NATIONAL LAMPOON'S MOVIE MADNESS aka GOES TO THE MOVIES (1982)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Let me make things even clearer. When a studio bankrolls a movie project, usually there is hope that money will be made, even if the film is garbage. However, I do honestly believe, having read several behind-the-scenes books on filmmaking, that everyone involved does give it their best shot and hopes for the best. I do not believe this was the case with "National Lampoon Goes to the Movies," not at all. I don't believe that directors Henry Jaglom (who has made good films) and Bob Giraldi had any intention of making anything worthwile. I will go so far as to say that if anyone ever directly asked Jaglom or Giraldi of their intentions with this film, they would concur that, yes, they intended to make a worthless pile of horse manure with extra steam rising from it to stink up any theatre showing it within a five mile radius.
But let's give a brief rundown of everything that goes wrong from the start. The opening segment entitled "Personal Growth" (and presumably a parody of "Kramer vs. Kramer") has Peter Riegert as a corporate lawyer who throws his wife out of the house (thanklessly played by Candy Clark). The reason? It is time for her to grow, although they are reasonably happily married. The movie sets off on the wrong foot of cinematic ineptitude when Riegert packs up a suitcase for his wife, with everything she presumably owns, including her Tampax. Everything just barely fits in the suitcase. How is that funny? Riegert doesn't fret over not being able to close the suitcase or drop it with everything flying out of the suitcase like a bomb went off - he succeeds admirably. What if the suitcase was the size of a room and everything she owned just barely fit in there (like her wardrobe?) Or what if he thought so little of her that he packed a wallet-size suitcase that just barely fit her toothbrush?
This segment plays it straight with no jokes at all, none. An apartment full of plants is not funny. A child left behind on a fire engine is not funny. A woman kidnapping a boy in a New York City bus is not funny. The movie assumes such situations are funny without benefit of a single punchline or joke. The best it can do is to show big breasts and that, my friends, is not automatically funny. There are more laughs when Dustin Hoffman was trying to make French Toast in "Kramer vs. Kramer" than in this segment.
The next parodic segment is even worse. I'll only mention the second segment because I could not make it through the third. It is called "Success Wanters" (presumably a parody of Harold Robbins and TV's "Dallas") and it has a stripteaser (Ann Dusenberry) who is raped by businessmen who yell something along the lines of "Butter Bang!" Yes, Virginia, she is raped with sticks of butter! Sorry Miss Virginia! And to make matters worse, she takes over the margarine business (!) by giving head to the head of the margarine corporation (Robert Culp). Eventually this all leads to tasteless one-liners involving incest, heavy bracelets that can cause turbulence in a plane (Don't ask) and margarine sticks that are dropped on the floor of the margarine plant and put back on the conveyor belt for consumption. Yeah, funny.
"National Lampoon Goes to the Movies" is more than just a painfully unfunny comedy - it made me sick and sad for the human race that such garbage ever got recorded on celluloid. It gave me pain to watch it, and left me in such despair that I could not suffer through another segment of this shite (even the knowledge that Richard Widmark appears in the third segment makes me sadder). There are only three other films that I've ever stopped watching because of such pain - this National Lampoon film can safely be added to the list. This is not a recommendation.
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