Schlock, le tueur à la banane...!

I suppose I was a little hard on this film. It entertains, indeed, but it's filled with holes and inconsistencies. I suppose if you ignore the aforementioned "holes and inconsistencies" you could get a kick out of this.

Childish, ridiculous, at times funny... Goofy, filled with rotten acting (and rotten bananas), bad camera-work, bad colours...

It's actually kind of nice to see a pretty well established director's first film and realize it's a total B flick.

I like the king kong reference. And the 2001. And the Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau would be proud... either that or roll over in his grave)

John Landis's first movie may be as good as anything he made. "Schlock" falls in neatly with other 'progressive' US comedy movies of the early 70s, which kicked around genre conventions and added a new frankness in language and toilet humour to US film comedy vocabulary. (Others like this were sketch comedy flicks like Landis's "Kentucky Fried Movie"; plus the Mel Brooks and Woody Allen movies of around the same time).

What sets this one apart is its sustained comic atmosphere, which is goofy, laconic and giddy. Set-pieces - like the 2001 parody, the bar scene where the monster 'Schlock' observes a Jose Feliciano-like blind musician playing a piano boogie and ends up joining in, and a very funny scene where the allegedly fearful Schlock goes into a cinema to see a horror movie, and is terrified - all come off perfectly.

Some beautiful bits of background business too - the hippie in the background of the 2001 scene, just ignoring the portentous foreground action while eating his frozen custard is worth a look. This is just a really, really funny film.

This is a truly bad film in almost every conceivable way: Poorly scripted, amateurishly acted, badly directed, and incompetently edited, but is saved by director Landis himself: His largely improvised performance in Rick Baker's excellent "monkey suit" for most of the second half of the film is laugh-out-loud funny in places, truly saving an otherwise forgettable film.

Sadly, despite Mr. Landis's encyclopedic knowledge of early cinema, many opportunities to parody or pay homage to other monster movies are missed. For example, the sequence where Schlock is feeding the ducks at the pond is just asking for a reference to the "flower" scene from James Whale's "Frankenstein". (Or is this reference enough? Hmm.) Other similar opportunities are missed throughout.

The reviews for this movie here are mainly positive. And it's no surprise. This is a very, Very strong first movie. In fact, it looks almost exactly like the more famous Landis movies down to the lighting and editing. It does have some silly stuff in it, and there are scenes to make the picture longer. But the movie never feels constricted by its low budget, it successfully pokes fun at it. Landis is great as the titular ape and Rick Baker's done a great job on the mask - it even allowed Landis to emote. Eric Roberts' wife plays a blind girl who befriends Schlock thinking he's a dog, but soon she regains her sight and then!... Schlock's really funny, it looks like it's someone's first movie only for the first 15 minutes, and then it becomes big and quite enjoyable.

This is the work of a big time film fan who has...not a lot of cinematic talent. He's the goofy guy people said was funny, pushing his low-brow sense of humor as hard as possible across a quick 77-minute long thing that resembles a movie. It's interesting to see this kind of desperate attempt for a laugh after finishing the work of Preston Sturges which always felt so effortless (well, until the end), but that kind of screwball mentality is what gives John Landis the little appeal the film has. It's not really a story. He can't build anything across a scene or the film at all. All that's really there is the weird guffaws at odd behavior and base comedy that come along with regularity. It's enough to get me through the movie, at least.

The banana killer is attacking a small California town, killing hundreds at a time, and Detective Sergeant Wino (Saul Kahan) would rather stay safe in his house than investigate, but he must because it's his job. Interviewed by television anchorman Joe Putzman (Eric Allison), who interrupts his reports to describe the movie of the week (always the fake See You Next Wednesday, a 2001 reference) or update the audience on the "guess how many bodies are in the bags" contest the station is running, Wino is at a complete loss and does not know what to do. Four teenagers accidentally come across the lair of Schlock (Landis in Rick Baker makeup), a pre-history man-like creature that has been frozen for millions of years and is now terrorizing the countryside, as explained by Professor Shlibovitz (Emile Hamaty).

It's easy to see Landis' love of 50s scifi movies pop through all of this. Much like Joe Dante and Piranha, it's the kind of influence that reeks of children sitting around the TV in the middle of the night watching scientists explain nonsense that thrilled the generation of genre filmmakers who came up in the 70s. There's no real satire of it, though. It's more like base parody, kind of like Mel Brooks at his least imaginative (usually without Gene Wilder) with people acting the roles in lightly comedic manner. It's mostly deadpan delivery of silly dialogue (I wonder if there's a Monty Python influence here). But the dialogue is only intermittently amusing, mostly the proto-version of "lolwut...so random" type of joking.

For instance, there's a scene where a blind girl, Mindy (Eliza Garrett) has her bandages taken off from her eyes. First, the bandages end up much more than expecting, coming to a large pile on the floor. That's a kind of funny image. It doesn't come from anything or feed into anything else, though. There's no build up. The other thing in this scene is the doctor walking into a closet with a sliding door, very obviously a closet mind you, to leave the scene. It's meant as a joke, gets a guffaw, and quickly moves on. That is both the film's appeal and limitations in terms of its comedy. It's constantly trying for laughs (it's easy to see why the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams would hire him to make The Kentucky Fried Movie), but the laughs are all isolated, thin, and never really all that funny.

So, what it amounts to is a long series of individual attempts at comedy that never connect, relying almost entirely on the strength of the comedy within those individual moments to provide the entertainment. It's essentially a skit show centered around Schlock wandering around and being a fish out of water. There's an extended sequence in a movie theater (apparently added after the main production to add length for the distributor) where Schlock struggles with an ice cream machine, terrorizes the concession girl into giving him candy, gets scared at dinosaurs on screen, is fearful of a clip from The Blob (50s scifi, mind you), takes a kid to the bathroom, and has the poster outside the theater changed repeatedly (The Blob, See You Next Wednesday, King Kong vs. Godzilla). You see, it's just a random series of slightly amusing things that don't build to anything.

The irony is that Landis built this film on a well-worn structure, the 50s scifi monster movie, but he doesn't understand how they work narratively at all. He can poke fun at moments here and there, but they don't actually cut the material at all. In addition, the jokes don't piggyback off of the narrative to build to something bigger. All we get is Schlock climbing the gym roof with Mindy, throwing her off harmlessly in fear of some thrown flares, and then a King Kong reference. Some of this is funny (honestly, the last line of the film is probably the height of it because it's actually satirical in nature), but it's just all so disconnected from everything else except in the most basic, mechanical ways of plot.

I'm reminded, in contrast, of how Lubitsch built jokes on top of each other until the Super Joke that made audiences burst into laughter.

Oh well, I'm not that down on the film. It's not good. It's kind of bad. In taking nothing seriously, not even the comedy, nothing really lands or builds, but there are a surprising amount of chuckles along the way. That made the experience far better than it had any right to be.