Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers

Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers (1984) was a re-telling of the famous Alexandre Dumas classic novel. Cheech and Chong new that they had to market their comedy towards a different audience. There hard core fan base wasn't enough to make themselves profitable. Not only did they change their style of humor, they toned it down dramatically. Sadly, no one wanted to see a period piece starring Cheech and Chong. The movie is not horrible but it's not a laugh riot. Not wanting to end the partnership, the duo made another comedy album and a video that went along with it called GET OUT OF MY ROOM. The video was a tad under an hour and it featured the classic comedy song BORN IN EAST L.A. which would become Cheech's stepping stone towards mainstream acceptance.

Recommended for Cheech and Chong fans. Others will want to stay away from it.

In modern France, Los Guys (Cheech and Chong) is a rock band playing horribly which forces the locals to pay them to stop. A fortune teller (Rae Dawn Chong) tells them a story about revolutionary France. Louis (Cheech Marin) and Lucian Corsican (Tommy Chong) are twins born to two aristocratic fathers. Their fathers duel and both end up killed. They are raised as peasants and find that they feel the other's pain. Louis is raised in Mexico. He returns and the brothers run afoul of The Evil Fuckaire. Fuckaire tries to execute the brothers but they end up escaping while the princesses fall for them.

This is mostly unfunny. There are a couple of funny jokes but they are not enough. Cheech and Chong work best as dumb and dumber bros. Cheech is able to keep some of his idiocy by making his character Mexican and dealing with societal differences. Chong is playing straight and mostly unfunny. It would be a lot funny with the Los Guys traveling back in time and thereby becoming fish out of water. This writing is simply not good enough.

I loved this film, and as the second Cheech and Chong film I'd ever seen (the first being 'It Came From Hollywood'), I laughed myself mad. Don't be a fool, see this film!

I won't go into details about the story behind it, but if you haven't seen it, you really must see it!

I don't want to say that "Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers" has aged well. It hasn't. It's still pretty bad but it does have a few laughs. I did laugh more tonight than I have in the past. What can I say? I'm a fan. But overall, it has a pretty bad groan to laugh ratio. I wish that they would have used some co-writers and maybe a different director. C&C were a good writing/directing team but I think a different perspective would have helped their movie career last a little longer.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It is one of those movies where you won't get a lot of direct laughs, but the general level of ludicrousness accumulates over time and had me giggling a lot by about 20 minutes in. The whole idea of these two in this period piece, not to mention Chong's bizarre intensity and seriousness throughout... I don't know, it got me. I also liked that in place of the drugs (which were there, just not as directly), the general smuttiness was cranked way up... well, that appeals to me, especially from these two, but I have a soft spot for lecherous perverts. I'm glad it's in my collection!

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