Up Yours

As I type this, "Up Yours" is ranking a 4.9. How? I viewed this the same night I viewed "The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio" and, while that movie also stinks, it's a helluva lot better than this thing, yet gets a much lower rating. So, rather than getting technical about what's wrong with this movie (as that would be practically everything), let me describe it this way:

You're at a garage sale and find a copy of one of those "Truly Tasteless Jokes" books you used to find at Spencer's Gifts back in the day. Remembering how you once found those books hilarious (about 30 years ago when you were about 12), you dig deep and pay $0.25 for the thing, hoping for a cheap laugh or maybe some nostalgia. Instead, after pouring through the book for a couple minutes, you realize it just isn't funny anymore, the jokes are worn out, boring and corny, and you had a lame sense of humor when you were 12 years old. That's this movie.

Basically, nothing works right in this film. It isn't raunchy enough to be a sex comedy and the jokes are like the sort of stuff a stand-up comedian might have come up with in the 1950's. A few seconds into some of the skits and I found myself nailing the punchlines-it's that lame and predictable. The acting is bad, the dialogue is bad, and the concept is bad. This movie isn't so bad it's good-it's just really dated, lame stuff, from a period that was producing much better material, so there's no excuse for it. The only thing I liked about it were the cheap sets, which appear to be little more than people's apartments, giving a realistic peek at what 1978-79 looked like for the average shmoe. It was literally the only thing in this film I found interesting. Don't waste your time (let alone money) on this turkey.

This is a must see, because I don't think anyones ever glazed their eyes on the masterpiece of movie making. Any movie starring the George " Buck" Flowers, yes the Buckster in all his glory. Who could forget his outstanding performance in Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II as the Bum.Or the stylish performance in They Live as The Drifter or in Night Stalker as Tramp. The way he used subtle nuance to go from Drunk in Escape from N.Y. to Wino in Dead Men Don't Die...truly impressive. And perhaps his crowning glory in Munchies as the unforgettable, but mostly forgotten and hardly ever remember or brought up in any conversation by anyone living or dead, the character simply known as Ragpicker. This alone makes Up Yours truly a gem of a motion picture.