chevy chase

Nothing But Trouble (1991)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

For most of my life, I’ve heard about what a terrible movie Nothing But Trouble is. From my friend Michael telling me that the appearance of Dan Aykroyd’s judge character’s phallic nose scarred him as a child to the fact that the film was the subject of one of the earliest episodes of the movie-mocking podcast How Did This Get Made? (all the way back in 2013!), all signs pointed to this movie being utterly irredeemable. Our very own Brandon has even called it “a cinematic abomination.” With Spooky Season starting to get into swing, it happened to come up again in conversation when talking about what to watch among a small group of friends, and it ended up being a surprising crowd pleaser (as well as a crowd disguster). 

Chris Thorne (Chevy Chase) is the publisher of a financial newsletter who meets Diane Lightson (Demi Moore), a beautiful lawyer, on the elevator up to his Manhattan penthouse for a party in his honor featuring some clients whom he despises. She’s been dating one of her clients who is now proceeding with some kind of landfill redevelopment plan she warned him against, and she enlists Thorne to drive her to Atlantic City the following morning so that she can meet with her ex/client in person. Two of Thorne’s obnoxious South American clients (they’re stated to be Brazilian but speak Spanish rather than Portuguese, and an image of their documents later indicate that they are from Argentina), siblings Fausto (Taylor Negron) and Renalda (Bertila Damas), invite themselves on this trip and cannot be avoided. The unlikely quartet takes off for Atlantic City, but the siblings insist that they packed a nice picnic lunch and that they should leave the highway and instead take a nice back road so that they can enjoy it. After detouring onto a series of country roads that feature nothing but the blighted panorama of industry, Thorne fails to make a complete stop at a sign in the rural nowhere of Valkenvania. Although he at first attempts to evade the pursuing officer, Chief Dennis (John Candy), the beat-up old police cruiser proves capable of overtaking Chase’s European luxury car. Dennis hauls the group before the local Justice of the Peace, Alvin Valkenheiser (Aykroyd), who doesn’t take kindly to out-of-towners. 

All of this set-up is the least interesting thing in the whole film. Chase is a charisma-free doorjamb in this one. He’s always been stated to be someone who was difficult to work with and all material I’ve read about this film indicates that Nothing But Trouble was just another notch on the old asshole bedpost for Chase. Moore and Chase feuded constantly on set, and Chase spread his malice around by acting like the larger paycheck he was making for starring in the film gave him seniority over director/co-star Aykroyd, to the point that multiple sources state that someone in the crew threatened to drop a brick on his head if he kept it up. I’m not really sure how contemporary audiences read this film, and I’m curious if they found Thorne to be a sympathetic character and if that is part of the reason that this failed to find an audience. My reading of the text is that Thorne is an unrepentant asshole; he sees a beautiful woman crying and immediately maneuvers to be alone with her in an elevator to take advantage of her presumed vulnerability, nearly sends her off with his driver when he’s hungover on the day of their trip and only decides to proceed when he sees Diane’s skimpy outfit, and allows himself to be goaded into trying to outrun local police because it stokes his ego. Although it’s arguably not fair that he’s going to end up dead on Judge Valkenheiser’s compound simply because the judge has a grudge against bankers (Thorne’s protestations that he’s a financial advisor falling on deaf ears), he’s also a smug and arrogant yuppie whose flirtation verges on predatory, and his constant smarm at the presumed lack of sophistication regarding the people of Valkenvania (accurate or not) doesn’t make him someone in whose fate we are terribly invested. Ironically, however, this makes the harrows of the situation in which he finds himself more palatable than if the film featured a more likable character (or actor). 

Negron’s character was the first to get a legitimate laugh out of me, when he begs Thorne to find “a nice vista” for them to pull over at, and that’s mere moments before the car chase begins, a solid chunk of the way into the film’s runtime. Once the group is captured and sequestered at the Valkenheiser manse, things really start to pick up. We get a solid idea of what terrible fate could befall our leads when a car of even more unsavory characters arrives in Valkenvania and appears before the judge, only for him to sentence them to death via Bonestripper, which is a roller coaster that ends in a mashing metal mouth and which features a hair metal theme tune that plays every time that Bonestripper appears; the description is literal, as the end of the machine is a chute which disposes Halloween decor skeletons into a pile, complete with cartoonish sound effects. It’s ridiculous and quite a lot of fun, and although I understand the need to establish a more grounded reality outside of Valkenvania in order for the outlandish, deadly Saturday morning hijinks to land, it’s a shame it takes so long to get there. The Valkenheiser home and compound is an excellent location and effectively quite creepy; there’s a genuine sense of a former power in decay as a mansion that was clearly quite elegant in its day is now covered in detritus juts out of the middle of a maze of scrap metal. There’s even a great matte painting as the quartet first enters the compound where we can see a downed airplane at the property’s periphery, visually implying that this place is nothing but an industrial graveyard. My friend Sam marveled at “the pulley budget alone,” and the production design here really is something to admire. 

We haven’t gotten into the prosthetic work yet, and it’s probably this that people find the most distasteful, or at the very least off-putting, about the film. Both Candy and Aykroyd appear in dual roles, and while Candy’s characters don’t require a lot of time in make-up (there’s the previously mentioned Officer Dennis, but also Dennis’s presumed twin sister Eldona, who’s just Candy in drag), Aykroyd’s sure does. The biggest groan of disgust came after the midpoint of the film, when we see Judge Valkenheiser preparing for bed, and he removes his already disgusting (and dick-like) prosthetic nose to reveal that he has no nose at all and there’s just scar tissue where it would be. It’s a great bit of grossout prosthesis, credit where credit is due. Less convincing (but no less disgusting) are the severely deformed twins Bobo (Aykroyd again) and Li’l Debbul; imagine someone in a more realistic padded sumo wrestler suit that’s been slightly deflated, then covered with a fine mist of bacon grease. They are always wet, they are always disgusting, and every moment that they’re on screen is revolting, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not also fun. 

In a contemporary review, LA Times critic Peter Rainer described the film as “a slap-happy cross between Psycho and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” and Baltimore Sun’s Lou Cedrone called it an attempt at a comedic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I would make similar comparisons, although the cultural touchstones I would reach for are probably more esoteric. The town itself and its insular nature bring to mind Deliverance or the arrival of our characters to the dilapidated town in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, through the lens of the comedic shenanigans of Scooby Doo or Scary Movie 2 (whether this is damning or not is up to you, dear reader). I wouldn’t move this movie to the top of any lists, but as a Halloween season watch that’s troubling but largely bloodless, it might be of interest to some.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Groove Tube (1974)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

The sketch comedy movie is an often derided & dismissed genre with rare exceptions like Kentucky Fried Movie breaking through to land significant cultural impact. Loosely connected sketches strung together for a full-length feature have a minute-to-minute “hit or miss” reputation with general audiences, who seem happily willing to brush them off as empty frivolity. I probably should not have been surprised, then, that the 1974 sketch comedy The Grove Tube has been largely forgotten by mainstream culture and, according to indicators like its pitifully low score on Letterboxd, dismissed even by those who have a patience for low budget experiments in independent cinema. I was still a little taken aback, though, since the film is so much funnier & more substantial than its reputation suggests. According to Wikipedia, “The film was originally produced to be shown at the Channel One Theater on East 60th St. in New York, a venue that featured R-rated video recordings shown on three television sets, which was a novelty to audiences at the time.” You can feel that artsy, confrontationally low-fi aesthetic in the film’s comedic tone, which aims more to amuse the post-hippie counterculture types of NYC than to reach as wide of an audience as possible. Shades of future counterculture comedy outlets like Wonder Showzen, UCB, UHF, and early SNL are detectable throughout. Absurdism, non sequitors, chaos disguised as order: The Groove Tube is surprisingly experimental & forward-thinking for a sketch comedy feature. Better yet, its individual sketches pay off with a much higher success rate than they typically do in these sprawling, stoner-minded comedies. It’s consistently funny.

The film opens with a fairly straightforward parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a small community of apes are confronted with the mystery of a television set instead of the Kubrick film’s monilith. When the television flips on, a druggy montage of nuclear families watching TV over inverted outer space imagery read the title credits: The Groove Tube. This is clearly a film where early 70s counterculture laughs in the face of mainstream consumerism & family values, poking holes in and making fun of the sanitized version of America that’s broadcast on television. An early sketch even parodies hitchhiking & free love nudism to establish that it’s trading in Laugh-In‘s hippie California sunshine for a much more authentic New York City grime. Period-specific Barbie commercials & “Let your fingers do the walking” phone ads are parodied, but for the most part its satirical targets are relatively timeless: corporate empires, sexual norms, hippies, news media, cops, etc. In the film’s most typifying sketch, a Bozo the Clown stand-in appears to be harmless children’s entertainment on the surface, but devolves into purient readings of erotic De Sade-type literature once parents are asked to leave the room. In another, a nonsensical cooking show recipe devolves into a kind of madness distinctly reminiscent of a modern YouTube gimmick. Originally released with an “X” rating, the film features just as much male nudity as it does female and somehow avoids ever being outright sexist despite the general grossness of its era, even as it obsesses over explicit sexuality. In a perfect world, The Groove Tube would have been exalted just as high as Kentucky Fried Movie for the way it managed to elevate the sketch comedy feature to something more than just comedians dicking around with no sense of purpose or direction.

There is one unfortunate blemish on the film that hasn’t aged well at all in the four decades since its release: a brief sketch in which a young Richard Belzer plays a black female prostitute. It’s an offensively dated, bone headed moment that certainly leaves a bad taste in its wake, but like most sketches doesn’t last long enough to make too big of an impact on the film’s otherwise impeccable runtime. The Groove Tube mimics the feeling of being up too late in a drugged out haze, flipping channels without aim, and trying to make sense out of modern culture through that window. Most sketches, then, last only for seconds at a time, with the one minutes-long exception falling down a strange rabbit hole that begins with drug trafficking & public heavy-petting and ends with psychedelic animation & sincere expressions of homosexual desire. The prostitution sketch is only a blip in the larger gestalt, with most of Belzer’s work holding up fairly well as New York City alt-comedy counterculture, a snapshot of the city’s proto-punk grit & sleaze. He’s joined in most sketches by director Ken Shapiro and a young Chevy Chase (making his first feature film appearance), who would later carry a lot of the film’s sardonic, druggy, nose-thumbing comedy to his breakout role on SNL. Besides boasting all this youthful rebellious energy and politically-minded absurdism, The Groove Tube is also bookended by the Curtis Mayfield classic “Move On Up,” which helps solidify its tone as a fun, funky slice of political anger & cultural discontent. I doubt the sketch comedy feature will ever get its due respect as a vibrant & viable film genre, but if it ever does, I’d love to see The Groove Tube included as one of its more surprisingly rewarding specimens.

-Brandon Ledet