Schlock

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.

Low budget comedy that helped launch the careers of director John Landis and makeup artist Rick Baker. It parodies everything from King Kong to Dragnet to 2001: A Space Odyssey and more. Funny stuff but it does lose steam the longer it goes on. Still worth a watch especially for Landis fans. I would also recommend the many would-be filmmakers whose crappy iPhone-shot home movies dominate the internet today take a look at how a proper low budget (really no budget) indie film can be done.

This is a pretty simple review to write, if you like Monty python stuff, you'll like this movie. It's very surreal, but in the best way possible. I thought it was pretty funny, while not all of the jokes stuck, but you could easily say the same thing about Monty python. Give this gorilla film a chance if you like bizarre comedies!

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.

This is an early film from John Landis made when he was just 21 years old and funded by family and friends but not released until 1973. He shows a deft touch for writing and directing goofball comedy and this was far more entertaining than I had anticipated.

Landis also wears the monkey suit as Schlock, courtesy of make-up artist Rick Baker, who is the missing link between ape and man. Both Landis and Baker would go on to create the groundbreaking transformation make-up effects for An American Werewolf in London (1981) with Baker receiving an Academy award. Here though the Schlock suit is not quite as sophisticated but Landis delivers some good physical slapstick comedy dressed as the prehistoric creature in a nod to The Three Stooges. This also marks the beginning of the long running professional relationship Landis had with producer and editor George Folsey Jr.

There's not much plot involved about locals discovering an ape like creature in a well which then goes on the rampage but a noteworthy highlight is a lampoon of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and quotes from other movies such as Love Story (1970) and the original King Kong (1933). Essentially this is a 1950's B movie parody with a string of gags and quickfire lunacy that sweeps you along with it's silly but good natured humour in much the same vein as the early Woody Allen films.

Schlock also features the phrase 'See You Next Wednesday', a quote lifted from the aforementioned 2001 and is a running gag featured in every John Landis movie. Some of the on screen lunacy would be later refined by Landis for his more accomplished comedies like The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

Don't let this minor cult classic be the missing link in your John Landis collection.