Loose Shoes

While most of the film could be described as mildly amusing at best, there is a piece of filmic comedy history contained within it for the "Darktown after dark" movie trailer, that makes this film a must see for anyone who appreciates truly great comedy! I guarantee* that when you hear the mock blues song that notes the bad start to the singers day, then not only will the title of this film become clear, but you will be in a state of extreme merriment for quite sometime.

*(Please note that this guarantee is not valid anywhere within the planet called Earth.)

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.

This is a sketch comedy movie done in the style of movie trailers. It's another in the long line of films that filled theaters in the mid to late 1970's like Kentucky Fried Movie, Groove Tube, American Raspberry, Tunnelvision promising to do what Saturday Night Live was doing but with dirty words and naked women. This is probably the weakest of the bunch.

Spoofing everything from musicals (Darktown after Dark) to prison films (3 Chairs for Lefty) to public service announcements (Buddy Hackett on bed wetting) to biker films (Skateboarders from Hell) to Charlie Chaplin films (The Kid and the Yid) and a few things in between this is a very hit or miss film. Most of the gags had been done before and better in other films and on TV by the time this was made so it was like watching reruns of reruns.3 Chairs for Lefty, which stars Bill Murray is rife with the sort of prison jokes that have been around since the 1930's,including giving Lefty a roast to cook when he finally goes to the chair.

The real problem is that almost all of the sketches go on way past the point of being funny. There seems to be some need to spoof a complete film, so in Skateboarders from hell we get a climatic funeral scene that isn't very funny and destroys the laughs that the film had generated with the "biker" fight. There is no reason that this film needed to be almost two hours long since tighter cutting could have made this a classic.

Worth seeing if you run across it on cable and you're in the mood for a very uneven comedy.It would be also okay to get in the bargain bin at the 99 cent store (which is how I got my copy) since its not worth more than a dollar.

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.

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.