Retro review: The Groove Tube (1974) comedy, Chevy Chase, Ken Shapiro

Being a glutton for punishment, I subjected myself to another 70s sketch comedy film. This time, The Groove Tube actually had moments of worth! I recall this again from the days of the video store, but couldn't remember if we ever actually rented it. Nothing rang a bell while watching it, so I guess not. I did however, have vivid memories of that video cover, and was amazed when the "character" pictured appeared in the film. More on that later...

Opening with a 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof, only with the primates finding a television instead of an obelisk, and straight into a sequence involving a hitchhiker who thinks he's getting lucky only to run butt naked into the police (and instantly surprising is that the film doesn't shy away from full frontal male nudity! The naked man in question is musician Buzzy Linhart who wrote "Ya Gotta Have Friends" for Bette Midler, which was also used in Shrek!) Another big shock was hearing Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up as the main title theme. This film just gained it's first positive points!

Next up is a brilliant take on a morning kids show, involving Ko-ko the clown (director Ken Shapiro, who appears several times). In true pre-school fashion, grown ups are told to leave the room so we can get to the "make believe time". These include reading heavily explicit passages from Fanny Hill and the Marquis de Sade. Wonderfully subversive, although maybe not belly achingly funny.
Chevy Chase pops up for the first time (don't worry, he's not overly used) in a brief advert for a diet supplement which is basically an excuse to have adult movie star Jennifer Welles strip off. No complaints here. Chase's fingers also star in an amusing take on the old Yellow Pages ad, only rather than walking, the fingers "do it"

A lengthy, but not too unfunny, TV show "The Dealers" features Shapiro once again, as he and Richard Belzer (yep, the same one who would later star in Law & Order) play a pair of drug dealers who are all too quick to ditch their stash at the first hint of suspicion. This section also includes a rather brilliant psychedelic animated section which could have come straight out of Yellow Submarine. 

 

The spoof news report, which would become a standard trope in this type of film (and indeed on TV) is actually very funny, with lots of smutty sounding foreign names and even some stock footage from the old serial, King of the Rocket Men. It also includes one of the better payoffs, and includes some funny commercials on behalf of the Uranus Corporation... There's also a section in which comical music is played over real political footage, a technique used often later by the Not The Nine O'clock News team.

A sports section, in which the International Sex Games are commentated on expands the idea used by Woody Allen in Bananas, but more graphically. The satellite link to the "action" in Germany (which looks like an old 8mm loop) amusingly breaks down when it gets too explicit. The actress on screen, by the way is Mary Mendum, who made several hardcore films with cult director Joseph W. Sarno (whose Vampire Ecstasy, 1974 was released on DVD in the UK last year) under the name Rebecca Brooke.

The most memorable skit is an infomercial warning of the dangers of VD, hosted by "Safety Sam" the intriguing looking guy on the video sleeve. Yep, that's what you think it is... The actor who had the balls to do this (sorry, couldn't resist) chose to leave their name off the credits, however..The lame song and dance number that plays the film out is superfluous once you've seen this bit!

In conclusion, while not laugh out loud funny, this is much more memorable than many other spoof/sketch based films of the time. Worth checking out if only for Safety Sam...

6 out of 10

Retro review: Loose Shoes (aka Coming Attractions, 1980) comedy Bill Murray, Sid Haig

Coming Attractions is one of many spoof film trailer films which arrived in the wake of skit-based films such as The Groove Tube (1974), Tunnel Vision (1976) and more influentially, John Landis' Kentucky Fried Movie (1978). Hitting video shelves as Loose Shoes, I recall seeing this back in the halcyon days of VHS.  Re-watching the film recently (via an awful quality grey market DVD I got from a market stall), it seems we were all so easily amused back then.

Directed by Ira Miller, who had a career as a bit-part actor in comedy films (notably in many of Mel Brooks' output), this mishmash of sketches based on film trailers was probably already out of date by the time it was made. Titles such as "The Invasion of the Penis Snatchers", "The Yid and the Kid" (a Chaplin send-up), "The Howard Huge Story", and "Skateboarders From Hell" give you the idea of the broadness of the humour on display here.

There's more misses than hits, and for the most part it's hard to even break a smile. A spot-on Woody Allen impression from David Landserg (The Jerk, Love at First Bite) in "The Sneaker" but it goes on too long to be really successful, but is at least has the right idea.

There's a slighlty amusing take on the long forgotten (at least in the UK) 1940s Universal characters Ma and Pa Kettle which involves a foul mouthed talking pig, but like most of the other skits, it out stays its welcome even at five minutes.

Some actors who are now big names make an appearance, giving the the Saturday Night Live feel of the film a little more validity. Arguably the biggest, Bill Murray, appears in a sequence where he plays a prisoner on death row. There's a few amusing moments; the prisoners plan to breakout just before his execution but fail to tell him where the tunnel is, they all eat at candelabra clan tables and the obligatory riot is started because of the choice of food and house wine, but it's certainly not side-splitting funny. Even a Wizard of Oz spoof, "Billy Jerk Goes To Oz" bombs.

Other famous faces popping up include Sid Haig (Spiderbaby, The Devil's Rejects) in a spaghetti western spoof, Susan Tyrrell (Forbidden Zone, Nightmare Maker), The Gong Show regular Jaye P. Morgan and Howard Hesseman (WKRP in Cincinnati). Harry Shearer (This Is Spinal Tap, The Simpsons) provides one of the voice overs.

The best of the famous spots, and probably the best sketch, is a spoof charity announcement one behalf of the bed-wetting charity, S.T.O.P.I.T. fronted by the legendary Buddy Hackett (It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World).

The alternate title, Loose Shoes, which is the title it was released with over here, comes from the Cab Calloway type song towards the end of the film.  During the section "Darktown After Dark", David Downing sings the song with a refrain culled from a quote attributed to a former US Agricultural Secretary, Earl Butz. He allegedly once make a joke: (quote direct from Wikipedia) "I'll tell you what the coloreds [sic] want. It's three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit". Those three things make up the chorus of the song. I would say its downhill from there, but as that was the last section, it says it all.

It just goes to show, what you may have found funny when you were younger (I was probably about 12 when I first saw this) doesn't mean it is actually funny. Woeful.
2 out of 10

Retro Review: Hollywood Boulevard (1976) Joe Dante/Candice Rialson

Candy Hope (Candice Rialson, of infamous talking vagina film Chatterbox) has come to Hollywood to make it as an actress. She is taken with the town, and hangs about under the famous Hollywood sign pondering her future. She drops in to agent Walter Paisley (the legendary Dick Miller - and if you don't get the reference in his character name you have no right to be reading this blog. Or indeed, anything on the internet. You're dead to me) who instantly advises her to change her name "that's what we do". "But I like my name; it's what people call me" This simple, yet humourous exchange is the kind of quick fire comedy we're going to get, and for the most part it works.

So, with her new moniker, Candy Wednesday is told to walk the streets, get her face out there, and be discovered. Her first job soon comes, unfortunately it's as a getaway driver in a bank heist.

  

Paisley does get her work, though and sends her to Miracle Pictures ("if it's a good picture, it's a Miracle") where she is put to work on the latest action caper from director Erich Von Leppe (the wonderful, much missed cult actor Paul Bartel, Eating Raoul) and she falls for the writer P.G. (Richard Doran). Things are not going well on the shoot though, as various stunt women and actress' fall victim to 'accidents'. Could someone have it in for them?

 

The star of the picture, Mary McQueen (Mary Woronov, who often appeared with Bartel and popped up in Ti West's The House of the Devil) seems to getting more and more worked up at the pretty young starlets getting the limelight. All of which leads up to a climax under the aforementioned Hollywood sign.

Hollywood Boulevard is a heart felt spoof of the industry of low budget film making, itself made up from stock footage and clips from various New World Pictures that the directors Joe Dante and Allan Arkush could get their hands on. If there's any action scene in the film, you can guarantee it's from something like  The Big Doll House, Caged Heat or Death Race 2000 (Frankenstein's car and costume is even used in newly shot footage). All this adds to the charm of what is essentially a look behind the scenes of Roger Corman's empire, and the Hollywood 'dream factory'. While the laughs come thick and fast in the first half of the film, (Miller's character being brilliant and Rialson displaying more than her psychical charms to show she should have been a star) the slap dash of styles (probably not helped by having the two directors off filming separate scenes) doesn't quite gel, and the attempted rape sequences (once while being filmed) are more uncomfortable to watch than the much more graphic one in I Spit On Your Grave. More offensive to some may be the inclusion of a musical interlude in which a no mark hippy band (Commander Cody and The Lost Planet Airmen) play one of their 'ditties'. Fans will rejoice in spotting the many references and nods, to films as diverse as A Hard Days Night, Robot Monster and even the smoke filled atmosphere of Mario Bava flicks. The one eyed, oafish cameraman (whose patch changes from side to side) is amusing too.

We all know what Dante did after this, but Arkush wasn't such a directorial slouch either, going on to direct many TV shows including St Elsewhere and Heroes, but also was behind the often overlooked android romance, Heartbeeps (1981) with Andy Kaufman and The Ramones film, Rock n' Roll High School (1979).

For the most part, it's a fun ride with in jokes a-plenty and and some quite irreverent humour. Keep an eye open for a Godzilla character apparently played by future Oscar winner Jonathan (The Silence of the Lambs) Demme, and a party sequence whose guests include Famous Monster creator Forrest J Ackerman, Lewis (Alligator) Teague, Joe Dante himself and Forbidden Planet's Robby The Robot (OK you're not going to miss him, not least because he has a great scene with Miller who is trying to sign him as an actor - "do you do pictures?"; "not recently, I don't do nudity" ).

The US DVD has a great commentary track in which Dante, Arkush and producer Jon Davison discuss the various footage they plundered from other films, working for Corman in the 70s, and the usual behind the lens gossip (during the shoot, one of the actress' threw their only prop grenade and lost it in some mud, so the grenade thrown onscreen is a rock)

Forrest J. Ackerman and Joe Dante (as the waiter in the background)

7 out of 10.