Loose Shoes

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.

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.

Every previous review has stated something I agree with and maybe something I DISagree with. For example, this doesn't come close in laughs to Kentucky Fried Movie which I consider the benchmark for this type of parody movie.

I do believe that some of the segments (I don't know, is SKIT really the right word?) do go on a little past where they should. Even long trailers tend to end before these and we've all see via the internet and TV skit shows that a parody trailer can be hysterically funny and remain at the usual trailer length. There's some fantastic stuff here and some that do fall a bit flat but all in all, if you are a fan, even just a bit, of the genre, this is a must see, if for not other reason, it's a history lesson of what was, back in the day. If you don't enjoy it, really, what did you lose?

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!

As with all of these kind of satire skit movies (i.e. Kentucky Friend Movie, Tunnelvision, etc) some skits range from not so funny to hilarious. The funniest (in my opinion) skit is the take-off on the Ma & Pa Kettle Movies. Here, instead of a talking horse we have a talking pig and some of the dialogue being uttered by the pig is priceless. Here's an example. Pa Kettle says to the pig "Pigs can't talk" whereby the pig replies "Your old lady is a pig and all she ever does is talk". Then the pig really lets loose on a hotel detective calling him all kinds of deragatory names. But the end is a hoot where they do a satire of the Warner's Bros. cartoon ending with a Porky Pig spoof that is so x-rated I can't repeat it here. J.P. Morgan is quite funny as the Nurse at a hospital for chronic bed-wetters. Not a great movie but some very clever spoofs in between the not so funny ones.