SKIDOO: a drug fueled trip to self-indulgent hell

Few films better illustrate mainstream Hollywood's complete inability to grasp late 1960s counter-culture than SKIDOO.
Otto Preminger's 1968 cinematic rendering of an LSD trip is enough to put Charlie Sheen off drugs for life.
Produced and directed by the autocratic 63 year old and starring two actors with a combined age of 99 this film never stood an icecube's chance in hell of accurately portraying the youth dominated hippie movement and its fascination with peace, love and illegal substances. Heck, it's not even an entertaining parody of the culture!

But it's worst offence is not the patronising attitude towards the teens of America who chose love over war, nor is it the simplistic and stereotypical depiction of their alternative lifestyle.
It's the sheer boredom of the undertaking.
The opening scene is an ominous portend of what is to come, with Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing as Tony and Flo Banks, a long married middle-aged couple bickering over which tv channel they're going to watch. With Preminger's camera holding steady on the Banks's tv screen it switches back and forth between channels as Tony and Flo use their respective remote controls to battle for supremacy.
The temptation to reach for my own tv remote and hit the OFF button was immense, but I resisted, persuading myself - in the words of 1990s Irish dance band D:Ream - that "Things Can Only Get Better."
Oh D:Ream, what a heavy burden of guilt it is you bear.
Not only is that song forever etched in my memory as the soundtrack to Tony Blair's 1997 general election triumph and with it the image of John Prescott, Peter Mandelson and other Labour heavyweights half-heartedly mouthing the lyrics at their election night party, but it is also my automatic default internal debate clincher when faced with unmitigated dross like SKIDOO.
No D:Ream, things did not get better. They got worse.
This nonsensical, inconsequential and completely unengaging waste of space turned an hour and 37 minutes into an eternity - and not in a good way.
The leaden comedy drags along, seemingly oblivious to its awfulness and the absence of elements that might loosely be termed entertainment.
I stuck around because once I start watching a film I am really really really loathe to bail on it and also because I wanted to see how the famous old timers in the cast fared.
Not very well as it turned out.
Groucho Marx looked and sounded all of his 78 years. Not even a jet black wig and painted-on mustache could conceal his tired and weak appearance, and his obvious reading of his lines off cue-cards.

George Raft had a nothing bit part which traded on the fact that he was George Raft, former big time movie star, without giving him anything worthwhile to do. I shouldn't have been surprised at that. It's what he did in practically every film he appeared in after his star waned in the mid 1950s.
Mickey Rooney, Cesar Romero, Peter Lawford and Peter Lawford were all similarly underused.
Which left me with Gleason, whose appeal eludes me, Channing in her underwear, which is now  an image now, unfortunately, burned onto my retina, and a surprisingly charmless Frankie Avalon.
SKIDOO is bizarre, undeniably different and monstrously awful. It's not even bad enough to boast kitsch appeal. It's just self-indulgent rubbish by a director who should have known much better.

CADDYSHACK: one big yawn

My god is CADDYSHACK a huge waste of space!

For a film touted as one of the 1980s more memorable comedies it's unbelievably devoid of laughs.
Bill Murray's slack-jawed grounds keeper, locked in a life or death feud with a pesky gopher,  is self indulgently stupid, Rodney Dangerfield over-acts appallingly, while Chevy Chase sleepwalks through the film offering not a shred of evidence to justify his reputation as one of America's top funny men of the period.All three stars are comprehensively outperformed by the gopher and he's nothing more than a mechanically operated prop.
CADDYSHACK is just the kind of film we Brits offer in evidence when making the case that Americans have a weird sense of humour, and by weird we mean a propensity to laugh at material that's just not funny.
Nothing that's actually funny happens in CADDYSHACK. There's plenty of scenes and characters with comic potential if only someone had remembered to write some genuine humour into the script rather than settle for a ragbag of half-finished routines and one dimensional characters. There are too many set-ups which simply peter out before they reach the punchline. Even the grand climax - the thing the whole story's been building up to - falls flat.
I've got nothing against American comedy - I'm a big fan of Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Laurel and Hardy, David Letterman, Larry Sanders, and Jack Benny  among others - nor do I dislike low brow humour. It can be the funniest comedy in the world if it's done right, But I do object to a bunch of over-rated 'comedians' who've so bought into their own inflated reputation that they believe absolutely anything they do must be funny simply because they're doing it. Today we call it 'Will Ferrell syndrome' and there's really only one cure for it. Make these people earn the title of 'funnyman' instead of just bestowing it on them because they tell us they're funny.