Such expectations of John Landis as have been bred by Animal House and The Blues Brothers might prompt one to overemphasize the humor element here. That element is not far to seek, but much of it is limited to the inveterate wiseguyism of a couple of happy-go-lucky American backpackers afoot …
Grind-it-out sequel: just something to keep Eddie Murphy busy. The opening action sequence is well assembled, though it sets up a pattern of schizoid alternation between comedy and drama that persists throughout: immediately after the hero's boss expires in his lap, we plunge onward to airbag gags in the ensuing …
Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, as a couple of Chicago white boys tuned to a rhythm-and-blues wavelength, expand the musical act they unveiled on television's Saturday Night Live into a full-blown slapstick chase movie, travelling through a meaningful cultural landscape that includes a Catholic orphanage, a black Baptist church, a …
A for-want-of-anything-better-to-do movie. It at least serves as a reminder that John Landis made a good one once. Eighteen years earlier. His lack of inspiration here extends to the clodhopping parade of face shots, the paraphrasing and plagiarizing of the original, the employment of the Russian mafia as straw badmen, …
Prince Akeem of Zamunda -- a kind of African Shangri-La -- selects Queens, N.Y., to seek out a bride who will love him for himself, and "who will arouse my intellect as well as my loins." He finds one of those, right enough, but a dearth of laughs. Eddie Murphy, …
Female vampire, French, gamine, Peter Pan coiffed, finicky in her tastes, takes advantage of a gang war to gorge her appetite (i.e., "eat Italian"). John Landis, back in the mood of his American Werewolf in London, turns out a movie of mild horror and milder humor (the fondness of Mafiosi …
It would be possible to feel we were getting more than a comedy-thriller if we could feel we were getting at least that. A simple nonstop pursuit -- of a spacey emerald smuggler and a Good Samaritan astrophysicist by a team of Middle Eastern hit men, among others -- produces …
The Los Angeles-based Kentucky Fried Theater ensemble makes its movie debut with strung-together parodies of movies and television (included are an interminable take-off on Bruce Lee and a reasonably amusing shorter one on TV courtroom dramas). These parodies use a grapeshot attack, which is to say they are off target …
One is likely to find more inside cameo appearances than a mid-period John Landis picture in this affectionate homage to the lowliest genre of them all, the slasher film. Director and co-writer Teddy Chan’s straight out non-PC tale of courage triumphing over adversity follows a clubfooted serial killer (Baoqiang Wang) …
Surprisingly coherent and polished piece of work, considering it's from the writers of the National Lampoon and from the director of Kentucky Fried Movie; not as raunchy as you might expect, held in check perhaps by the tighter morals of the 1962 period setting, and not as funny either. This …
Optimistically titled gangster farce. (Hoped-for critical blurbs: "Oscar's a winner!" "Oscar is the best!" "Oscar, meet Mr. Price and Mr. Waterhouse.") Some of the actors -- Peter Riegert, Tim Curry, Chazz Palminteri, particularly -- get a lot of chewing out of the driest old bones: mistaken identities, switched satchels, etc., …
The opening, with hard-working music by Elmer Bernstein, is a reasonable facsimile of a straight espionage drama. The rest is an unreasonable facsimile of a Bob Hope spoof of one. (An actual cameo appearance by Ski Nose himself, in golfing togs, can't help.) Director John Landis tries to maintain a …
Sort of an understaffed Magnificent Seven, only not nearly three-sevenths as good a movie (nor even with three-sevenths as good an Elmer Bernstein score). These heroes are actually just Hollywood actors, ca. 1916, who have been invited to a besieged Mexican village for what they mistakenly believe to be a …
The Prince and the Pauper set in modern-day Philadelphia and without the gimmick of the two social opposites being physical duplicates: the princely figure, to the contrary, is a WASP financial wizard and the pauperish one is a ghetto black, and they trade places through no choice of their own, …
Four twenty-minute episodes (plus a prologue), three of which are adapted from episodes of the same-named Rod Serling TV show, and the other an original. Together, they re-evoke the heavy moralizing and ironizing and sentimentalizing that marked, and marred, the entire series. They do not re-evoke the cumulative richness of …