Tag Archives: Sandy Helberg

The Hollywood Knights (1980, directed by Floyd Mutrux)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Halloween Night, 1965.  While the high school holds a pep rally and the Beverly Hills Homeowners Association debate the best way to tackle the problem of juvenile delinquency, the Hollywood Knights hang out at Tubby’s Drive-In, their favorite burger joint.  The Hollywood Knights are a car club and a group of fun-loving rebels, determined to have a good time and to always humiliate Officers Clark (Sandy Helberg) and Bimbeau (Gailard Sartain).  In practice, this amounts to a lot of jokes about flatulence and Newcomb Turk (Robert Wuhl) mooning the cops every chance the he gets.  I’m hoping a stunt butt was used for the mooning shots.  If I had known watching Hollywood Knights would mean seeing Robert Wuhl’s bare ass a dozen times over 91 minutes, I wouldn’t have started the movie.

The humor is crude but the movie has a serious side, one that was cribbed from American Graffiti.  Duke (Tony Danza), a senior member of the club, is upset that his girlfriend (Michelle Pfeiffer, in her film debut) is working as a car hop.  He’s also sad that his buddy, Jimmy Shine (Gary Graham), is leaving in the morning for the Army.  Jimmy’s not worried about being sent to Vietnam because Americans are only being sent over there as advisors.  Hollywood Knights doesn’t end with a Graffiti-style epilogue but if it did, Jimmy would be the one who never came home.  The serious scenes work better than the comedy, due to the performances of Gary Graham, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tony Danza.  I can’t believe I just said that either.  Danza, though he’s way too old to be playing a high school student, is actually really good in this movie.  Pfeiffer doesn’t get to do much but, from her first scene, it’s easy to see why she became a star.  The camera loves her and she brings her character to life, despite not having much screen time.

Unfortunately, the drama takes a back seat to a lot of repetitive humor.  The problem isn’t that the humor is crude.  One thing that has always been true is that, regardless of the year, teenage boy humor is the crudest humor imaginable.  Even back in prehistorical times, teenage boys were probably drawing dirty pictures on the walls of their caves.  The problem is that the humor is boring and Robert Wuhl is even more miscast as a high school student as Tony Danza was.  Fran Drescher plays a high school student with whom Turk tries to hook up.  Drescher, like Pfeiffer, comes across as being a future star in the making.  Robert Wuhl comes across as being the future creator of Arli$$.

The Hollywood Knights has a bittersweet ending, the type that says, “It’ll never be 1965 again.”  This movie made me happy that it will never be 1965 again.  1965 should have sued The Hollywood Knights for slander.  Hollywood Knights tried to mix the nostalgia of American Graffiti with the raunchiness of Animal House but it didn’t have the heart or creativity of either film.  At least some of the member of the cast went onto better things.

 

Spaceballs (1987, directed by Mel Brooks)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…

President Skroob (Mel Brooks), the evil and incompetent leader of Planet Spaceball, has squandered all of the air on his planet and is planning on stealing the atmosphere of the planet Druida.  To pull this off, he arranges for the idiotic Prince Valium (Jim J. Bullock) to marry Vespa (Daphne Zuniga), the princess of Druida.  (All together now: “She doesn’t look Druish.”)  Vespa and her droid, Dot Matrix (voice by Joan Rivers), flee Druida with Lord Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) and Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) in pursuit.

In debt to the intergalactic gangster, Pizza the Hut (voiced by Dom DeLuise), a mercenary named Lone Star (Bill Pullman) and his associate, the man-dog hypbrid Barf (John Candy), accept a contract from Vespa’s father (Dick Van Patten) to track down his daughter.  They take off in their space Winnebago to bring Vespa home.  Though they start only interested in money, Lone Star and Barf come to learn about love, freedom, and a mystical power known as the Schwartz.  (“No, the Schwartz!”)

Back when I was growing up and just being able to have HBO made you the coolest guy on the block, Spaceballs was one of my favorite movies.  I watched it every time that it came on cable.  As usual with Mel Brooks, there were a lot of double entendres that went over my young head but there was also enough goofy humor that I could laugh at what was going on.  I could quote all the lines.  I laughed whenever Rick Moranis showed up in his Darth Vader-costume.  I laughed at John Candy’s facial expressions.  I laughed when Mel Brooks showed up as Yogurt, the Spaceballs version of Yoda.  Pizza the Hut?  That’s hilarious when you’re a kid!

I recently rewatched the film.  Revisiting it was a lesson in how your memory can trick you.  I could still quote most of the lines with reasonable accuracy but nothing was quite the way I remembered it.  Rick Moranis and John Candy were still hilarious and, being older, I could better appreciated the frustration felt by George Wyner’s Colonel Sandurz.  I also realized what a good performance Bill Pullman gave as Lone Star.  While everyone else mugged for the camera, Pullman played his role straight.

I also discovered that a lot of the scenes that I remembered as being hilarious were actually just mildly amusing.  Mel Brooks was always hit-and-miss as a director, the type who would toss everything and the kitchen sink into his films.  Spaceballs has a lot of hilarious scenes but it’s obvious that Brooks didn’t have the same affection for the source material as he did with Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles or even High Anxiety.  Brooks is poking fun at Star Wars because it’s popular but he doesn’t seem to have any strong feelings, one way or the other, about George Lucas’s space epic.

I still laughed, though.  Even if Spaceballs wasn’t the masterpiece that I remembered it being, I still enjoyed rewatching it.  The jokes that hit were funny enough to make up for the ones that missed.  Even with his weaker films, Mel Brooks is a national treasure.

Meet Wally Sparks (1997, directed by Peter Baldwin)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Wally Sparks (Rodney Dangerfield) is a talk show host with a program that is so raunchy that even Jerry Springer says, “At least this isn’t The Wally Sparks Show!”

Despite being a huge hit amongst teens and college students, the show is on the verge of being canceled by the head of the network, Mr. Spencer (Burt Reynolds, wearing a fearsome toupee).  He is tired of Wally’s antics and he tells Wally and his producer, Sandy Gallo (Debi Mazar), that they have a week to make the show respectable.

Wally doesn’t know what to do.  Wally Sparks act respectable?  Wally’s a guy who don’t get no respect, no respect at all.  Then Sandy finds a letter inviting Wally to attend a party at the home of Georgia Governor Floyd Patterson (David Ogden Stiers), a noted critic of the show.  Hoping to get the interview that will save the show, Wally and Sandy head down south.

At the party, Wally acts like Wally and scandalizes all of the politicians and socialites.  He also shares a bottle of whiskey with a horse and then rides the horse through the mansion.  The party is a disaster but, after Wally claims that he can’t walk because of a spinal injury he suffered when he fell off the horse, the Governor allows him to recuperate in the mansion.  Wally causes more chaos while also teaching the Governor’s wife (Cindy Williams) how to play strip poker and eventually exposing a scheme to blackmail the Governor into building  a Confederate-themed amusement park.

Rodney Dangerfield playing a talk show host sounds like a great idea and there are a lot of talented people to be found in Meet Wally Sparks.  Debi Mazar is an actress who should have appeared in a lot more movies and she and Rodney Dangerfield make a good team.  The movie actually gets off to a funny start, with a montage of actual talk show hosts talking about how much they hate Wally Sparks and his show.  Gilbert Gottfried has a cameo as a manic guest and Wally repeats some of Rodney Dangerfield’s classic jokes.

Unfortunately, the movie starts to fall apart as soon as Burt Reynolds threatens to cancel the show for being too lowbrow.  No network executive has ever threatened to cancel a show that’s bringing in the ratings, regardless of how lowbrow it might be.  Things get even worse after Wally goes to Atlanta and ends up staying there.  The movie tries to recreate the Snobs vs. the Slobs dynamic of previous Dangerfield films but the Governor comes across as being such a decent man that there’s no joy to be found in watching his life get turned upside down.  The movie has a surprisingly large number of subplots, including one about Wally’s son (Michael Weatherly) falling for the Governor’s daughter (Lisa Thornhill), but most of them go nowhere and just distract from the man who should have been the film’s main attraction, Rodney Dangerfield.  By the end of the movie, even the usually irrepressible Dangerfield seems to have been neutered.

Rodney Dangerfield was a national treasure but Meet Wally Sparks was not the best showcase for his persona or his style of humor.  Fortunately, Caddyshack and Back To The School are available to watch anytime that we need a good laugh and we want to show Rodney Dangerfield a little respect.