Uma Família Muito Brega

Although a poor film it contains more than enough good jokes, and that is just why it was being made.If you like the rude dutch sense of humor this would be a movie you certainly like. Lots of influence of Brutti, Scorchi e Cattivi from Ettore Scola. If you think flodder is a bit corny, go and see this tasteful movie.

An anti-social family moves, because of a ridiculous government experiment, into an upper class neighborhood. The neighbors do not except the "Flodders" in their neighborhood. Most of the jokes are about the inappropriate behavior of the Flodders and about the hypocrisy of the neighbors. Mostly crude humor, but if you like that sort of thing than you will find this movie entertaining. The characters are very stereotypical, which I think is a shame. One never really connects with the characters.

This movie clearly targeted an American audience rather than just a dutch audience.

"Flodder" tells the story of the anti social family of the same name. Their house turns out te be on toxic soil and so the city council is forced to find a new place for them to live. A social worker proposes to give them a vacant house in an upper class neighbourhood. Of course this results in agitation and problems.

"Flodder" performed very well at the box office. It resulted in several sequels and a TV series. Nevertheless almost 40 years later I could find very few reviews.

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the film is generally viewed as "cheap amusement" with a "Louis de Funes" type of humor. In my view this is not entirely correct.

The film is sometimes described as ridiculing the Dutch welfare state, showing that state tolerating and sometimes even rewarding bad behaviour.

The question is however who exactly is being ridiculed?

The Flodder family consists indeed of some petty criminals, but they don't engage in real serious crimes. The story is told through their eyes so inevitably the viewer starts to identify with them.

In my opinion it is much more the wealthy inhabitants of the neighbourhood that are ridiculed. Of these inhabitants the men are treated rather mildly. They don't like the family Flodder very much but are "compensated" by the fact that the sexy and busty daughter Kees (Tatjana Simic) is included. Especially the wealthy women are made fun of. They are proud of the careers of their husbands without doing very much themselves. Nevertheless they feel very much superior to the Flodder family.

The Dutch welvare state finally is represented by the social worker Sjakie (Lou Landré). He doesn't understand much of real life and made me think of the social worker in "A clockwork orange" (1971, Stanley Kubrick).

At the end the neighborhood dispute escalates in some kind of a civil war, underlining, somewhat superfluously, the over the top character of the movie.

Seeing the movie again after many years I must admit that some of the humor (but not all!) has not aged well. An example is the character of Tatjana Simic portrayed as an object of desire of many men. This portraying would be considered sexist today. Even more however you won't find the somewhat sadistic jokes about pets in a contemporary film very easily.

Flodder the movie is a great comedy movie with a wonderful concept and great leading actors. after i watch it 50 times it is still very funny. Because Flodder is still popular there are still rumors to reboot Flodder, That is a totally obsolete idea. Because you get an exact copy like Flodder was. The concept Flodder is also very obsolete especially after more than 30 years.

Well, at first you are astonished and laugh about the Flodder-Family. But if the movie continues you will see, that the freaks on this story are not the Family. It may be the truth that, to identify freaks positively, you have to confront them with other freaks.

Works still after 32 years. One of my favourite movies.