age had killed off whichever remaining sparks of anarchic humour that the drugs hadn't, and offerings like this film and the increasingly terrible spin-off records shot further holes in the hull. Outside of a nicely illustrated title sequence, there's absolutely nothing to recommend this singularly depressing stinkbug. If you make it through the baffling opening segment, 'Growing Myself', hoping things will get better, tough luck - they don't. Whoever thought the idea of a woman being brutally raped with a stick of butter was comedy gold deserved to have his head handed back to him on a platter of dog mess. If there's ever a global shortage of guitar picks, the negatives of this rambling, incoherent ragbag of crummy ideas and dire performances may well serve some purpose.