Waitress!

My review was written in September 1982 after a Times Square screening.

"Waitress" is a low-budget comedy picture from the team responsible for the successful "Squeeze Play". Only intermittently funny, the new film is serviceable in general situations.

Episodic in the extreme, pic limns the comic experiences of three waitresses at a New York City restaurant. Andrea (Carol Drake) is a feisty would-be Broadway actress working the restaurant gig until her big break. Jennifer (Carol Bevar) is a beautiful blonde fronting as a server while working on "how to meet men" article for a teen magazine, and Lindsey (Renata Majer) is a young girl who was kicked out of Troma Prep School and forced by her dad to work in his restaurant.

Getting off to a hectic start, "Waitress" becomes wearisome with its reliance on food gags, pratfalls , old puns and vulgar schtick. Pic bogs down in the middle for plot material and a romantic interlude involving cafe manager Jerry (Jim Harris), who is opposed to Andrea's acting career obsession, but reverts to sheer anarchy when Lindsey is put in charge of the eatery and succeeds in wrecking it. A very old-fashioned ending has all the leads' dreams come true.

Within a format which is closer to the sketch humor of drive-in films of yore, such as "If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind" than sustained "Porky's" comedy, "Waitress" suffers from non-stop overacting. Although the leads are personable and in some cases attractive this is probably one credit they would like to forget. With more than 200 actors credited in the cast, most in bits, best performance is by Anthony Sarrero, genuinely amusing in a pleasantly overdone attempted cowboy style seduction of Jennifer.

Other actors simply try too hard here, with use of Three Stooges-style sound effects tending to overshadow any shadings. Tech credits are variable but adequate.

Troma Entertainment is not known for quality films, but this one is really bad. This movie has it all: bad acting, bad directing, bad writing, bad set design, bad costumes and even a bad soundtrack. The best part of the movie is watching for the sight gags behind the main scene, like the heart attack victim being revived by jumper cables. Although the DVD seems to be marketed as soft porn (the actresses featured in lingerie on the cover) that isn't at all what this film is about. The intro says its about women's lib--maybe barely. There are lots of really bad jokes, including vaudeville style jokes shoe-horned into the script despite the fact that they do nothing to advance the plot (lots of farces do this, but this wasn't supposed to be farce--at least I don't think it was!).

But the most remarkable thing about this movie is that it seems to have killed the careers of almost every actor who appeared in it! There are 214 credited parts, and of those 157 actors never appeared in another film. None of the three female leads ever did another movie or TV show.

I think it is quite possible that this movie ranks as the all-time leader in "last movie they ever did" category.

There are a couple of actors who actually survived the film. In the intro to the DVD they mention Chris Noth (Big on "Sex in the City"; "Law and Order") and Larry "Bud" Melman. Noth has no lines and is barely recognizable in the 10 seconds of screen time; Melman has two lines. Anthony John Denison has a major part (Moe), and amazingly went on to have a very successful career. He is definitely the exception; everyone else in the movie must have changed careers.

"Waitress" is a bad movie when judged by the Hollywood standard. The technical aspects fall short of generally accepted norms, the editing sometimes makes you wonder if they resorted to using what they had instead of the best takes, the acting wavers between inspired and insipid, and the writing cannot stay on track long enough to get any single aspect of the story to the front, to allow a single thread to connect the feature.

All of the above combine to make a lurching, bumbling, lost in the dark movie that just also happens to be fun to watch. It could have been better-- but a better film would not have been as good.

Waitress is fun. Not "PC" in any form, not a glossy product, just fun in the context of the time it was made. A bad movie that is fun to watch-- another example of the contradiction of the American Dream.

If you've seen Troma's The Toxic Avenger, then you can get ready for Waitress. While it's not the horror movie Toxic was, its humor is matched 100 percent by Toxic.

Corny like a Sunday, Waitress is still one of my favorite films. It's VERY funny, most people are scared to say that this film is good, because they're afraid people will think they are dumb, well I have an above average IQ, a building full of friends and a sweet life, and I say Waitress is good.

On a scale of 1 to 10, Waitress gets a 9!

Billed as some sort of comedy, it completely misses on all levels. It's a confusing mess that never plants its feet and for that matter, ever figures out where/why they should be planted. The acting is horrible, the gags look like they were all rejects from the worst vaudeville shows. It mainly revolves around a NYC restaurant that has an overflowing amount of patrons, while being served food that is too gross to look at , yet alone eat. I don't recognize any "actors" in this film but they constantly offer childish/pun-like food-jokes even Benny Hill would not touch with a 10-foot fish-stick. The restaurant has a maniacal/drunk Russian chef and a wait-staff of about 20-women, but apparently there was no budget for the wardrobe department to provide them bras. If braless pokies are for you, at the cost of being totally annoyed and grossed-out, then this is the film for you.