Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers

Ridiculously awful, infamous "Cheech and Chong" outing has the so-called "Corsican Brothers" having more fun doing stupid things. I saw this in Britain at about two in the morning, and so it's hard to really remember anything about it (did it even have a plot?), but I did find it very goofy and silly and hard to put a rating on.

Technical value: 0/5 2:00 a.m. fun value: 3/5

In modern France, Los Guys (Cheech and Chong) is a rock band playing horribly which forces the locals to pay them to stop. A fortune teller (Rae Dawn Chong) tells them a story about revolutionary France. Louis (Cheech Marin) and Lucian Corsican (Tommy Chong) are twins born to two aristocratic fathers. Their fathers duel and both end up killed. They are raised as peasants and find that they feel the other's pain. Louis is raised in Mexico. He returns and the brothers run afoul of The Evil Fuckaire. Fuckaire tries to execute the brothers but they end up escaping while the princesses fall for them.

This is mostly unfunny. There are a couple of funny jokes but they are not enough. Cheech and Chong work best as dumb and dumber bros. Cheech is able to keep some of his idiocy by making his character Mexican and dealing with societal differences. Chong is playing straight and mostly unfunny. It would be a lot funny with the Los Guys traveling back in time and thereby becoming fish out of water. This writing is simply not good enough.

Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers (1984) was a re-telling of the famous Alexandre Dumas classic novel. Cheech and Chong new that they had to market their comedy towards a different audience. There hard core fan base wasn't enough to make themselves profitable. Not only did they change their style of humor, they toned it down dramatically. Sadly, no one wanted to see a period piece starring Cheech and Chong. The movie is not horrible but it's not a laugh riot. Not wanting to end the partnership, the duo made another comedy album and a video that went along with it called GET OUT OF MY ROOM. The video was a tad under an hour and it featured the classic comedy song BORN IN EAST L.A. which would become Cheech's stepping stone towards mainstream acceptance.

Recommended for Cheech and Chong fans. Others will want to stay away from it.

I don't want to say that "Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers" has aged well. It hasn't. It's still pretty bad but it does have a few laughs. I did laugh more tonight than I have in the past. What can I say? I'm a fan. But overall, it has a pretty bad groan to laugh ratio. I wish that they would have used some co-writers and maybe a different director. C&C were a good writing/directing team but I think a different perspective would have helped their movie career last a little longer.

In March, 2002, after my parents and I had seen the disturbing - but very well done - "In the Bedroom", we felt like we needed something really light, so we rented "Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers"; I mean, what could be more easygoing than a movie starring filmdom's favorite goof-ball stoners? This one turned out to be probably their lowest movie ever. For starters, no drug humor. It features them as siblings in pre-revolutionary France (despite the fact that they talk like 20th century Americans) making a mess of the status quo. Much of the little humor that the movie provides derives from the fact that if one of them gets injured, the other feels it.

So, this is definitely not the Cheech & Chong movie that I recommend. Their other movies are far better. Also starring Edie McClurg and Rae Dawn Chong, and they probably prefer to omit this from their filmographies.