TV was never quite like this!

One Sunday morning in late 1987, as I was just waking up, Dad was raving about this movie that had been on at 3 in the morning, and he had gotten up in order to tape it. I guess he didn't know the concept of setting the timer in order for the VCR to do that for him. Oh well...what could this be???

After a curious prologue that spoofed 2001 (which I hadn't seen yet), it opened up with a hippie guy hoisting his thumb out on the freeway, only to be picked up by a nice-looking hippie chick. They go a few miles, but she comes on to him, pulls the car over, gets out and starts running...and the clothes begin to come off. He runs after her, pulling off his own clothes while running (and trying not to fall over), getting terribly excited, running out onto a road completely naked, and...I can't give the ending away, but let's say I hadn't laughed that hard in years!

Although that segment really didn't have much to do with the rest of the movie, I was intrigued by this one, despite the really low budget it was produced under. I saw a young Chevy Chase in a few segments, including one one of just his fingers, lampooning a Yellow Pages commercial. Then a lengthy segment with a couple of guys smuggling a huge amount of pot home in order to sell it, only to end up dumping some of it down the toilet, eating it, and getting the rest stolen from their place. Kind of a poor man's Cheech & Chong, but it was actually pretty funny.

I had seen the "Ramon & Sonja" segment from this on Night Flight, but didn't get to see the movie that it came from until the 10th grade, when we found the videotape at Tower Records in the "bargain" section. We got it home, put it in, and although it looked like it had been shot on video and transferred to film, with a budget of around $40 (and even that's being generous!), I liked a lot of what I was seeing.

The film's plot is set in 1985 (ten years in the future), and centers around a senatorial hearing, in which the Tunnel Vision channel's contents are being reviewed in order to see if it's obscene or not. Looking at it now, it's funny how they predict the viewing audience losing interest in their jobs, vegetating in front of their TV's, and watching this one channel the whole day.

There are many take-offs of TV commercials, newscasts, trailers for upcoming TV movies and programs. Some of them are pretty dumb, but the whole thing is just "so bad" that you can't help but just go along with it. And although it's supposed to be set ten years ahead of its time, there's a plethora of Nixon and Polish jokes throughout it, especially during one newscast, where Nixon is tracked down to be living in a crackhouse somewhere in Compton.

The selling point on VHS 9and later DVD) editions were appearances by Chevy Chase, John Candy, Laraine Newman, and Howard Hesseman, among others, but John Candy is only in it for a few frames! Literally! And not even a speaking role!

One of Dad's friends brought this one over, in a pile of other videotapes that he brought over and left here. I had never heard of this one, but since they were making comparisons to The Groove Tube on the cover, I had to see what it was.

This one is almost a direct sequel to Tunnel Vision, as it is directed by Bradley Swirnoff, one of its co-directors. This one has another flimsy plotline, where members of the President's cabinet are alerted by the contents of one particular TV station that is broadcasting offensive material. They then alert the President himself, who has no idea what's going on. Meanwhile, the viewing audience is getting more and more concerned and outraged by what they're seeing on their TV screens; indeed, some of the shows spark off fistfights and riots in the street!

There are some interesting moments on this one, which contains one of the strangest take-offs of Charlie's Angels that you'll ever see (starring three plus-sized ladies), and Kinky Friedman tooting up coke and hosting a kids' TV show, singing about picking boogers (the song "Ol' Ben Lucas" is guaranteed to get stuck in your head for weeks!). Lots of short clips for upcoming TV shows and movies, infomercials, vacation spots, and TV commercials aplenty. Some of them go by a little too fast to fully digest, but are well worth revisiting.

Finally, the President can no longer stand it, and presses The Big Button at the end, annihilating the US in the process. Problem solved!

I found this one down at Buzzard Video in the summer of 2004. Somehow, I knew this was connected to the other movies, and--sure enough--it was: Ira Miller directed this one, and he had been one of the writers on Tunnel Vision, as well as starring as Ramon in "Ramon & Sonja".

This one seemed to be lampooning movie-theater trailers and ads...just a long, never-ending string of them, one after the other, with no narrative.

There were some good ones to behold. The Ma & Pa Kettle take-off was pretty damned funny, even if I wasn't familiar with the real thing, and their foul-mouthed pig is an absolute laugh-riot. There's one of Billy Jack finding himself on his way to Oz (by way of getting bit by a rattlesnake), and the devastating closer, "Dark Town After Dark", a Cab Calloway soft-shoe number that has its roots from racial remarks made by a US senator, which cost him his job, but left us with this song to remember him by. I can't give away the chorus, as it's too funny, and--again--will be in your head for many weeks to come!

Bill Murray is the selling point of this one, being one of his first film roles, as a condemned prisoner, but is wearing some very heavy facial makeup, perhaps to hide his acne-pitted complexion. It looks as if an undertaker did the makeup job.

The "Porky's" Trilogy

Oh, these things bring back some fond memories.

I saw the first one when I was in the second grade in the fall of 1983. It was premiering on HBO, and I had absolutely no idea what this was, especially not by the title. It didn't sound like it was going to be a Looney Tunes cartoon!

Man...I don't think I laughed as hard as I did in my life as I watched this. I had seen some funny stuff before, but this one seemed to have topped everything, and gone way beyond it. One scene seemed to be superseded by the next one in terms of hilarity: Pee-Wee's "morning wood", the guys all running out of the house stark naked, Tommy running around the schoolyard with the inflated super-size condom, Meat passing out into a bowl of chili, Coach Brackett and Miss Honeywell getting it on in the locker room (while the assistant coach is crying his eyes out laughing in the gym), and--finally--the "tallywhacker" conversation in Mr. Carter's office. I don't know who was laughing harder...them or me!

When we heard there was a second one that had come out, Dad rented the videotape of it as soon as it came out. Boy, were we excited...and the momentum of excitement slowly melted as it went on. Sure, there was some good stuff in it, but very sporadically, and nothing like the first one. The funniest scene for us was the double-sided prank at the graveyard, where poor ol' Pee-Wee was running down the road naked again, but Steve was drunker than hell and going "boogie-boogie-boogie!" on the sheriff's car!

The scene with Wendy and Commissioner Gebhardt was just plain over-the-top and seemed like a totally different movie altogether. I think half the film's budget went into that scene, by the looks of it. And it wasn't really that funny, either, although we were treated to the immortal line "Your ass sucks canal water, buddy!".

And, of course, everyone thought it weird that the man of whom the movie was named after was not in it. I've heard that Porky was supposed to have been revealed as the Grand Dragon of the KKK, but balked at the idea of running around naked with the other Klansmen, and that was the end of his involvement.

As soon as we heard that there was a third one, the whole lot of us went to the AMC8 Theatre to see it on the big screen. It was a full house when we got there, and the only seats left were right up in the front row, looking up at the screen at a not-so-great angle.

We liked the one a little better, although some of the cast was missing, the school looked different, and everyone looked a little too old to convincingly be playing high-school students. The biggest laugh we got was when the guys go past a girl bending over underneath the hood of a stalled car, Meat gets out to take a look, and when she turns around, the other guys peel out, leaving Meat there with her.

It was great to see Porky in the movie with the gang, and it was great fun to see his steamboat casino get wrecked under the bridge at the end. But it was also a little sad that this was the final go-round with the Angel Beach gang, and that there weren't going to be any further adventures with them. But what a great time we'd had!

Years later, while still in school, a friend was talking about these, saying that they were funny then, but not so much now. He noted that for a bunch of movies about guys trying to score, "you saw more naked guys running around than naked girls!". That summed it up perfectly.

"The Choirboys" (1977)

My Dad always told me about this one, which he'd seen at the theater when it came out. I'd never heard of it, it didn't seem to be out on video, and it never turned up on any of the cable stations we had (and this was when we had HBO, Cinemax and Showtime). The way he told me about some of the scenes in the movie made it sound as if it were funnier than anything in any of the Police Academy movies, which we really liked when they came out. He made it sound as if it were a good one, but since it wasn't turning up anywhere, I would have to just wait for it to appear someday.

Flash forward to 1992, and he found Joseph Wambaugh's original novel, on which the movie was based. Not only was it a great read, but was impossible to put down once you got started on it. I took it with me to school to read during any slow spots. Yes, it had its share of funny moments throughout it, but it also had its dark and sinister side to it as well. Could the movie be anywhere near as good?

Not long after finding the book, an edited version of the movie was finally shown on one of the local TV stations, Seattle's KTZZ-22. But before we get to that, let's flash forward to finding the original theatrical version on VHS in the summer of 1993.

Wow, it sure had a stellar cast with some very inspired choices to play the different characters in the movie. We have Charles Durning, James Woods, Randy Quaid, Don Stroud, Louis Gossett Jr., Burt Young as the obnoxious Sergeant Scuzzi, and a handful other of actors whose names I didn't know, but remembered by seeing them in other things, sometimes as cops.

What could go wrong?

The direction is lousy and aimless, yet (at the same time) it tries to add so much from the book into it that every scene feels rushed, with no real character development...which is too bad, as there are some great facets to all of the officers in the story, let alone some of the adventures and mischief they get into.

As with a lot of '70s comedy movies, a lot of it looks and feels as if it were a sitcom, minus the laugh track. A lot of the jokes and pranks that the guys pull on one another (or their superiors) fall flat, and get rather tiresome after a while. Another annoying aspect is the score by Frank DeVol, who composed the opening theme and background score for The Brady Bunch, which a lot of the music here sounds like.

My Dad always thought one particular scene was funny, where the racist, homophobic Roscoe Rules gets handcuffed to a tree during one of the choir-practices, naked below the waist, and promptly gets hit on by a stereotypical '70s gay person, swishing through the park, accompanied by a little pink poodle. It's funny in the book, but just doesn't translate well to the screen here.

And then the movie was made and marketed as nothing but a slapstick comedy. Again, the novel has some hilarious stuff throughout it, but it eventually unfolds into drama and tragedy toward the end, and the movie tries to end it on an uplifting note, which just seems out of place. Small wonder it was released into theaters a couple of days before Christmas...the old ploy of sticking it in the theaters to make some money off of it before the public spread the word on how bad it was.

Now, back to the edited version. The thing that really made that version of the movie so odd was that (apart from shortening or deleting the racier scenes) some parts of the film were replaced with others, and sometimes even re-sequenced. After the opening credits, the edited version strangely opens with a scene of some of the guys getting shot at by a "mystery shooter", which doesn't appear in the theatrical cut. There was scene with Art Metrano (later to play Mauser in a couple of the Police Academy movies) getting arrested and booked, which replaced the scene of Roscoe Rules and Whaddyamean Dean getting beaten up during a riot in a rundown apartment building. And of course, the memorable scene with Father Willie scuttering underneath the glass coffeetable below Officer "No Balls" Hadley was shortened on the edited version.

A potentially good movie that ended up a wasted effort (despite the talented cast), and a source of embarrassment for Joseph Wambaugh, who has since lambasted it. This is a prime candidate for either a proper re-make of the movie, or to have it as a mini-series.