Loose Shoes

This is a sketch comedy movie done in the style of movie trailers. It's another in the long line of films that filled theaters in the mid to late 1970's like Kentucky Fried Movie, Groove Tube, American Raspberry, Tunnelvision promising to do what Saturday Night Live was doing but with dirty words and naked women. This is probably the weakest of the bunch.

Spoofing everything from musicals (Darktown after Dark) to prison films (3 Chairs for Lefty) to public service announcements (Buddy Hackett on bed wetting) to biker films (Skateboarders from Hell) to Charlie Chaplin films (The Kid and the Yid) and a few things in between this is a very hit or miss film. Most of the gags had been done before and better in other films and on TV by the time this was made so it was like watching reruns of reruns.3 Chairs for Lefty, which stars Bill Murray is rife with the sort of prison jokes that have been around since the 1930's,including giving Lefty a roast to cook when he finally goes to the chair.

The real problem is that almost all of the sketches go on way past the point of being funny. There seems to be some need to spoof a complete film, so in Skateboarders from hell we get a climatic funeral scene that isn't very funny and destroys the laughs that the film had generated with the "biker" fight. There is no reason that this film needed to be almost two hours long since tighter cutting could have made this a classic.

Worth seeing if you run across it on cable and you're in the mood for a very uneven comedy.It would be also okay to get in the bargain bin at the 99 cent store (which is how I got my copy) since its not worth more than a dollar.

Other comments will give you the skits within, but know this revue movie comes from the late 70s when THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT spawned spoof imitators like THAT'S ADEQUATE! ....KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE and finally LOOSE SHOES, here to mop up the threads of the compilation genre. Most skits run too long... and I guess, loose, thus allowing the title to cover the unedited feel to most of the sorta funny and occasionally tedious skits. but.... it is worth getting to the end to discover possibly the funniest movie skit of all time: "Darktown After Dark", a parody of Negro nightclub musicals as seen available on other classic DVD titles like Killer Diller or Boardinghouse Blues. You can almost skip through the previous 75 minutes then spend another 75 minutes screaming with laughter as you play this one musical skit over and over until you collapse. Then take great delight in showing this bit to everyone you know over the age of 18. Somehow Mel Brooks missed inventing this sequence so it is here instead.

Continuing to review movies starring "SNL"ers early in their film careers, we're now still in 1977 with the completion of something originally called Coming Attractions but would eventually be released a few years later as Loose Shoes. Bill Murray, the first to join the show after the departure of a cast member-in this case Chevy Chase, appears in the "Three Chairs for Lefty" segment. He plays a condemned prisoner awaiting execution while studying to better himself. He's funny here but just about every skit-which spoofs various movie preview trailers-has something that I thought was hilarious. Oh, and Harry Shearer is another one who would eventually join "SNL". He's one of the announcers here. Oh, and since I just watched Tunnel Vision, I also have to note the appearances of Betty Thomas and Howard Hesseman from that flick doing their own funny characters (also Lynne Marie Stewart in more of a straight role). Since I grew up in the '70s, I noticed the spoofs on Billy Jack, The Bad News Bears, and Star Wars and laughed myself heartily on those. Then there's the climatic musical number that gives this movie its title which was taken from a now-politically incorrect quote by an administrator of the Ford presidency that was all-out entertaining to me. So on that note, I highly recommend Loose Shoes.

Most collections of comic sketches are extremely uneven. "Loose Shoes" is an exception. It is CONSISTENTLY unfunny, and all the episodes are awful. Their humor is infantile, aimed strictly at kids. Murray, who stars in just one episode, is awful,too. At 74 minutes, this excruciating "comedy" doesn't even qualify as a movie. It's just a fraud. Be warned.

As with all of these kind of satire skit movies (i.e. Kentucky Friend Movie, Tunnelvision, etc) some skits range from not so funny to hilarious. The funniest (in my opinion) skit is the take-off on the Ma & Pa Kettle Movies. Here, instead of a talking horse we have a talking pig and some of the dialogue being uttered by the pig is priceless. Here's an example. Pa Kettle says to the pig "Pigs can't talk" whereby the pig replies "Your old lady is a pig and all she ever does is talk". Then the pig really lets loose on a hotel detective calling him all kinds of deragatory names. But the end is a hoot where they do a satire of the Warner's Bros. cartoon ending with a Porky Pig spoof that is so x-rated I can't repeat it here. J.P. Morgan is quite funny as the Nurse at a hospital for chronic bed-wetters. Not a great movie but some very clever spoofs in between the not so funny ones.