Roba che scotta

This is a funny movie. It was way too long in coming to DVD. I bought it for my sons and brother for Christmas. We worn out the VHS copy.

The ensemble cast is excellent. Each character has its unique personality. Very well acted, and it looks like they had a lot of fun making this. Sadly most every one of the main characters are gone now.

It does have the repertoire company of Burt Reynolds, but I think it is a better film with this cast then if Burt had taken the lead.

I wish Dom DeLuise had made more films. He became more interested in cooking later in life. He was a very funny man. I used to love him on Johnny Carson.

Please take the time to seek out this movie. You'll enjoy it!

Miami police detectives Ernie Fortunato (Dom DeLuise) and Doug von Horne (Jerry Reed) are partners working stolen goods in a squad run by Captain John Geiberger (Ossie Davis). Sergeant Louise Webster (Suzanne Pleshette) has been brought in to fix their lack of convictions. Doug has the idea to take over a rundown pawn shop to film all the thieves fencing their stolen goods.

This is a mildly humorous comedy directed by Dom DeLuise. It mostly relies on the loveable characters in the squad doing funny things. Quite frankly, it relies on the performers themselves more than anything else or the writing.

In Miami in Florida, cops Dom Deluise, Suzanne Pleshette, Jerry Reed, and Luis Avalos run a fencing operation as a sting.

It's highly episodic and pretty funny, too, as you might expect with Donald Westlake doing the scripting with Michael Kane. The large and varied cast includes Ossie David, Marc Lawrence, Pat McCormick, and Sidney Lassick. The movie has a loose, cobbled-together feel that indicates its incidents are drawn from police files somewhere, and the performers manage to always sound like they're making it up as it goes along -- except for Lawrence, which lends a comedy air of its own.

This film plays as if it was originally written with Burt Reynolds as the star, but he couldn't/wouldn't do it.

It features pretty much the Usual Reynolds-Film Suspects -- Jerry Reed, Alfie Wise, Pat McCormick and others, and has exactly that air of slightly sardonic, semi-detached humour that Burt's raised eyebrow and patented cackle/chuckle convey so well (to the extent that his laugh was used as part of an animated pre-credits studio logo sequence for "Smokey & the Bandit").

That said, the cast make an excellent ensemble, play well off each other, and deliver the goods quite satisfactorily.

Quite an agreeable way to fill in an otherwise wasted hour and a half or so; if you're not expecting Great Drama, i don't think this film will fail to entertain.

(Watch for the then-Mayors of Miami and Miami Beach in Very Funny cameos. I won't tell you where -- if you don't spot them, check the end credits.)

Pleshette, deluise, and a couple other coppers come up with a unique way to catch crooks. Instead of chasing after them, they open a down low pawn shop, and record the thugs fencing stolen goods! Which works great, until the local mafia don tries to muscle in. It's quite good! Pretty fast paced. Nothing too complicated. It's all light and fun. Directed by deluise himself. One of only two he directed.and if you check the cast list, deluise managed to get a whole lot of his family on the payroll. This was just after pleshette had finished with bob newhart.

Deluise had already done blazing saddles and a bunch of his goofy 1970s film.