skinnyjoeymerlino

Tyler Perry's directorial movie debut was the second adaptation of his stage plays to make it to the big screen. Initially released in 2002 as a filmed version of the stage play, "Madea's Family Reunion" has its roots in the gospel musical; melodramatic morality plays with titles like "Your Arms Are Too Short To Box With God", several plot lines, lots of speechifying, and plenty of shouted comments from audiences of middle-aged evangelical Black women in brightly colored hats.

The big screen adapation is a follow-up to Perry's first screenplay "Diary of a Mad Black Woman". Perry reprises his role as Madea (aka Mabel Simmons), a big-bosomed take-no-crap-but-ultimately-kind-hearted grandmother/aunt/anchor of an extended Black family in Atlanta whose house serves as a kind of refuge for troubled young female relatives. He also plays Madea's lecherous pot-smoking brother Joe and lawyer Brian who constantly gets Madea out of legal trouble brought about by her Samaritan actions. This time around Madea takes in unwed mother of two Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell Anderson) and rebellious foster child Nikki (Keke Palmer). The drama gets compounded when Vanessa's sister Lisa (Rochelle Aytes) shows up, fleeing from her abusive fiancé played by Blair Underwood. Nikki is disciplined and cared for by Madea, Vanessa ends up falling in love against her will with a perfect puppydog-eyed deep-voiced selfless man named Frankie (Boris Kojoe), and Lisa struggles to leave her fiancé against the will of her mother played by Lynn Whitfield.

Perry's first attempt at movie direction is pretty straightforward and fairly competent. There are bright spots. Lynn Whitfield is excellent as the cruel mother, the scenes with Madea are funny, and Underwood is good in what must be his third go-around as the guy who doesn't get the girl. The poetry reading in the jazz cafe is really atmospheric. and the poetry read by Maya Angelou is very uplifting.

Where "Reunion" falters is in the clichés. When Underwood slaps Rochelle Aytes the audience can actually count from five to one the split second it happens. Some of the romantic dialogue spoken by Kojoe is cringeworthy. Comedy bits with Madea move jarringly to over-the-top melodrama involving battered women, child abuse, and incest. Tyler Perry plays Joe in a painfully unfunny flatulence humor monologue that apparently attempts to mimic the family dinner scene played by Eddie Murphy in "The Nutty Professor". The old men leering at the young girls at the family reunion(!) is disturbing. Cicely Tyson's impromptu sermon about the decline of morals in the Black community in the middle of a barbecue(?) may work on stage to an audience that is expecting to be preached at, but on the big screen in a multiplex it's a bit much. The set where the final wedding scene takes place features a church draped in blinding white lace and curtains with real human beings dressed like angels suspended from the ceiling; in such bad taste it's ALMOST funny, but not.

None of this matters, of course, to the God-fearing over-30 Black women Tyler Perry aims his plays and movies at. They flocked to theatres to make "Madea's Family Reunion" the number one movie at the box office its opening weekend. No one else is making movies for them, and as long as Tyler Perry does he's going to continue to laugh all the way to the bank.

The mid-to-late 1980s marked the heyday of the Mom-and-Pop video store. Americans had brought VCRs in record numbers and the "4 Titles For the Price 3" special was the standard way we rented VHS cassettes for the weekend. It took a year or more for top Hollywood movies to come to video (the "A" titles) and to fill up that four title special customers would look on the back shelves for the single copies of older movies and more obscure stuff (the "B" titles). Drive-ins were closing, but the hack producers of drive-in fare started producing movies that went direct-to-video. Most of the DTV B-titles were crap, exploitation pics shot in a garage with a hand-held mike for chickenfeed budgets. Not restricted by the MPAA ratings code, a way to distinguish a DTV title on the shelf was to feature T&A, and as this was the era of gratuitous nudity flicks, the onslaught of 80s nudie cuties was on.

Exploitation director Ed Hansen and John Carpenter regular Buck Flower wrote "Takin' It Off" and its sequel "Taken It All Off" and churned out what was probably the best of this kind of movie. A school for strippers is losing money and the owner Becky Lebeau, played by Mr. Skin nude scene queen Michelle Bauer, decides to save her school from the greedy landlord played by John Alderman. It's the umpteenth remake of the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney formula of "putting on a show" to save the (farm, orphanage, church, community center, stripper school). They manage to snag stripping queen Betty Bigones (Russ Myer regular Kitten Natividad) to perform with them, but a monkey wrench is thrown into the plan when new student Allison (80s porn queen Candie Evans under her real name Jean Poremba) can't bring herself to take her clothes off and hypnosis is used as a last ditch effort to save the day.

There's lots of bad 80s hair and hideous 80s fashions. The acting is largely beyond horrible. Kitten Natividad recites many of her lines like a child in a big paper costume in a school play, but Buck Flower himself is a hoot as Allison's hillbilly father; and Candie Evans must have been game to try something that didn't involve her getting smothered by some guy, because she is surprisingly good in her role. Hansen's direction is competent and the jokes in the script aren't bad. There's LOTS of full-frontal female nudity, and only one scene with male nudity and that's one male backside in a tender shower love scene. Some of the stripping is amateurish, but that's okay, and Kitten Natividad shows she's a good performer and dancer who loved what she did. The title song is annoying, but a few others ("Louisiana Lovers", "I Just Want You" performed by someone named Little Joe Shaver) on the soundtrack aren't. The movie is padded with extra nudity to get close to 90 minutes, but that's what a Mom-and-Pop video store customer would have rented Takin' It All Off for.

Kitten Natividad was 40 when this movie was made and her face was starting to age, but her body here is still in good shape. Sadly she hit the wall soon after. Candie Evans married one of the American Gladiators, started a family and left showbiz entirely in 1988. Their beautiful bodies are preserved on VHS tape. Takin' It All Off must have been a hugely successful rental as used copies pop up on ebay all the time. Hansen died in 2005, so it's up to Buck Flower or whoever owns the rights to Takin It All Off to put it out on DVD. They should be encouraged, because there aren't a lot of comedies made with gratuitous female nudity anymore, and that's ashame.