Night Patrol

This film does a superior job of balancing its exceptionally crude humor against the setting of occupational narrative of a police officer moonlighting as the Unknown Comic (bag over head), just as the protagonist does a superlative job balancing both careers. While criticized as appealing to a adolescent sense of humor, Night Patrol is entirely worthwhile for all ages, so long as they have a vulgar and adolescent level of maturity. The fact that the humor is very coarse and the laughs cheap does nothing at all to detract from the intensity of that laughter or the sense of fulfillment that it engenders. Night Patrol has been too long out of print and deserves a reissue.

Being a devoted and unconditional Linda Blair fanboy puts you through watching a whole lot of crazy and abominably awful stuff. I learned that via guilty pleasures like "Night Force", "Witchcraft", "Fatal Bond", and now I can add "Night Patrol" to the list as well. How, in Pazuzu's name, did you end up here Linda?

As far as slapstick/24 jokes-per-minute parodies go, there's a mighty good reason why "Night Patrol" isn't appearing in the same lists as films like "Airplane!", "The Naked Gun", "Top Secret", or "Hot Shots!". It simply is not as funny as those. That is not an issue, and you honestly can't expect from director Jackie Kong to be as skilled and gifted as the ZAZ-trio. "Night Patrol" can best be considered as a naughtier, schlockier, and politically incorrect R-rated version of "Police Academy". The script makes fun of every minority group, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or physical disability imaginable, and even traumatizing events like rape are shamelessly mocked.

The biggest risk with these rapid-fire comedies is that many jokes become misfires. "Night Patrol" scores quite bad in this department. For every ingenious and genuinely funny moment, there are approximately 10-12 downright embarrassing jokes. And yet, even the painfully unfunny gags (including every scene with Andrew Dice Clay) didn't bother me much, because this is basically nothing more than harmless and infantile comedy you cannot get offended by. The only thing I regret is that I didn't watch "Night Patrol" when I was 11 years old, as it features everything I wanted to see back then (like boobs, toilet humor, ...)

Night Patrol is one of those films where you finally catch your breath after laughing, and then lose it again a second later. I seen the movie for the first time on the same day I'm posting and I'll say it tops most comedies I've seen to this day.

If you like Conan O'Brien type humor then this movie will put a smile on your face, and a tear in your eye. Or something like that.

Make no mistake, Night Patrol is a mix of juvenile stupidity and toilet humor.

Maybe that's why I liked it so much.

Comedy of this nature doesn't ask much of your brain. Your age and/or sense of humor fills in the blanks. Even years down the road some pretty funny segments stand up. On a shoestring budget and featuring the likes of The Unknown Comic from the 80's (who? Yeah exactly), Pat Paulsen, Linda Blair and a few other familiar faces.

The whole thing isn't trying to be anything it's not. Sure you could say it was riding the coat tails of the 80's Police Academy screwball cop genre, but it does it way cruder and funnier than anything Guttenberg and Co. Ever did. Night Patrol has it's own camp style.

I was pretty young when I first seen this (no surprise). Now much older it still ranks as one of my favorite comedies. Sure some of it is dated. Some of the material didn't hold up well. There's also some gags I'm sure you couldn't get away with today, but few things are classic shtick. Bodily function jokes, boobs, a The Good, The Bad and The Ugly parody, more boobs, etc. I'm not going to attempt to sell this movie to you. If you like it - you already know why. The humor is raw, crude and funny.

Night Patrol (1984)

** (out of 4)

If you thought POLICE ACADEMY was immature then you haven't seen nothing until you watch this clone. The actual story here is pretty light as a dimwitted police officer (Murray Langston) has to work the night patrol while at the same time playing The Unknown Comic and trying to get his act off the ground. That's pretty much the only story here as we're basically just given raunchy and politically incorrect scenes that are sometimes funny but more times than not just downright stupid. I say downright stupid and that's not necessarily a bad thing because it really does seem like the writers of this thing just sat around trying to think of the worst jokes they could tell and put them in the movie. So many of these jokes are just so bad and so lame yet you still laugh simply because of how bad they are. Why is public hair curly? Wait until you hear the punchline. The entire film has humor that you're only going to find in an 80's movie and this includes a lot of jokes towards gay people and there's even a rape victim sequence, which is just downright weird to say the least and especially once you see who the actual victim is. So, is NIGHT PATROL any good? I really wouldn't call it good but I think it's campy enough to where you should be able to enjoy it. Langston is decent in the lead role and we've got Linda Blair in support as well as Pat Paulsen and Billy Barty. Fans of 80's humor will certainly want to watch this at least once but you've low-level of humor will determine how much you actually enjoy it.