(Lisa is currently in the process of cleaning out her DVR.  It’s taking her such a long time that she’s running out of cutesy ways to talk about how long it’s taking.  She recorded this 1989 comedy off of Starz on May 10th.)

This is another strange one.

Homer and Eddie opens with Homer (James Belushi) standing on the corner of an isolated stretch of desert road.  He is hitchhiking.  When a car finally stops to pick him up, Homer is so excited!  He gets in the back seat, gives the two men in the front seat a really wide smile, and innocently asks them how they’re doing.

One of the men (played by director John Waters) holds up a gun and demands all of Homer’s money.  After Homer hands the money over, he is kicked out of the car.  As the car drives away, Homer pulls a few dollars out of his sock and loudly yells that he fooled them and that they didn’t get all of his money.

The car abruptly stops and, going in reverse, pulls back up to Homer.  Homer gives up his money and the car speeds off.

In short, Homer probably shouldn’t be hitchhiking on his own.  Homer, you see, was hit in the head by a baseball when he was younger.  He has the mind and the innocent outlook of a child.  He is cheerful, he is religious, and he is totally unprepared to deal with real world.

Fortunately, Homer won’t be alone for too long.  Homer comes across an apparently deserted car and, without money or a place to stay, he decides to use the car as shelter.  However, it turns out that the car isn’t as abandoned as it looks!  No, the car is being used by Eddie (Whoopi Goldberg).  Eddie stole the car when she escaped from a mental institution.  Why was Eddie in the mental institution?  She’s a paranoid schizophrenic and she occasionally kills people.  Eddie and Homer are soon taking a very strange road trip, heading up north so that Homer can see his dying father.

It’s a very disjointed film, one that switches tone from scene to scene.  The two stars seem to be acting in totally different movies.  Belushi gives a very broad performance, one that often crosses the line into pure goofiness.  Eddie, meanwhile, is continually and constantly full of rage.  You never know when she’s going to snap and kill someone.  I spent a good deal of the movie waiting for her to kill Homer.  Maybe that was the point but it’s still hard to laugh at scenes of Homer and Eddie waving at a school bus full of cheerleaders when you’re also waiting for Whoopi Goldberg to beat and dismember Jim Belushi.

Homer and Eddie can  summed up by one lengthy sequence.  Eddie takes Homer to a brothel so that he can lose his virginity.  While Homer is dancing around in his underwear, Eddie is at a convenience store, shooting the clerk (played by Pruitt Taylor Vince).  The clerk, who was perfectly nice to Eddie before getting shot, looks at his wound and feebly says, “Why did you do that?” before dying.

It’s a weird little movie.  Usually, I love weird moves but this one is too much of a mess for even me.  As I watched it, I couldn’t help but think of how much more interesting the movie would be if it was the child-like Homer killing people and schizophrenic Eddie trying to keep him calm.  On a positive note, this was decades before Whoopi Goldberg gave up her edginess to co-host The View and she gives shockingly good performance.  When Eddie loses control, she’s actually frightening.  But, unfortunately, the film itself just doesn’t work.