Loose Shoes

While most of the film could be described as mildly amusing at best, there is a piece of filmic comedy history contained within it for the "Darktown after dark" movie trailer, that makes this film a must see for anyone who appreciates truly great comedy! I guarantee* that when you hear the mock blues song that notes the bad start to the singers day, then not only will the title of this film become clear, but you will be in a state of extreme merriment for quite sometime.

*(Please note that this guarantee is not valid anywhere within the planet called Earth.)

An occasionally amusing, often confusing, gleefully profane 70's movie that hasn't really aged well. A precursor to Saturday NIGHT LIVE, it's a hodgepodge of spoofs and takeoffs of popular movies of the time. Some of the material is quite good ('The Shaggy Studio Executive,' where Walt Disney comes back as a guy in a dog suit), some of it's dated badly (A 'Snacktime' concession stand advert featuring a stoned guy with the munchies), a lot of it you have to think for a minute or two to figure out what's supposed to be funny (Who knew the eulogist at the biker funeral was supposed to be a takeoff of Georgie Jessel?). Best if you remember the time.

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.

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.