Category: Comedy

Really Awful Movies: Ep 277 – Barfly

~ reallyawfulmovies ~ 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:21 — 40.9MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS | More

Mickey Rourke. Faye Dunaway. Frank Stallone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, a little impromptu discussion about the pisstank movie, Barfly.

This one is one of the more unlikely Cannon Films productions you’ll ever see, a distributor best known for cheesy action and kung fu flicks. Here, it’s a screenplay by the skid row hero and novelist, Charles Bukowski, fairly accurately depicting the author’s own life. Rourke plays Henry Chinaski, a lazy drunken layabout who stumbles between some of the meaner bars in Los Angeles.

In one of his inebriated nights on the town, he runs into love interest, Wanda (Dunaway). Along the way, he butts heads with a brutish bartender named Eddie (Frank Stallone) and gets himself in trouble with the law.

Dark, dreary, depressing, yet strangely empowering, Barfly is a dour little treat.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 272 – The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

~ reallyawfulmovies

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:44 — 49.4MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS | More

Ah, another cheap product cash-in. We love our oddball movies, and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is certainly that.

As tonally off as any movie we’ve discussed on the Really Awful Movies Podcast, we were nonetheless thrilled to visit this bizarre late eighties entry.

The plot: a kid, Dodger, is being bullied. He seeks the sagely advice of the owner of an antique shop, who also happens to have among his chachkas/wares, a garbage pail meteorite.

The proprietor warns the youngster, that while he’s working a shift, he is absolutely not to touch said trash can. But touch he does, and bam, a bunch of creatures are unleashed. Based on the toy/bubblegum cards and short-lived TV show, The Garbage Pail Kids were meant to lampoon that craze of toyland, The Cabbage Patch Kids.

Anyway, there is lots to love about this rather weird little gem. At no point in its short run time, does it not bewilder and amaze with its weird choices. There is a love interest for Dodger, who looks to be considerably older than he is, in an age-inappropriate romance (and yet the lovebirds in real life were a mere year or so apart). There are dreadful songs, weird animatronics, and more.

Check it out and subscribe!

Really Awful Movies: Ep 250 – Heavyweights

~ reallyawfulmovies

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:25 — 44.4MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS | More

A Disney movie where Ben Stiller runs a fat camp? What’s this movie called, “Box Office Poison”? (to quote an infamous Norm MacDonald appearance on Conan O’Brien).

It’s hard to believe someone actually green-lit Heavyweights (or Heavy Weights as it’s sometimes known). This 90s-era comedy came and went with little fanfare.

Like many flicks that are not successful theatrically, the film has since garnered a cult following, probably because of the involvement of co-writer Judd Apatow along with Stiller.

Ben Stiller plays fitness guru Tony Perkis, an excitable send-up of infomercial gym hucksters. He’s also a yoga aficionado as well as an up-with-people peddler of lifestyle trends

As a new owner of a fat camp (which he has purchased from a kindly, if ineffectual elderly duo), Tony Perkis is tasked with whipping a bunch of teen boys into shape.

The boys (who include among their ranks, Fat Albert and Saturday Night Live standout Kenan Thompson) are none too happy about this and decide to stage a coup along with camp counselor and co-conspirator, Pat (played by Frasier’s Tom McGowan).

This is a movie that is being pulled in opposing directions. As a New York Times critic put it, “One…is a no-holds-barred spoof of a Tony Little- or Susan Powter-style fitness merchant […] The other …a conventional family comedy that pokes lighthearted fun at the chubby young campers.”

It’s tonally very odd, but it’s also an interesting look at the comedy star Ben Stiller would soon become. Perkis’ is a fantastically over-the-the-top workshopping of a character. When Heavyweights focuses on him, the film comes to life, otherwise, it sags.

Still, there is surprisingly enough to recommend it even if it falls into the trappings of other summer camp-type movies, Meatballs, etc.

Join us on this unique episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast!