Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

Going Berserk (1983, directed by David Steinberg)

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John Bourgignon (John Candy) is a man of many talents.  He’s a limo driver.  He’s a drummer.  He is an occasional actor, having starred in Kung Fu U. for his friend, director Sal DiPasquale (Eugene Levy).  John is also improbably engaged to Nancy Reece (Alley Mills), the daughter of Congressman and presidential candidate Ed Reese (Pat Hingle).  As the wedding approaches, John deals with a number of things.  He chauffeurs around a group of Spanish Beatles impersonators.  He finds himself handcuffed to a fugitive (Ernie Hudson) who dies at an inopportune time.  A cult leader (Richard Libertini) attempts to brainwash John into assassinating Ed, though the process might just turn John into a “schmuck.”

Going Berserk was John Candy’s first lead feature role and it was obviously designed to play to Candy’s popularity as one of the stars of SCTV.  Going Berserk doesn’t gave a plot as much as it’s a collection of skits, some of which work better than others but all of which are held together by Candy’s comedic timing and amiable presence.  Going Berserk is disjointed and wildly uneven but it’s also frequently funny and that is a testament to Candy’s talent.  Even an overlong parody of The Blue Lagoon raises a smile because John Candy is just so committed to playing out the joke.

Going Berserk also features several familiar faces, like Richard Libertini, Pat Hingle, Ernie Hudson, Dixie Carter, Kurtwood Smith, Paul Dooley, and two of Candy’s SCTV co-stars, Eugene Levy and Joe Flaherty.  I especially liked Levy’s performance as the sleazy director who blackmails his way into filming the wedding.  Going Berserk was frequently stupid but, more often than not, it made me laugh.

Neighbors (1981, directed by John G. Avildsen)

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Uptight suburbanite Earl Keese (John Belushi) is paranoid about his new neighbors, Vic (Dan Aykroyd) and Ramona (Cathy Moriarty).  Ramona continually tries to seduce Earl (and everyone else) while Vic is loud and obnoxious, always telling off-color jokes and insinuating that Earl is less of a man than he is.  Earl thinks that there’s something mentally wrong with Vic but Earl’s wife and daughter (played respectively by Kathryn Walker and Lauren-Marie Taylor) love both Vic and Ramona.  Over the course of one very long night and morning, Earl grows more and more suspicious even as he starts to feel truly alive for the first time in several years.

Based on a novel by Thomas Berger, Neighbors is an unfortunate attempt at dark comedy that also turned out to be the final film appearance of John Belushi.  It’s appropriate that Belushi’s final film featured him with his comedic partner and best friend, Dan Aykroyd, though I think most of their fans would rather remember them for The Blues Brothers than Neighbors.  Originally, Aykroyd was cast as Earl while Belushi was meant to play Vic but the two actors decided to switch roles at the last minute.  It takes a while to get used to seeing Belushi as an uptight character who worries about the neighbor’s dog digging up his flower garden but Belushi actually does give a good performance as Earl, revealing that he had more range as an actor that most suspected.  Aykroyd and Moriarty also give good performances, though Aykroyd’s performance is not as much a departure as Belushi’s.  Earl is an amiable eccentric with several out-there beliefs, which also sounds like a good description of Dan Aykroyd.

Why, despite the talented cast, does Neighbors fail?  Director John G. Avildsen was the wrong choice to direct the film.  From the first shot of Earl and Vic’s two houses sitting on a hill and looking like left-over sets from The Addams Family, Avildsen directs in a cartoonish manner that is not appropriate for a comedy-of-manners.  The book’s humor comes from Earl becoming progressively more and more unstable but, in the movie, Earl seems to be unhinged from the start.  Bill Conti’s musical score drives him every point with a thudding obviousness.  Conti’s style was perfect for the soaring anthems of Rocky but not for a comedy like Neighbors.

Unfortunately, this would be Belushi’s final film.  Neighbors was released in December of 1981.  John Belushi died four months later.

The Art Of War (2000, directed by Christian Duguay)

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In The Art of War, Wesley Snipes plays Neil Shaw, an UN operative who is framed for the assassination of a Chinese diplomat and who must uncover the real conspiracy while also proving his innocence.  Proving his innocence means engaging in a lot of conflict while using investigation techniques that were cribbed from the Mission Impossible films.

Featuring a lot of war but not much art, The Art of War has a few good action scenes and an overly convoluted storyline that sometimes makes the film feel like a retread of another film in which Snipes was framed for a crime he did not commit, U.S. Marshals.  It’s hard to take seriously any action hero who works for the United Nations but Wesley Snipes is credible in the action scenes and he could deliver a one-liner with the best of them.  (Of all the bad things you can say about the IRS, the worst is that it put one of our best action stars in prison.  Unforgivable!)  The supporting cast is good, featuring Donald Sutherland, Maury Chaykin, Anne Archer, and Michael Biehn.  The final battle between Snipes and the person who is revealed to be the main villain is exciting but, overall, The Art of War is overlong and overcomplicated.  Neil Shaw is cool but he’s no Blade.

The Challenge (1982, directed by John Frankenheimer)

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Rick Murphy (Scott Glenn) is a punch-drunk boxer who is hired to return an ancient sword to Japan so that it can be returned to its rightful owner, the honorable Toru (Toshiro Mifune).  Once in Japan, Rick becomes involved in a battle between Toru and his corrupt brother, Hideo (Atsuo Nakamura).  Hideo demands that Rick work as an undercover spy in Toru’s martial arts school or be beheaded.  Rick decides to keep his head and be a spy but he soon finds himself truly wanting to learn the ways of the Bushido.

A martial arts film is the last place most people would expect to find Scott Glenn and considering how miscast Glenn is, that’s understandable.  Scott Glenn feels very out-of-place as both a boxer and a modern-day samurai.  Scott Glenn is a very good actor but the role of Rick Murphy called for someone who could mix comedy with drama and be convincingly desperate.  That’s not Scott Glenn.  Who would have been better in the role?  Tom Berenger was already acting in 1982.  Or maybe even someone like Jan-Michael Vincent.  Vincent was a B-actor but, deep down, The Challenge is a B-movie.

The good thing is that the action often does make up for Glenn’s miscasting.  John Frankenheimer struggled with making the human drama compelling but he knew how to film a good fight.  John Sayles’s script is pulpy without ever being disrespectful to Japanese culture and, as always, Mifune looks like he could battle and defeat the entire world if he wanted to.

One final note: Steven Seagal worked behind-the-scenes on the film but we won’t hold that against it.

Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993, directed by Jim Abrahams)

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Topper Harley (Charlie Sheen) is back but instead of being a knock-off of Tom Cruise, he’s now Sylvester Stallone.

When two separate teams of U.S. soldiers fail to rescue a group of hostages who are being held by Saddam Hussein (Jerry Haleva, who built an entire career out of his resemblance to the Iraqi dictator), it not only embarrasses America but threatens the reelection campaign of President Tug Benson (Lloyd Bridges).  President Benson can get away with throwing up on the Japanese ambassador and knocking over all the other Presidents with a shovel (though Gerald Ford falls on his own) but he can’t survive a hostage crisis.  Colonel Denton Waters (Richard Crenna) and Michelle Huddleston (Brenda Bakke) attempt to recruit Topper Harley from the Buddhist monastery, where he’s been living since the disappearance of Ramada (Valeria Golino).  Topper refuses to help with a third mission but, after Water is captured by Saddam, Topper does decide to lead the fourth mission.  Working with Ryan Stiles and Miguel Ferrer, Topper heads into the jungle to save Colonel Waters, reunite with Ramada, and discover his destiny.

The sequel to Hot Shots! is more of the same, a non-stop cavalcade of jokes, movie references, and deadpan one liners.  There are enough laugh out loud moments to make up for the jokes that don’t work.  I’ll always like the moment when Charlie Sheen sees Martin Sheen on another patrol boat.  (“Loved you in Wall Street!”)  It’s a movie made in the vein of Airplane! but the jokes aren’t as timeless as in that classic.  Everyone remembers Rambo enough to get the main joke and the interrogation scene in Basic Instinct has left enough of an impression that Topper’s “I know what to get your for Christmas,” comment to Michelle still draws a chuckle but do you remember Body of Evidence and the first President Bush vomiting at a state dinner?  Not all of the jokes have aged well but Charlie Sheen does a decent Rambo impersonation and Lloyd Bridges’s dim bulb President is one of the more relatable parts of the movie.  Fortunately, jokes about Saddam Hussein getting flattened by a piano will always be funny.

Hot Shots! (1991, directed by Jim Abrahams)

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There are a lot of reasons why it’s hard to take Top Gun seriously but, for me, the biggest problem is that I’ve seen Hot Shots!  Directed by Jim Abrahams, Hot Shots! does for Top Gun what Airplane! did for disaster movies.

Charlie Sheen plays Topper Harley, the hot shot Navy Pilot who is haunted by the death of his father.  (“I’ve even got my father’s eyes,” Topper says before revealing that he carries them around in a cigarette case.)  Topper has left the Navy and is living in a teepee with the Old One.  Command Block (Kevin Dunn) asks Topper to return to the Navy to take part in Operation Sleepy Weasel.  Topper puts on a leather jacket and hops on a motorcycle.  The Old One tells Topper to pick up some batteries for his walkman.

Cary Elwes plays Kent Gregory, who says that Topper is not safe in the air.  Valeria Golino plays Ramada, the psyciatrist who helps Topper deal with his father issues.  Jon Cryer is Washout, who has wall-eyed vision.  Kristy Swanson is Bo, the only female pilot.  William O’Leary is the pilot who has the perfect life and wife but who everyone calls “Dead Meat.”  And finally Lloyd Bridges is Admiral Tug Benson, who has never successfully landed a plane and who has suffered and recovered from almost every war wound imaginable.  Tug is clueless but he loves America and his admiral’s hat.

Hot Shots! is one of the better parody films to come out in the wake of Airplane!  Charlie Sheen’s limitations as a dramatic actor actually made him a good comedic actor and Cary Elwes does a decent Val Kilmer imitation.  Some of the jokes have definitely aged better than others.  In 1991, Valeria Golino singing on a piano automatically brought to mind Michelle Pfieffer in The Fabolous Baker Boys but does anyone remember that film (or that scene) in 2025?  (The 9 1/2 Weeks scene is even more of a distant memory to most but Valeria Golino is so appealing in those scenes that most viewers — well, most male viewers — won’t mind.  In this case, the parody is far more successful than the original.)  Hot Shots! is at its best when imitating Top Gun‘s kinetic, music video-inspired style.  The mix of quick-cut editing and ludicrous dialogue is hard to resist.  After watching Charlie Sheen dance on his motorcycle and Cary Elwes explain what a chafing dish is for, it’s hard to take Top Gun seriously ever again.

Stripes (1981, directed by Ivan Reitman)

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Bill Murray and Harold Ramis join the army.

Wait, that can’t be right, can it?  Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were cinematic anarchists.  Early in his career, Bill Murray was the ultimate smart aleck slacker who did not have any respect for authority.  Harold Ramis was hardly a slacker but he came across as someone more likely to be marching on the Pentagon than guarding it.  Stripes is one of the ultimate examples of a comedy where the laughs come from things  that don’t seem to go together suddenly going together.

John Winger (Murray) at least has a reason to join the army.  He has a dead end job.  He has just broken up with his girlfriend.  The country appears to be at peace so why not spend four years in the Army?  It’s harder to understand why John’s friend, Russell (Ramis), also decides to enlist, other than to hang out with John.  Along with Ox (John Candy), Cruiser (John Diehl), Psycho (Conrad Dunn), and Elm0 (Judge Reinhold), they enlist and go through basic training under the watchful eye of Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates).  John and Russell go from treating everything like a joke to invading East Germany in a tank that’s disguised as an RV.  They also meet the two sexiest and friendliest MPs in the service, Stella (P.J. Soles) and Louise (Sean Young).  Russell goes from being an proto-hippie who teaches ESL to asking John if he thinks he would make a good officer.  John goes from not taking anything seriously to picking up a machine gun and rescuing his fellow soldiers.

It’s a comedy that shouldn’t work but it does.  It’s actually one of my favorite comedies, full of memorable lines (“Lighten up, Frances.”), and stupidly funny situations.  The cast is full of future comedy legends and P.J. Soles shows that she deserved to be a bigger star.  This was early in Bill Murray’s film career and he was still largely getting by on his SNL persona but, in his confrontations with Hulka, Murray got a chance to show that he could handle drama.  With all the comedic talent in the film, it’s Warren Oates who gets the biggest laughs because he largely plays his role straight.  Sgt. Hulka is a drill sergeant who cares about his men and who knows how to inspire and teach  but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about having to deal with a collection of misfits.  (Watch his face when Cruiser says he enlisted so he wouldn’t get drafted.)

The movie does get strange when the action goes from the U.S. to Germany.  What starts out as Animal-House-In-The-Army instead becomes an almost straight action movie and the movie itself sometimes feels like a recruiting video.  Join the Army and maybe you’ll get to steal an RV with PJ Soles.  That would have been enough to get me to enlist back in the day.  But the combination of Murray, Ramis, and Oates makes Stripes a comedy that can be watched over and over again.

Down Periscope (1996, directed by David S. Ward)

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After being passed over twice as a result of both a “brushing incident” with a Russian submarine and an embarrassing tattoo, Lt. Commander Thomas Dodge (Kelsey Grammer, playing Dodge as being the laid back opposite of Frasier Crane) has finally been promoted and given his own submarine to command.  The catch is that the submarine is a rusty piece of junk from World War II and he’s been assigned a crew of misfits.  Captain Dodge is to take part in a war game.  Admiral Winslow (Rip Torn) wants Dodge to prove that even an out-of-commission submarine can be dangerous by infiltrating Charleston Harbor undetected and then blowing up a dummy warship in Norfolk Harbor.  If Dodge is successful, he’ll get a nuclear submarine to command.  If he fails, he’ll be assigned of desk job and probably leave the Navy.  While the sympathetic Winslow encourages Dodge to “think like a pirate,” the antagonistic Admiral Graham (Bruce Dern) pulls out all the stops to make sure Dodge fails.

I imagine that Down Periscope was probably pitched as Police Academy In The Navy and it follows the general rules of the Police Academy films, right down to casting Lauren Holly as the one woman on the submarine who has to overcome her own insecurities and prove herself to all the men.  Unfortunately, none of the misfits on the crew are as memorable as the cadets from Police Academy and the movie’s attempts to mix juvenile humor with suspenseful naval action are not at all successful.  Having Rob Schneider go totally over the top as Dodge’s second-in-command while having William H. Macy give a serious performance as the captain assigned to prevent Dodge from reaching the harbor indicates that Down Periscope has a definite identity problem.

Harry Dean Stanton plays Howard, who is the submarine’s chief engineer and who uses whiskey as a fuel to keep the submarine moving.  Toby Huss has a few amusing moments as the electrician who keeps electrocuting himself.  Grammer, Dern, and Macy have more than proven their talents in other projects and Rip Torn will always be remembered for bringing Artie to profane life on The Larry Sanders Show.  Director David Ward also directed Major League and wrote The Sting.  A lot of talent went into making Down Periscope so it’s a shame the film wasn’t more memorable.

Wrongfully Accused (1998, directed by Pat Proft)

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Ryan Harrison (Leslie Nielsen) is a world-famous concert violinist who plays his instrument like Jimmy Page plays his guitar.  Harrison is invited to a party but when his host, Hibbing Goodhue (Michael York), is murdered, Harrison is wrongfully accused.  No one believes his story that the murder was committed by a one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged man.  Harrison is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.  Maybe he should have asked for a preemptive pardon but that would probably have been too ludicrous an idea for even a parody film like this one.  An accident on the way to prison allows Harrison to escape.  He must now prove his innocence while being pursued by the determined Fergus Falls (Richard Crenna).

Wrongfully Accused is the only film to be directed by comedy writer Pat Proft and it’s a parody film in the style of Airplane!  There are sight gags, movie references, and a lot of ridiculous dialogue delivered in deadpan fashion by Leslie Nielsen.  Richard Crenna does a decent impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones.  There’s a North By Northwest parody that involves a toy airplane.  It’s not that there weren’t enough funny moments, it’s just that there weren’t enough of them.  Most of the jokes instead felt uninspired, as if Proft just turned on his TV and tossed in a joke about whatever movie he saw being advertised.  It feels like the script was written by using parody movie mad libs.  One reason why Airplane! holds up  so well is because it genuinely loved disaster movies and there was a sense of innocence to even the wildest of the jokes.  Wrongfully Accused has some funny moments but there’s no real affection for the movie being poked fun at.  The Fugitive feels like almost too easy a target.  Leslie Nielsen and Richard Crenna score some laughs but even they sometimes seem to be just going through the motions.

As the old saying goes, dying is easy.  Comedy is hard.

Game Review: American Outlaws: The Dillinger Gang (2017, by Will 1 1)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The time is the Great Depression and you are a lawyer who has had a terrible run of luck.  You’ve lost your money, your home, and your wife.  Sent to prison for a pretty crime, you befriend the legendary outlaw John Dillinger.  When you are both released on the same day, it’s time to get back to doing what Dillinger does best, robbing banks.

American Outlaws: The Dillinger Game is a choose-your-own-adventure style game, in which you are a member of Dillinger’s gang and an associate of outlaws like Baby Face Nelson, Red Hamilton, and Homer van Meter.  The choices start out simple.  Do you accompany Dillinger on his latest robbery?  Do you head to Indiana with Dillinger or do you instead decide to join Baby Face Nelson’s gang?  The choices start to get more difficult.  Do you run when the cops show up?  Do you fight with the cops?  When a member of the gang orders you to shoot someone, do you do it?  The game keeps a running tally of the number of gunfights you’ve taken part in, the number of people you’ve injured, the number that you’ve killed, the number of banks you’ve robbed, and the amount of money you’ve made.  Depending on the decisions you make, it’s totally possible to make it all the way through this game and retire without having killed or even injured someone.  It’s also possible to be such a viscous outlaw that even Baby Face Nelson wouldn’t mess with you.  The longer your play, the more money you can potentially make but the more money you make, the more likely it is that you’ll commit a crime that will make it impossible for you to safely retire.  You could end up the last member of the Dillinger Gang.  You could also just as easily end up getting taken down by the FBI.

It helps to know the history of the Dillinger gang.  That saved my life at least once.  In fact, it’s really not difficult to survive the game.  The sensible decisions are there and easy to make.  But why be sensible when you’re hanging out with John Dillinger and there’s more and more money to be made?

This is a good game because every choice really does effect what happens to your bank robber.  There are no throw-away choices and who your outlaw turns out to be really does depend on the decisions that you make.  Because there are so many different outcomes, this is a fast-paced game can be played again and again.

Play American Outlaws: The Dillinger Gang.