Manny’s Orphans (1978)

          In addition to sequels and a TV series, The Bad News Bears (1976) begat ripoffs including the shameless Here Come the Tigers (1978), directed by future horror-movie icon Sean S. Cunningham. Amazingly, the same year he made Here Come the Tigers, Cunningham made another riff on The Bad News Bears, this time swapping out youth baseball for youth soccer. Manny’s Orphans, which is pleasant enough to watch but painfully formulaic and predictable, concerns an everyman with bad gambling debts who takes a job as the live-in supervisor at an orphanage, then organizes the kids into a soccer team. To the minor credit of Cunningham and his collaborators, the story structure of Manny’s Orphans does not slavishly emulate the plotting of The Bad News Bears, though the gist is similar—a man lacking direction finds himself by guiding children, and the children gain self-esteem by coalescing into an effective team. That said, the characterization, jokes, and style of Manny’s Orphans are primitive compared to the sly textures of The Bad News Bears.

          Manny (Jim Baker) loses his job as the soccer coach at a snooty private school because of his crass manners and disreputable lifestyle. Desperate to pay off a loan shark, he answers a want ad and meets Father McCoy (Malachy McCourt), who needs someone to supervise the boys in his care. Naturally, Manny takes an unusual approach, swearing around the children and playing poker with them. In the usual way of such movies, the kids find his vulgarity endearing. Among feeble subplots, the most important concerns a new arrival at the orphanage, Pepe (Melissa Valentin), who is secretly a girl. (She fled an abusive foster home.) You get the idea. Although Baker’s performance is fairly charming, McCourt is likeable, and some of the juvenile actors render passable work, flat scripting and uninspired direction make Manny’s Orphans monotonous. Still, the picture mostly avoids mean jokes and stereotypes, and the warm-fuzzy ending—no matter how obvious its construction—checks the appropriate boxes.

Manny’s Orphans: FUNKY

1980 Week: Friday the 13th

          Despite its ample cinematic merits, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) had an insidious influence on the film industry, because the film’s easily replicated narrative formula—combined with Halloween’s massive commercial success—inspired countless imitators. Of those subsequent films, Friday the 13th is the most significant for one simple reason: It proved that deficiencies in imagination and quality were not impediments for repeating Halloween’s box-office performance. After all, similar 1980 releases including He Knows You’re Alone, Prom Night, and Terror Train all made money, but none of them inspired deathless franchises, perhaps because none stole so shamelessly from Halloween. Twelve movies, one TV series, and innumerable ancillary products later, the Friday the 13th series and its signature monster, hockey-masked Jason Voorhees, are still going strong. All that being said, the original Friday the 13th, produced and directed by the singularly unimpressive Sean S. Cunningham, is a dimwitted, gruesome, puritanical, repetitive, trite schlockfest.

          Copping the basic shape of Halloween—without matching that film’s unique power, style, and themes—Friday the 13th follows the slasher-film playbook of a psycho systematically killing horny teenagers until a final showdown occurs between the killer and the inevitable lone survivor. What makes Friday the 13th so uninteresting is that the film contains nothing but the slasher-film playbook. This is paint-by-numbers horror cinema. Literally the only distinctive element of the picture is Henry Manfredini’s score, which steals bits from the work of Bernard Hermann and John Williams but also adds signature vocalizations (“ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma”).

          The plot, such as it is, begins with a brief prologue set in 1958. Two young counselors at Camp Crystal Lake leave a party to have sex. Then an unseen individual kills them. Two decades later, several young people converge on Camp Crystal Lake, which is set to reopen for the first time since the tragedy. The same unseen individual kills these newcomers, usually while they’re in the midst of having sex, until the murderer’s identity is revealed. (Spoiler alert!) Although Jason Voorhees emerged as the main antagonist in the series during Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), he’s not the main culprit here, meaning no hockey mask—that prop didn’t show up until the godwaful Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982). On a technical level, Friday the 13th is passable, with competent cinematography and some half-decent acting. (Watch for a young Kevin Bacon as one of the horny victims.) More than anything, however, Friday the 13th is just plain dumb, the film’s brainless rhythms offering hints of just how stupid later entries in the franchise would become.

Friday the 13th: LAME

Here Come the Tigers (1978)

Helmed by Sean S. Cunningham, who later found a niche in teen-themed horror by directing Friday the 13th (1980), this low-budget family comedy is a shameless rip-off of The Bad News Bears (1976). Like The Bad News Bears, this movie depicts a ragtag Little League team getting whipped into shape by a reluctant coach. Among other elements brazenly stolen from The Bad News Bears, the picture features a juvenile delinquent who becomes a star player and a soundtrack peppered with classical music. Yet while Bill Lancaster’s ingenious script for The Bad News Bears completely avoided the usual cute-kid excesses of family films by featuring a cantankerous coach and foul-mouthed youngsters, Here Come the Tigers is nearly as sickly-sweet as a Disney movie. In the bizarre opening sequence, kindhearted policeman Eddie Burke (Richard Lincoln) talks an older colleague out of committing suicide by agreeing to become a Little League coach. Then Eddie’s bumbling partner makes a bet on Eddie’s baseball success. These contrived circumstances set the stage for Eddie’s first encounter with his team, which includes such misfits as Art “The Fart” Bullfinch (Sean P. Griffin), whose distinguishing characteristic is indeed flatulence. By 10 minutes into the movie, which is about when the first scatological joke happens, it’s clear that viewers have traveled a long distance from the sharp satire of The Bad News Bears. Leading man Lincoln delivers a truly bland performance, and none of the child actors pop as memorable personalities. Additionally, all of the baseball scenes feel like limp re-enactments of bits from The Bad News Bears, complete with montages of botched plays and running gags about imaginative training techniques. Cunningham’s direction runs the gamut from basically competent to numbingly generic. There’s nothing to genuinely hate in Here Come the Tigers, since it’s a feel-good story about an adult teaching children to respect themselves, but there’s also no reason to watch a carbon copy of an infinitely better movie.

Here Come the Tigers: LAME