moviemystic

Hey, it's Joyride, starring the son of Desi Arnaz, a son of John Carradine, and the wife of Antonio Banderas!

Well, these wacky kids could sure pull crimes and escape local bar patrons, business owners and the police with ease, alright

But there was always ONE horrible thing they could NEVER escape from:

All that lousy ELO music!!!

Yes, regardless of what state they drove to, what restaurant, bar or car radio that played music, mainly only ONE thing kept blaring out of those poor little speakers:

ELO! ELO! ELO!

Now THAT was some scary stuff!

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!

Stanley Kubrick's life as a director can easily be charted in an up and down graph that looks like one large (if not evenly measured) pyramid.The up side begins from his start with a few documentaries, then rises quickly with The Killing (1956), and Paths of Glory (1957).It then soars to his peak with masterpieces like Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), and Dr. Strangelove (1964).The Kubrick career chart shows its first slowdown, however, with the dull, plodding 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which irked many film goers by its refusal to explain what the heck those dumb "monoliths" where supposed to mean.From then on things went even more downhill for him.A Clockwork Orange (1971) was a muddled mess of sexism and violence, Barry Lyndon (1975) was a snore-inducing swashbuckler that buckled under Kubrick's bad decision to use "available light" in most shots, The Shining (1980) was a weak attempt at horror (certainly not Kubrick's style at all), even prompting Shining author Stephen King to later do his own version of the script (1997).Then came Full Metal Jacket (1987), a piece of belated back- biting about Vietnam (produced about 15 years too late), and his finale flop, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring the sickeningly sweet married couple Cruise and Kidman.Had he lived, another even worse bomb was next up, called A.I. (2001). It was such an overdone can of stale spam that even the great Steven Spielberg (a sci-fi movie veteran) couldn't save it, when he later finished it for Kubrick.In short, Kubrick should have stopped right after Dr. Strangelove.