Post by No Personality on May 7, 2010 7:16:39 GMT -5
Diane is in a rush to get to Atlantic City and has something of a personal crisis to deal with involving an ex-lover and a business deal. Chris is a financial publisher who takes a liking to Diane and is in a personal slump of his own because his former wife divorced him and years later, he hasn't quite gotten over it. Until he meets a distraught Diane in an elevator. They have a polite, almost tender conversation at a party and she asks him for a favor. He very nicely agrees to help her out and the two strike up a friendship. He's a genuinely nice guy anyway though he has his own sarcastic cross to bear and she's only too willing to trust the kindness of a rich stranger. The next morning, they hop in his car and begin their journey to Atlantic City together in search of merriment and self-affirmation.
Got all that? Well, forget it. It never happened. At least, if any of it did happen it's erased by the time their Beamer enters the backward, hickville town of Valkenvania, New Jersey. Overshadowed by the utter insanity that is about to unfold. I have a keen respect for utter insanity. And this movie contains scenes so stunningly, so freakishly bizarre- you'll never forget them as long as you live. Honestly, this is a Hollywood film. And it immediately feels dusty because all the new characters introduced through the hasty genre changeover at about 20 minutes in are from another movie (maybe another planet) entirely. Now it strikes me that, were it not so dusty, this is the kind of thing MTV would have just eaten up- had they come up with the idea first. Could they have made it cheaper and with younger actors.
By any standards, this is a radical premise: carful of rich people are kidnapped by redneck-ish industrial small-town Jerseyans and forced to spend night in crazy courthouse (which actually is a house, with bedrooms and dining room and everything) filled with oddities and dangers of every shape, size, and variety. Oh and booby-traps. And this extends to the entire property including outdoors, so don't go off exploring by yourself or try to run away. You might not make it. And since these many ugly, twisted eccentricities are so incredibly outside the norm- it's going to be hard to then adjust to the fact that this was made by Hollywood. Never before has calling the town Holly-weird been so appropriate. The expression was only used before to suggest the people in that town are of an entirely different walk of life.
Immediately, I know that we should all hate this movie. Because the Hollywood execs who greenlit it were clueless. They thought audiences were so stupid, we would laugh at and be amazed by any far-fetched ideas regardless of how they were executed. No matter what story set-up led to scenes of a cross-dressing John Candy, hip hoppers going through a small list of classic white people disses, a moment where Demi Moore stops running to comment on an enormous pile of bat shit, and two ultra-fat, retarded full-grown mutant baby freaks who really don't even belong here- they clearly escaped from the auditions for The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. They thought we wouldn't care about things like character and subtlety because we had previously made irresponsible (but sometimes almost enjoyably rebellious) drek like Problem Child a hit for Universal.
And still, I remind myself just how much I respect utter insanity. And this was after all directed and co-written by Dan Aykroyd. Yes, any great personality in show business can make a mistake. But how am I to know it was just his? And the utter insanity within the movie is so remarkably insane that it works as a freakshow spectacle. This movie is a carnival where some of the exhibits / side shows actually do pay-off. Some of them have names as well. I'll whip out the most important one now: Mister Bonestripper. A roller coaster -slash- form of execution that takes the passenger on a ride from the door of the courthouse to a track (which twists like a regular coaster) in the backyard to the mouth of a meat dicing machine that kills the passenger, strips the bones clean, and spits the remaining pieces out the back to a huge bullseye and dump pile.
Is it cool? Well, that's up for you to decide. The unquestionable fact is- it's insane. And the scene plays every bit as bizarre as that sounds. We're treated to a test run of the thing when John Candy's male cop arrests a quartet of 30-something degenerate city punks for filling their car with booze bottles, drug paraphenalia, and street fighting weapons (in fact, some of these guys might have escaped from a lesser copy of the American Psycho world- only they're dealers who use their own products). The scene begins with a cold series of shots of them driving in a flurry of drunken, half-brooding gibberish being watched by Candy's cop car while inside he reads the speedometer (the camera never shows us his face until he gets out of the car) as their stereo blasts some truly unique, white square-hipster party-rap.
I actually want to try to describe this scene for you as best I can. I fully recommend it. Other than the fact that it's a wonderful break from what will soon become a prison of unoriginal and hellishly juvenile gross-out gags (thank God for DVD's chapter skip function and Warner for making so many chapters for this movie), tonally- it's an almost dark, anti-human moment. Not because these criminals are so believably sleazy and/or dangerous and intimidating. They're just over-the-hill party kids (had this been made years later, I could say: club kids) (and I don't think it's presumptuous of me to guess that they were all from rich families- these girls aren't exactly prostitutes) who you could smack around for hours and it wouldn't do any good (that's why they're over the hill). Tonally, it takes a detour into objective moral depravity just so it can show off this awesome Bonestripper contraption (I personally think it's way awesome).
The rest of the movie doesn't deserve this much thought, and what can I say- I'm a sucker for a great scene. Which I could say was insane simply because it doesn't have a real purpose. It's just mechanics. Yet, I found it slick and almost tense. Then, just apeshit outrageous and while that Damn Yankees' song plays in the background, the kind of insane where you just have to laugh at yourself for sitting through this or hold your hand over your face in horror. Again, at yourself, for sitting through this. We're talking Cool World insane here. You probably wouldn't be in any hurry to tell your friends you finally saw this movie. Nothing but Trouble won't be experiencing any kind of Troll 2 renaissance anytime soon. But it's worth noting that this movie just had to be an inspiration on Rob Zombie when he made House of 1,000 Corpses. Watch both back-to-back.
That was usually my key to exit a Spotlight... but I just had to detail some of the other things that I think work about this movie. This time, not because they're insane. But because they're honestly amusing (to me) novelties. Dan Aykroyd's Judge character here is annoying to the fullest but he remarks that his courthouse is a funhouse and the booby traps would have been intriguing had they been given more time. There may be some Labyrinth-inspiration going on here but hallways have many doors that require combinations (metaphorically) to open that the characters don't have and can close themselves at any time with locks and sliding wall panels and pulverising mechanisms. The slide scene works. The pickle-shooting train needed more time and maybe a better overhead shot.
I've always had a thing for devices that require rails and wheels. Hell- maybe I should have considered in my youth taking a training course in some kind of constructional, technical blue-collar vocation. Tour the whole circuit of handy-man professions as a student... Ehhh- too late now; that train has sailed. But I can't lie and say there isn't something exciting about the fantasy of being a guy who can say to another man: with me, you'll never need to call a mechanic (or plumber or landscaper or cable guy or all-around Mr. Fix-It). Now, if only I looked like Brad Pitt (circa 1992) - we'd be in business!
