Schlock (1973)

          Filmmaker John Landis’ twin preoccupations of campy horror tropes and rebellious juvenile humor permeate his first feature, Schlock, which he made when he was only 21. A one-joke spoof that sputters well before its brief 80-minute running time has elapsed, Schlock is nonetheless endearing—it’s a love letter to the movies from a lifelong fan, and it never takes itself seriously. Although the story is really just a makeshift framework on which Landis hangs innumerable one-liners and sight gags, Schlock tells the “story” of the Schlockthropus, a missing-link monster that emerges from centuries of hibernation and goes on a rampage until falling in love with a teenage girl. Landis, who wrote and directed the picture in addition to playing the title role from inside an ape suit created by future movie-makeup legend Rick Baker, borrows from Frankenstein (1931), King Kong (1933), and about a zillion other shock-cinema favorites, even including footage from The Blob (1958) at one point. Parts of the movie are presented mockumentary-style, with reporter Joe Putzman (Eric Allison) speaking directly to the camera and/or interviewing experts and victims. Other sequences are presented as straightforward narrative, though Landis (in his capacity as an actor) occasionally breaks the illusion by mugging for the camera.

          Schlock is completely silly, but Landis’ deadpan approach to sophomoric humor was already fully formed at this early stage of his career. Clues at murder sites are banana peels. Looney Tunes-style gags occur regularly, such as the bit during which a cigarette lighter that won’t ignite for the longest time suddenly produces a huge jet of flame. Stock characters lampoon stock lines—for instance, a professor proclaims, “I believe we’re on the brink of the greatest scientific breakthrough in the last eight or nine weeks.” Sometimes, this stuff works in a groan-inducing sort of way, and sometimes it doesn’t. The scene of the Schlockthropus participating in a Bronx-cheer contest with a little kid goes on too long, but the bit when the Schlcoktropus uses a throw pillow as a weapon is casually amusing. Throughout the picture, Landis’ camerawork is clean and confident. Editor George Folsey Jr., who subsequently cut most of Landis’ hit comedies, energizes the director’s footage with his customary zippy pacing, thereby ensuring that Schlock has momentum even when it isn’t going anywhere.

Schlock: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Blues Brothers

          The first and arguably best movie derived from Saturday Night Live characters, The Blues Brothers is a gigantic 10-course meal of a movie. It’s an action picture, a comedy, a musical, and a social satire. Yet the film, which was written by star Dan Aykroyd and director John Landis, is hardly to everyone’s taste. Those who quickly lose patience with car chases, for instance, will find some scenes interminable. For viewers who lock into the movie’s more-is-more groove, however, The Blues Brothers is a nonstop parade of bizarre sight gags, ingenious character flourishes, and vivacious musical numbers.

          Best of all, the title characters translate to the big screen beautifully, because Aykroyd employs the same gift for imagining the universes surrounding his creations that he later brought to Ghostbusters (1984), which he cowrote with Harold Ramis. Instead of pummeling one joke into the dirt, the sad fate of most recurring SNL characters given the feature-film treatment, Aykroyd uses the main gag of the Blues Brothers sketches as the starting point for a proper story that’s populated with fully realized supporting characters. The Blues Brothers might not be great cinema, per se, but it’s made with geunine craftsmanship.

          Whereas on SNL the Blues Brothers mostly just performed soul tunes with accompanying physical-comedy shtick, The Blues Brothers gives the characters backstories, distinct personalities, and a mission. A mission from God, that is. Soon after fastidious Elwood Blues (Aykroyd) picks up his slovenly brother, Jake Blues (John Belushi), from prison after a three-year stint for armed robbery, viewers discover their shared history. The brothers were raised in a Chicago orphanage overseen by stern nun Sister Mary Stigmata (Kathleen Freeman), and the orphanage’s kindly custodian, Curtis (Cab Calloway), taught the boys to love black music. Upon reaching adulthood, Ellwood and Jake formed a hot band, but the group fell apart when Jake went to jail. Upon reuniting with Curtis and Sister Mary, the brothers discover that the orphanage will close unless back taxes are paid, so Elwood and Jake contrive to reform their band for a benefit concert. That’s easier said than done, since the musicians have started new lives.

          Additionally, the Blues Brothers gather enemies at every turn, pissing off a country-and-western band, a gaggle of neo-Nazis, a psychotic mystery woman (Carrie Fisher) who uses heavy artillery while trying to kill Jake, and the entire law-enforcement community of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Sprinkled throughout the brothers’ wild adventures are fantastic musical numbers featuring James Brown, Calloway, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, to say nothing of the Blues Brothers Band itself, which features real-life veterans of the ’60s soul-music scene. Landis treats this movie like his personal playground, throwing in everything from mass destruction to ornate choreography, and his affection for the material is contagious. (A few years later, in 1983, Landis reaffirmed his musical bona fides by directing Michael Jackson’s groundbreaking “Thriller” video.)

          What makes The Blues Brothers so unique is its three-pronged attack. In addition to telling an enjoyable men-on-a-mission story (the source of the action scenes), the picture delivers innumerable gags as well as the aforementioned musical highlights. Each element receives the same careful attention. For instance, The Blues Brothers features so many quotable lines (“How much for your women?”) that it’s easily one of the funniest movies featuring actors who gained fame on SNL, which is saying a lot. There’s even room in the mix for wry supporting turns by John Candy, Fisher, and Henry Gibson, as well as wink-wink cameos by movie directors including Frank Oz and Steven Spielberg. Speaking of cameos, try to name another movie that features both Chaka Khan (she’s one of Brown’s backup singers) and the future Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens).

          Long story short, if you can’t find at least one thing to enjoy in The Blues Brothers—if not a dozen of them—then you’re not looking hard enough.

The Blues Brothers: RIGHT ON

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

          By far the funniest and most polished of the various doofus-humor anthology films that hit theaters after Saturday Night Live’s success transformed so-called “college humor” into mainstream entertainment, The Kentucky Fried Movie was a game-changer for its director, John Landis, and its writers, the zany team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. After this picture made a splash, Landis went on to helm the blockbuster Animal House (1978), while the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team perfected their style of comic insanity with Airplane! (1980). Yet while both of those pictures feature traditional start-to-finish narratives, The Kentucky Fried Movie operates in the Saturday Night Live mode by presenting more than 20 different sketches, some of which are less than a minute long, and one of which runs more than 30 minutes. Some bits are funnier than others, of course, but everything in The Kentucky Fried Movie is executed with the utmost professionalism; Landis’ sleek camerawork and meticulous pacing has the effect of corralling the movie’s slapdash gags into a coherent format.

          Obviously, none of this should give the impression that The Kentucky Fried Movie represents an exercise in good taste. Quite to the contrary, the movie is gleefully crude, especially in the realm of sex jokes, of which there are many. For instance, one sketch that I’m ashamed to say kept me chuckling for years after I first saw the picture (and still makes me laugh now) is the outrageously vulgar two-minute trailer for a nonexistent sexploitation movie called Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, which hits every note of Roger Corman-style hucksterism perfectly. There are other fake trailers, as well as ersatz news broadcasts, faux commercials, and straight-up comedy bits that feel like stand-alone short films. Sometimes, characters from one sequence pop up in an unrelated sequence, so everything feels like it’s happening in the same milieu.

          The centerpiece of The Kentucky Fried Movie is A Fistful of Yen, a slick spoof of the iconic Bruce Lee flick Enter the Dragon  (1973). A Fistful of Yen contains some of The Kentucky Fried Movie’s silliest gags—think of this extended vignette as a dry run for the genre send-ups Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker made in the ’80s, and you’ve got the right idea. (Sample gag: The bad guy has a disloyal underling beheaded, then shouts, “Now take him to be tortured!”) During this sequence, comic actor Evan Kim gives a simultaneously charming and ridiculous performance as the Bruce Lee-styled lead character, delivering all of his lines with an absurdly racist accent; the wide-eyed shamelessness of his acting is winning, and he does a credible job of mimicking Lee’s fierce athleticism.

          A few familiar names pop up in cameos during The Kentucky Fried Movie, including Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, and Donald Sutherland, but utility players appearing in multiple roles—including David Zucker—carry most of the load. As with most examples of “college humor,” The Kentucky Fried Movie isn’t for everyone, because it’s a guy movie through and through. In other words, it’s so dumb and leering you may feel embarrassed laughing at some of the jokes. However, when seen in the right frame of mind, The Kentucky Fried Movie provides 83 minutes of jubilantly juvenile jocularity.

The Kentucky Fried Movie: GROOVY

Animal House (1978)

          The outrageous comedy Animal House belongs on any list of ’70s movies that changed the cinematic landscape (for better or worse), because ever since Animal House set the template, raunchy comedies about kids getting into mischief have been a staple at multiplexes. As is often the case, however, few imitators can match the energy of the original—Animal House is the Wagnerian opera of frat-house flicks, featuring debauchery and destruction on epic levels. Whether the picture is actually amusing depends on the viewer’s taste, of course, since the barrage of nocturnal panty raids and toga-party bacchanalias is inherently vulgar. Nonetheless, Animal House has a certain kind of lowbrow integrity because it never apologizes for its excesses; quite to the contrary, the picture proudly celebrates cretins and lowlifes.

          To make this anarchistic material palatable, the filmmakers smartly position the boys of Delta House as relatable underdogs, then stack the deck by making the straights who oppose the Deltas such insufferable pricks and prigs that there’s no choice but to root for the Deltas. Describing the plot of is futile, since the story isn’t the point, but the basics are that Delta House is the worst frat on campus, so the Deltas have to clean up their collective act or face expulsion by their mortal enemy, Dean Wormer (John Vernon). Far more important than the story are the raucous exploits of Boon (Peter Riegert), Bluto (John Belushi), D-Day (Bruce McGill), Flounder (Stephen Furst), Otter (Tim Matheson), Pinto (Tom Hulce), and the rest of the Deltas. Whether they’re jamming to “Shout,” destroying the school cafeteria in a gigantic food fight, or sneaking into sororities to stare at naked coeds, these misfits live for babes, booze, and brawls. Accordingly, the picture’s humor exists on a plane of adolescent wish fulfillment, so watching Animal House is like entering the testosterone-fueled dreams of a teenaged boy who thinks he’s invincible and that life should be a nonstop party.

          Sure, the picture has a few nods to social consciousness reflecting its setting in the early ’60s—mostly via Donald Sutherland’s smallish role as a with-it professor who espouses counterculture ideals in between nailing coeds—but the heart of Animal House lies in characters like Bluto, the slob who horrifies a “nice” girl by stuffing his face with mashed potatoes and then smashing his cheeks to spit out his food before announcing, “I’m a zit!” There’s no denying the crude power of this movie, which was made with great enthusiasm—and, thanks to director John Landis, considerable craftsmanship. Furthermore, the cast is uniformly good. Belushi’s take-no-prisoners performance transformed him from a TV star into a box-office attraction, Hulce is sweetly hapless, Matheson is cool and slick, McGill is a force of nature, Vernon nails his campy villain role, and a young Kevin Bacon is terrific as one of the clueless straights fighting the Deltas. Still, despite all the talent on display, it’s difficult to make a case that Animal House is about anything except glorifying bad behavior. Enjoyable though Animal House may be, it’s not particularly admirable.

Animal House: GROOVY