Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.

Review #2318: Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.

Cast: 

Jon Voight (Bill Biscane/Kane), Scott Baio (Stan Bobbins), Vanessa Angel (Jean Bobbins), Skyler Shaye (Kylie), Leo, Connor and Christopher Lewis (Baby Kahuna), Justin Chatwin (Zack), Peter Wingfield (Crowe), Shaun Sipos (Brandon), Thomas Kretschmann (Roscoe), Stefanie von Pfetten (Jennifer Kraft), with Gerry and Myles Fitzgerald (Kahuna; voiced by David A. Kaye), Max and Michael Iles (Archie; voiced by Danny McKinnon), Jared and Jordan Scheideman (Finkleman (voiced by Jonathan Singleton), Maia and Keana Bastidas (Rosita (voiced by Melissa Montoya), and Joshua and Maxwell Lockhart (Alex; voiced by Rashad Hood) Directed by Bob Clark (#020 - A Christmas Story, #679 - Black Christmas, #1055 - Porky's, #1854 - My Summer Story, #2149 - Baby Geniuses)

Review: 

There really is no point in saying the obvious, but the original Baby Geniuses (1999) was a semi-success with audiences despite its ungodly idea of having babies that talk with mouth morphing. The only souls alive that really wanted another of these films must've loved the power of the dollar and also thought audiences really would be stupid enough to go with it a second time. You might remember that the genesis for what became the first film was partially at the hands of Jon Voight, who had sprung the idea of a script that had been done about intelligent babies, and that Voight showed a proof-of-concept film about babies sitting around talking. Of course, Clark eventually fiddled with things to be more about corporate intrigue for the movie that escaped onto theaters (the rare occasion when direct-to-video might have served this crap better). Voight, who was an executive producer on the film, now serves as the chief adult star to go along with one person returning from the last film. Gregory Poppen wrote the screenplay while Steven Paul (one of the people responsible for the last film's script) wrote the story and produced the film. Paul apparently really fought for the film when it came to the dawdling of actually releasing it, since as quoted by Voight, he was the who kept "awareness of it up." Truly inspiring. I can imagine that Now & Forever (2002), the only theatrical effort Clark did between the Baby Geniuses films that closed out his career before his untimely death, could be better. There were no more of these movies in theaters, but Voight appeared in three Baby Geniuses movies for the direct-to-video market. Tragically, Clark died in 2007 at the age of 67 in a head-on car crash, with this being his last feature film.

Now you have super babies with super strength to go along with brother reveals and plans about TVs making kids stay inside the house (nowadays you might as well worry about the iPads seeping one's attention span). It isn't particularly worthy to get mad and launch a comprehensive review about how this manages to be worse than the original, one that might make you wonder if you could give a -1 rating to a movie. The whole movie just seems unnatural, ugly and lifeless in ways that even mediocre movies blow out of the water in terms of actual entertainment value. Nothing changed in the five years from the first film to make one believe babies could be funny talking except for the people making it. I wonder how they came up with the idea of an apparently immortal being that will be stuck in the body of a three-year old baby that goes around protecting kids in his weird lair. Voight must've been watching too many movies about German-speaking doctors and thought it would be a neat bit for this film. There may have been movies in Voight's past and present that were actually effective, but this is clearly not one of them for a movie that would've been great to crush in the Berlin Wall. Baio has exactly one film credit that I remember with Bugsy Malone (1976), which had child actors play adult roles, incidentally. The nicest way to describe him here is "vacant". Shaye gives it a go for a movie that offers one nothing beyond a check. You know those cheesy b-movies that maybe don't have the effects or all-around acting to get the whole way across the finish line? Superbabies proves that having money ($20 million apparently) to pair Academy Award winning actors with effects made from the backside of God is not everything. Let's just throw out some words to call the movie to at least practice some alliteration for "education" about the movie: Incoherent, incompetent, insane, insecure, idiotic, ignominious, ignorant. I would rather see someone feed AI this crap just to see how it would respond to getting soullessness for a prompt (editor's note: do not do this).

Hell, I've run out of bile, so in the tradition of Thanksgiving, let me just repurpose old material for you: Getting kids (age 5-9, apparently) rather than adult voices to voice the babies (such as say, Look Who's Talking [1989]) is probably the least sad thing of the whole thing. What could possibly invite you to waste 95 minutes on a movie that never succeeds in every joke that is attempted? If there was a God, I do not believe that watching babies walk and talk would be high on the priority list. You might as well call it the film most likely to be thought of as having no soul in it. The people who made this film probably did not think much of the film either during or after production, but that doesn't give an excuse for this being one of the worst things I have ever seen. Hell, it shouldn't even be called a film, it should be put in a special garbage can that you would put expired food products in. You might think, oh, well, Monster a Go-Go (1965) is filled with more inconsistencies and worse acting. Well, maybe, but that has the label of being made in weirder circumstances of "make the best out of the footage", what kind of excuse does this Hollywood slop have? Absolutely none. Clark and his team probably thought it was one of those things you can put on for the kids and enjoy, but no, they did not. It's easy to say folks are mailing it in, but, well, yea, they are mailing it in as if this was a direct-to-video production, complete with little motivation to do much of anything. They repeat one line four times in quick succession and later do a repeat of a gag where an adult gets tricked into getting hit in the beans after talking about it. The voices coming out of those babies were never going to work with how it looked because it just isn't a useful effect that you would want to see for very long. It is a gag that has run amok for what might as well count for anti-comedy. Truly, this was a sad experience to sit through, because it means that Bob Clark may be one of few people who directed both a vaunted classic and a horrendously awful feature in the same career. Avoid, unless you like garbage.

Overall, I give it 0 out of 10 stars.

Next up: Black Friday gives you relief in boredom with the return of W. Lee Wilder and The Snow Creature.

Redux: A Christmas Story.

Redux #020: A Christmas Story.

Cast: 

Peter Billingsley (Ralphie Parker), Jean Shepherd (Narrator), Ian Petrella (Randy Parker), Melinda Dillon (Mrs. Parker), Darren McGavin (Mr. Parker - The Old Man), Scott Schwartz (Flick), R. D. Robb (Schwartz), Zack Ward (Scut Farkus), Yano Anaya (Grover Dill), and Tedde Moore (Miss Shields) Directed by Bob Clark.

Review: 

From my review on December 25, 2010: 

This film, is a classic. it's a film that has decent acting (albeit with some overacting at points), a story that has many themes to go with it that connect into one (with some...fantasies by Ralphie) It's funny, but it can also be serious. It's a timeless classic that was once overlooked back in 1983, but it is now considered to be a classic in the Christmas spirit. Merry Christmas, and I hope you watch this film at least once this year, if not twice (as it's on a marathon right now...).

If you have not encountered this film on cable television or on the video shelves, it would be quite a curious achievement for a film that has grown in stature since its release in November of 1983, which is now forty years old. The making of the film was a long and lengthy process that really should start with Jean Shepherd and his unique place among the art of telling a narrative to others. Born in Chicago but raised in Hammond, Indiana, Shepherd had served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the second World War before getting into radio that saw him move around various places such as Indiana and Ohio (there was also an attempt at late night television) before his most noted run came at WOR in the New York area, where he broadcasted for over two decades beginning in 1956. Somehow, with a timeslot of 1:00-5:30am, it all came together for those monologues (as opposed to playing music records). Probably his most notable stunt came with I, Libertine, a practical joke novel born in 1956 out of making fun of how bestseller lists were done (where people would just go to libraries and ask for it, complete with listing a publisher and a fake author name), which became such a noted phenomenon that an actual book was created (written by Theodore Sturgeon based on an outline by Shepherd). Shepherd kept busy even when not on radio all the time, whether that involved segment work, commentaries on other radio outlets / in magazine form / the college circuit, or, well, script work in television and this film. In 1966, Shepherd's novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash was published, which came about after Shel Silverstein had encouraged him to put his musings from tape into book form, which saw him help Shepherd with editing and developing. His musings were loosely inspired by experiences that aren't exactly autobiographical but are, well, ones that might seem real to you or me in the ways that matter - it was a hit book. A couple of Shepherd works had reached television (with him as narrator) before and after the release of this film, such as The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (1982) for TV. Shepherd apparently envisioned the film as "Dickens’s Christmas Carol as retold by Scrooge.” Shepherd, along with his wife Leigh Brown, wrote the film with Clark. The Louisiana native grew up in Alabama and Florida and had dabbled in philosophy and football before entering film in horror, such as with Black Christmas (1974). He had an interest in making a film of Shepherd's stories, but he couldn't get funding from MGM until the success of Porky's (1981). The film was done in Toronto for interiors and Cleveland for exteriors, but in that manner of low-budget films having to improvise, a lack of snow meant a variety of tricks used for snow, such as foam. You could watch the film in any one scene and feel right at home, whether that involves the reveal of that primal instinct coming out in going from tears to drawing blood in a fight or those imagined sequences of being a gunfighter or being blind from soap that isn't too different from the delusions one can find as an adult when it comes to assurances. 

The mundane things that make us who we are really do come into account for this film, one that runs for an efficient 94 minutes. Sure, it has the softening of nostalgia (as per Clark to the chagrin of Shepherd), but at the end of the day, we are weird little people every day of the year with our own little things to get hung up on, and such weirdness can be really funny to look at again and again. It was a modest success with audiences of the time, don't forget that part. But why do people like me come back to this film every now and then?  Shepherd once put it best: “Ah, life is like that. Sometimes at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.” One can be playing with their present and boom, something comes up to remind us that things will come and go the way you cannot control, holiday or not. Billingsley proves more than just a vessel for Shepherd to narrate the observations of memories past with his worthwhile timing that make for useful delight. It is a film for the kids and adults because it doesn't dawdle on BS'ing you about where things stand. There are no weak elements to the kid actors because they seep right into the story with no pretensions of being anything other than who they are: vessels to show us the weirdness of growing up in the pains and very few pleasures. Dillon and McGavin hold the film as the paragon of lovingly human people that hold it all together in that great connection of showing family in the clearest sense of making it work in spite of itself. Probably the best way to show that is in that fateful reveal of the last Christmas present where you see the faces of the two as Billingsley opens it (notice that through the previous parts of the film, McGavin's character never talks to Billingsley about a "Red Ryder BB Gun"). The film may seem like one all about the pursuit of an object, but really it is about who we are when it comes to the basic elements deep inside us, whether the calendar says December 25 or not. We lash out in those certain moments, we imagine others as witches or people to liberate with our perspective (hey, saving people with a "BB gun" or writing a theme isn't that too different), we try to do our job until we can start getting the shoes ready to head out, you get the picture. The film may be set in that time of the 1940s, but those desires and impulses are timeless and Clark knows what he can show in a film that doesn't stoop awkwardly in its perspectives. There are no dull moments shown here, and it is that tinge of bittersweet nostalgia that makes it all count in spite of whatever Shepherd may have thought of the whole thing. We connect with the material because there is a chunk of it in us more than we think it is. The films of the old in Christmas-flavoring like Miracle on 34th Street (1947) did their thing in holiday magic of belief, but this is a representation of holiday homespun honesty in the ideal way.

It was at the turn of the 1980s that Shepherd thought to drive an idea for a follow-up to this film. Perhaps it only made sense that he called it purely an exercise to try and make money, since he saw the following that was growing with rerun showings (i.e., royalties), which apparently saw a bunch of showings around the Thanksgiving season rather than just on Christmas Eve (1997 was when the whole tradition of Turner Broadcasting running it for 24 hours straight started, incidentally). My Summer Story (formerly referred to as It Runs in the Family) (1994) retained Clark as director and Shepherd as narrator, which is amusing considering that the two hadn't got along in the first film because of the incessant suggestions that Shepherd tried to give on set that led to Clark not allowing him to be there at all. The second Story film came and promptly died in little-run theaters. A Christmas Story Christmas, a film with a handful of returning cast members, was released in 2022 to a streaming service (gag). At any rate, the enduring element of the film that became more than just a low-budget sleeper is the everyday aspect that makes us chuckle in the holiday sense of the word. The item that one desires and the ways we toil in that wish (child or adult) is amusing when you really look at things, and it only makes sense that it has endured for generations as one to blare from the rooftops again and again. The inflections of mundane life and the odd nature of trying to look back at such things in life make for a great contradiction in the grand scheme of things that make an enduring winner that could only come from Clark and Shepherd in the best of ways.

Overall, I give it 10 out of 10 stars.

Baby Geniuses.

Review #2149: Baby Geniuses. 

Cast: 

Kathleen Turner (Dr. Elena Kinder), Christopher Lloyd (Dr. Heep), Peter MacNicol (Dan Bobbins), Kim Cattrall (Robin Bobbins), Dom DeLuise (Lenny), Ruby Dee (Margo), with Leo, Gerry and Myles Fitzgerald (Sylvester "Sly" & Whit; voices by Miko Hughes), and Kyle Howard (Dickie/Ice Pick) Directed by Bob Clark (#020 - A Christmas Story, #679 - Black Christmas, #1055 - Porky's, #1854 - My Summer Story)

Review: 

"We wanted to go for a more realistic presentation of the concept." - Bob Clark.

Oh no, Bob Clark. This was the guy who did horror such as Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972) and Black Christmas (1974) before getting to do comedy/dramas such as Tribute (1980). After that, every film of his seems to remind one of a rollercoaster, as for every sleeper-turned-classic such as A Christmas Story (1983)...there was a litany of films that went down the road of audience appreciation such as the following: Porky's (1981 - hit, for better or worse), Porky's II: The Next Day (1983 - hit, somewhat), Rhinestone (1984 - the odd flop), Turk 182 (1985 - flop), From the Hip (1987 - flop), Loose Cannons (1990 - flopped harder), My Summer Story (1994 - little-seen flop), I'll Remember April (1999 - ???)...and then this. The involvement of Bob Clark with what became this film started in 1994. Clark ran into Jon Voight when attending a play and heard about a script that Voight wanted to do with his company that he had formed with Steven Paul in Crystal Sky Productions; Paul came up with the initial concept because he saw two babies communicating to each other once. This script (with multiple writers having gone through it) involved babies. While the script didn't look great to Clark (it involved portals called "Baby World"), he was interested in the short film he was shown involving babies sitting around in a meeting like they were executives (i.e., morph technology). Clark led the charge for a shift in the script that honed to the corporate angle because the other script seemed less "fresh." Of course, Clark had every reason to be nervous with the effects, but Babe (1995) certainly cooled fears a bit when it came to morphing. The effects when it came to the babies fell to the hands of Creative Special Effects when it comes to lips and mouths (alongside other stuff like natural head movements) for the babies for, well, conversation. By default, the CGI is a pioneer of some sort when it came to mouth movement, with credit of course going to babies...hitting their marks along with the use of a 15-year-old little person and a young gymnast for dancing and karate moves. Would you be surprised to hear that the film had a dubious release history? It was first planned for a release in Christmas of 1997 before incomplete effects meant a new target of 1998 and then 1999, and there was even the possibility of just shuttering the film as a Columbia TriStar Home Video release in the direct-to circuit before the movie slithered onto theaters in March of 1999, which managed to garner marginal attention from audiences. Five years later, Clark returned to direct a sequel with Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004), now with Voight serving as a star to go with Paul writing the screenplay and serving as a producer. Somehow, that film has a much worse reputation than this film, and it happened to be the last film directed by Clark, who died in 2007 at the age of 67.

Getting kids (age 5-9, apparently) rather than adult voices to voice the babies (such as say, Look Who's Talking [1989]) is probably the least sad thing of the whole thing. What could possibly invite you to waste 95 minutes on a movie that never succeeds in every joke that is attempted? If there was a God, I do not believe that watching babies walk and talk would be high on the priority list. You might as well call it the film most likely to be thought of as having no soul in it. The people who made this film probably did not think much of the film either during or after production, but that doesn't give an excuse for this being one of the worst things I have ever seen. Hell, it shouldn't even be called a film, it should be put in a special garbage can that you would put expired food products in. You might think, oh, well, Monster a Go-Go (1965) is filled with more inconsistencies and worse acting. Well, maybe, but that has the label of being made in weirder circumstances of "make the best out of the footage", what kind of excuse does this Hollywood slop have? Absolutely none. Clark and his team probably thought it was one of those things you can put on for the kids and enjoy, but no, they did not. I can't tell who to feel sorrier for when it comes to being present in such a bad feature here, Lloyd (future voice in Foodfight!) or DeLuise (guy who appeared in past junk such as Sextette, and The Magic Voyage dub); Lloyd's most dubious scene might as well be his second one, when he accesses a computer that only is there to deliver exposition to the audience and serve no other purpose. Well, okay, maybe Turner, because she has more time than each actor and doesn't even get to chew scenery. Imagine my shock, no scene chewing in a movie that has less life on it than the planet Mars. Even if you want to term MacNicol and Cattrall as just sleepwalking through their roles, why should they be given slack? It's easy to say folks are mailing it in, but, well, yea, they are mailing it in as if this was a direct-to-video production, complete with little motivation to do much of anything. They repeat one line four times in quick succession and later do a repeat of a gag where an adult gets tricked into getting hit in the beans after talking about it. The voices coming out of those babies were never going to work with how it looked because it just isn't a useful effect that you would want to see for very long. It is a gag that has run amok for what might as well count for anti-comedy. Truly, this was a sad experience to sit through, because it means that Bob Clark may be one of few people who directed both a vaunted classic and a horrendously awful feature in the same career. Avoid, unless you like garbage.

Overall, I give it 0 out of 10 stars.

Next: The Lonely Lady.

My Summer Story.

Review #1854: My Summer Story.

Cast: 

Charles Grodin (Mr. Parker, the Old Man), Mary Steenburgen (Mrs. Parker), Kieran Culkin (Ralphie Parker), Christian Culkin (Randy Parker), Whit Hertford ("Lug"), Chris Owen ("Scut" Farkus), Geoffrey Wigdor (Flick), David Zahorsky (Schwartz), Tedde Moore (Miss Shields), T.J. McInturff (Grover Dill), Glenn Shadix (Leopold Doppler, Manager of the Orpheum Theater), and Roy Brocksmith (Mr. Winchell, The Assessor) Directed by Bob Clark (#020 - A Christmas Story, #679 - Black Christmas, #1055 - Porky's)

Review: 

A Christmas Story (1983) was a loose working of two Jean Shepherd works: his 1966 book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and his 1971 book Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories And Other Disasters. Shepherd, along with Bob Clark and Leigh Brown (Shepherd's wife), wrote the screenplay for the movie. You might not know that Shepherd was the best man to serve as narrator, since the screenplay was based on a series of monologues that he had done on the radio (his broadcasts on the station WOR made him quite popular); he was known for his "interesting" manner of telling tales about his life that balanced the line of fact and fiction while saying that his work was "anti-sentimental". Shepherd had been born in Chicago, Illinois before being raised in Indiana (East Chicago along with Hammond, where he graduated). Clark, inspired by hearing one of Shepherd's stories being told to him on the radio, spent twelve years trying to make the movie, and a couple of Shepherd works had reached television (with him as narrator) before and after the release of this film, most notably with The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (1982), a TV work with Matt Dillon as "Ralphie". The movie lessened the acid edge of the Shepherd stories, which he had envisioned as "Dickens’s Christmas Carol as retold by Scrooge.” At any rate, the moderate success of the film on release led to a plethora of television channels showing the movie on Christmas not long after it was released, and the popularity on the television circuit (rightfully) continues to this day. Shepherd, seeing the returns made from its showings on television, was inspired to try and make another movie based on his stories. Of course, it is also possible that Clark wanted to make a sure winner, since Clark directed these films after the release of A Christmas Story: Rhinestone (1984), Turk 182 (1985), From the Hip (1987), and Loose Cannons (1990). Somehow, idiotically, the movie was released as It Runs in the Family to tremendous empty returns. It was only after the movie had vanished from theaters that it was retitled My Summer Story, which is what you will see on video releases.

Of course, in waiting eleven years to make a movie with the same director and writing crew (along with being shot primarily in Cleveland), the main cast was entirely replaced. Oh, and now one is watching a series of vignettes that seem like an anthology rather than the offbeat material presented in the original, one that saw a handful of imagined scenes, such as our lead imagining himself as a hero stopping bandits from taking down his family (dressed up in frontier garb) with his imagined gun. So, instead of a movie where a kid's desire for a Red Ryder BB Gun that happens to feature little side stories in the spirit of Christmas, now one has a movie with small plots for the main family that has a central story of...super-duper tops along with a neighbor with hillbillies (or whatever you would call them). Of course, neither is really about the acquisition of an item as it is more about capturing the spirit of a time long ago told in engaging vision; Shepherd may think his stuff was anti-sentimental, but the heart of what made that movie work was how one confronts their childhood memories in its positives and negatives without being trapped by them. In other words: it was the experiences that stuck with one rather than some toy. Somehow, the movie just doesn't come together, proving that having the same crew behind a classic does not mean the next movie together will work out just the same. Simply put, putting a bunch of new faces will not make a winner when they can't quite live up to mildly interesting expectations that are flattened. Look, we all know that A Christmas Story can raise a distinct discussion when it comes to just how funny it actually is (spoiler: it is funny, no shit), but no one will really have that kind of discussion with My Summer Story, since it doesn't even reach half of the heights of amusement that the previous film had. Shepherd once stated that "The reality of what we really are is oftentimes found in the small snips way down at the bottom of things.” My Summer Story is basically the flattened expectations of what we thought summer was going to be...with life being like a series of ties. Who the hell would want that kind of movie? If Shepherd didn't care for the lightened touch of the original film, why go back with the original crew? And if he was fine with what was done before, why make a movie that seems thoroughly pale in spirit to the original?

It was a tough task to replace Peter Billingsley as the lead from the original, since he managed to cultivate an interesting lead presence in youthful charm. Culkin...doesn't really have that charm. One simply feels like they are watching a television product rather than something that reaches the level of film in conviction, which he just can't capture, and being paired with his brother doesn't lead to even a fraction of the brotherly amusement seen in the previous movie. I'm told that Grodin was actually a pretty funny actor with timing like no other in sardonic charm, even if his film choices were all over the place, ranging from The Heartbreak Kid (1972) to Beethoven (1992). Here, replacing Darren McGavin from the original, he just doesn't have what it takes to really capture the role from before, seeming more of an agitated father figure than the hardboiled tender role of the original. It probably doesn't help that he has an actual foil to deal with in the "Bumpus Family", which proves the case that you sometimes don't need to see something. Melinda Dillon held the original film pretty well in her timing that counteracted McGavin that practically resonated together with no effort needed. Steenbergen has the best timing of the main group here and is thus the only one to result in general charm, probably because her character arc is the most bewildering (read: interesting) of anyone in the movie, involving a bunch of gravy boats and irritated collectors, which she handles with semblances of laughs. The movie might prove fine for those who want something really average, since the technical aspects of its look and feel does at the very least seem adequate to anybody with the tiniest curiosity for the movie or to just spend 85 minutes. As a whole, the movie just seems lost in trying to capture the (ordinary) magic that had been seen a decade prior, one that was made too late to really have an impact while also serving as the strange cousin of future attempts at trying to cash in on the original movie that included a musical, a direct-to-video sequel, and even a live show. Sometimes the best thing to do is to just walk away and satisfy a different curiosity.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

Porky's.

Review #1055: Porky's.

Cast: 
Dan Monahan (Edward "Pee Wee" Morris), Mark Herrier (Billy McCarty), Wyatt Knight (Tommy Turner), Roger Wilson (Mickey Jarvis), Cyril O'Reilly (Tim Cavanaugh), Tony Ganios (Anthony "Meat" Tuperello), Kaki Hunter (Wendy Williams), Kim Cattrall (Miss Lynn "Lassie" Honeywell), Nancy Parsons (Coach Beulah Balbricker), Scott Colomby (Brian Schwartz), Boyd Gaines (Coach Roy Brackett), Doug McGrath (Coach Fred Warren), and Chuck Mitchell (Porky Wallace) Directed by Bob Clark (#020 - A Christmas Story and #679 - Black Christmas)

Review: 
Admittedly, I am not the biggest watcher of teen comedies. Aside from a few exceptions (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Superbad), this is generally a genre I'm not all too big with, although I'll say that at least I went into this film with an open mind, trying to not give this movie a hard time on purpose. In any case, this is a raunchy kind of teen flick that didn't really click with me all too well, although I can at least recognize its influence for other teen comedies, for better or for worse. The characters are vaguely memorable, but I didn't really find anybody to be really that funny, particularly since nobody looks/sounds like teenagers to begin with. The standout for me is Chuck Mitchell, who (despite being billed deep into the credits) plays Porky with the right kind of intimidation and sleazy nature that works in the short amount of time he's on screen, being the right kind of pig in a farm of mild-leveled ferrets trying to make you laugh. For me, the situations didn't really click for me, whether it was the main plot or the parts with other characters because the cliches feel smarmy this time around.

The film is vulgar and gross, but it isn't something that you would be surprised by, with one or two funny gags throughout. Director Bob Clark based off incidents from his time of growing up in high school and college for the film, and while I can't say they make for very funny instances, I will at least credit him for trying to make a film that looks like something a teenager could relate to. I can't get mad at something that is low bar if it aims for it intentionally. The film was shot in Florida, but it was produced by a Canadian company, Astral Bellevue Pathe Inc, with the success of the film meaning that it is the most successful "Canadian" film of all time. Like it or hate it, Porky's manages to both attract and repel audiences based on its content and weirdness. I can't really endorse it, but I also can't condemn it for being the film it wants to be, so I'd say it is something that could pique your interest if you're in the state of mind for it.

Overall, I give it 5 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: Black Christmas (1974).

Review #679: Black Christmas.

Cast
Olivia Hussey (Jess), Keir Dullea (Peter), Margot Kidder (Barb), John Saxon (Lt. Fuller), Marian Waldman (Mrs. Mac), Andrea Martin (Phyllis), James Edmond (Mr. Harrison), Doug McGrath (Sergeant Nash), Art Hindle (Chris), and Lynne Griffin (Clare) Directed by Bob Clark (#020 - A Christmas Story)

Review
Yes, the same Bob Clark who directed A Christmas Story (a movie that admittedly has its own weirdness to it) directed a movie called one of the first slasher films, Black Christmas. And hey, it's a "Christmas film" along with being a Canadian film as well. I guess surprises come in threes. But is the movie any good? Yea, I suppose so. This is a chilly little film that uses perspective from the killer and some pretty odd phone calls to make for a spooky little slasher film. The highlight for me though is Margot Kidder, who certainly seems like she's having a good time even if half of the time she is...inebriated. What is unique is the fact that the killer isn't revealed, not even at the end, as the movie ends ambiguously, all in part because Bob Clark decided to. The killer isn't really shown, but by using perspective and a voice (or two, probably), it makes for a creative way of delivering scares without having to adhere to the cliches too much. And hey, it's another movie with John Saxon, who as always is a rough but watchable authority figure. It's been 40 years since this film has been released, and it has had a remake but even now this film has a cult following and I can understand why. What we have here is a stellar movie that even inspired Halloween and Friday the 13th, which is like a sign of respect, I believe. Watch the movie, and then make sure to check the caller ID on your phone.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.