Bringing Down the House (2003)
Bringing Down the House isn’t so much a romantic comedy as it is a buddy movie, with all of the formulaic comic devices that the term has come to be defined as over the...
Category: Comedy
The Vagrant (1992)
The Vagrant is another of those “suburban nightmare” flicks that came out in the 80s, only a few years too late. Had it come sooner, it might have found a modest audience for those who...
High Anxiety (1977)
Spoof-meister Mel Brooks, having recently spoofed Westerns (Blazing Saddles), horror flicks (Young Frankenstein), and the silent movie era (Silent Movie), sets his sights on the works of Alfred Hitchcock in his sixth directorial effort. ...
Fargo (1996)
Although the blurb at the beginning states that Fargo is based on a true story, it’s actually not. Oh, those wacky Coen brothers are an odd couple, aren’t they? The film starts off with William...
Bates Motel (1987)
Bates Motel was announced in February 1987 as a two-hour pilot for a proposed new comedy-thriller series on NBC. It was the brainchild of screenwriter Richard Rothstein, creator of the HBO series, “The Hitchhiker”....
Old School (2003)
In my review for Road Trip, I gave the sophomoric hit negative points due to its “shameful laziness” in delivering a script that “a group of real college kids could write over the course of...
A Month by the Lake (1995)
Based on the novel by H.E. Bates, A Month by the Lake derives most of its pleasures around the likability of its stars and situations. It’s not quite up to the period piece standards set by...
The Couch Trip (1988)
Dan Aykroyd had played a variety of characters up to this point in his career, with lots of memorable ones among them, but he had never played the kind of smart-ass that he does...
Shanghai Knights (2003)
Shanghai Knights is both better and worse in many ways than the first film, Shanghai Noon, so I feel that the reaction as to which you think is the better of the two will significantly depend...
Nine Months (1995)
Nine Months is a remake of a French farce from the year before, Patrick Brauode’s Neuf Mois, which probably explains why the film tries so desperately to play every joke so over the top, with every...