SLAPSTICK (OF ANOTHER KIND)Can you say monumentally bad? It's almost incomprehensible to imagine how this movie ever got made. To steal a phrase from X-Entertainment, this movie is like watching the rape and murder of everybody you ever cared about.
Well, maybe it's not that bad, but Lord it's not good. (Extra points if you know where I stole that from.)
SLAPSTICK stars Jerry Lewis and Madeline Khan as. . . well, let me try to describe the plot to you.
The movie begins shots of space with a voiceover from Orson Wells and Madeline Khan. They are presumable alien intelligences complaining about how the Chinese have misused the emissaries they sent to them. So they take them back, and cause new emissaries to be born to an earth couple. Thus Jerry Lewis and Madeline Khan give birth to the ugliest twins ever born.
Flash forward 15 years. The twins have grown freakishly huge. The twins are also played by Jerry Lewis and Madeline Khan, and they are sporting some of the most hideous makeup you will ever see. They are given facial prosthetics and gigantic foreheads covered by terrible wigs. Comparatively, BATTLEFIELD EARTH seems to be on the right track. Anyway, when they put their bloated noggins together they are supergeniuses. Also, said noggins start pulsing like there are brain worms inside, itching to burst free.
Meanwhile, the Chinese, now miniaturized to the size of action figures, are scheming to get these twins to reveal to them the secret of gravity.
It would take a Begg-length review to encapsulate how woefully misguided this film is. The back of the box bills it as a "tragi-comedy", which just means the long stretches of piteous humor are punctuated by long stretches of piteous melodrama. The melodrama scenes are brutal. Don't get me started on the "incest taboo" speech.
Finally, this movie is based off a Kurt Vonnegut novel of (almost) the same name. Poor Kurt. How many movies are currently vilifying his name? To be fair to the movie, it wasn't a great Vonnegut novel. All the ideas in the movie are in the book. But screw that, let's not be fair to this movie. What the hell were they thinking? All parties involved must share the blame. Jerry Lewis, Jim Backus, Madeline Khan, Marty Feldman, Orson Wells, the director Steven Paul. All deemed guilty.
P.S. I just got done showing ths one to a group of my friends. We watched the whole thing, stupified by the hideousness of it all. My finest hour. I didn't have the heart to back to back it with TROLL 2.
