Loose Shoes

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.

Continuing to review movies starring "SNL"ers early in their film careers, we're now still in 1977 with the completion of something originally called Coming Attractions but would eventually be released a few years later as Loose Shoes. Bill Murray, the first to join the show after the departure of a cast member-in this case Chevy Chase, appears in the "Three Chairs for Lefty" segment. He plays a condemned prisoner awaiting execution while studying to better himself. He's funny here but just about every skit-which spoofs various movie preview trailers-has something that I thought was hilarious. Oh, and Harry Shearer is another one who would eventually join "SNL". He's one of the announcers here. Oh, and since I just watched Tunnel Vision, I also have to note the appearances of Betty Thomas and Howard Hesseman from that flick doing their own funny characters (also Lynne Marie Stewart in more of a straight role). Since I grew up in the '70s, I noticed the spoofs on Billy Jack, The Bad News Bears, and Star Wars and laughed myself heartily on those. Then there's the climatic musical number that gives this movie its title which was taken from a now-politically incorrect quote by an administrator of the Ford presidency that was all-out entertaining to me. So on that note, I highly recommend Loose Shoes.

I saw Loose Shoes featuring Bill Murray when it first came out (1980) and enjoyed it, but filed it under the same satiric label as Kentucky Fried Movie and Groove Tube also from that era, and forgot about it.

But I saw it recently, and suddenly realized that over a dozen modern movies (as well as TV shows) totally did RIP-OFFS of the many parody plots from this flick! The writers of this thing turned out to be total psychic geniuses when it came to future entertainment! For instance:

Does a talking pig from the farm going to the big city, like Babe sound familiar? And a bio on Howard Hughes, like Aviator? And Skateboarders From Hell, ala the recent skateboard flick Doggtown And Z Boy? Or how about a western slant to the Wizard Of Oz, like that recent Richard Dreyfus thing? And a Space Odyssey spoof, like the later Space Idiocy starring Leslie Neilsen, plus a Star Wars take-off like the later Spaceballs by Mel Brooks. Add to that a raunchy sequel to the Bad News Bears, like the recent... raunchy sequel to the Bad News Bears, starring Billy Bob Thornton. And the list goes on and on!

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.

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.