1986 - THREE AMIGOS, an unfunny comedy to put it mildly,

A low point for just about everyone involved in this film.  Steve Martin, Randy Newman of all people and Lorene Michaels all known for their supposed comedy chops put together this unfunny story about three silent actors mistaken for gunfighters. Somehow they end up fighting off bandits in a small Mexican town. What we have here is a supposed comedy version of The Magnificent Seven.  

The director was John Landis was apparently past his prime as a hipster comedy director when he got involved in this mess.  What is hard to understand about this film is that everyone involved was just completely clueless about how bad the script was.  I can only assume the usual Hollywood egos were wrapped up in this production without the ability to critique their work. Probably nobody had the guts to tell all these so called big time comic geniuses that the film was a stinker.

 

This is the stuff that passed for comedy in the 1980's.  Get three supposedly hot TV comics and just assume they could do a bunch of funny stuff to make a funny movie.  

Highly not recommended.  

The running time is 103 minutes.

1981 - AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, a horror/comedy film

The big deal on this film was the actual physical transformation of a man into a werewolf courtesy of special effects artist Rick Baker and his team.  The Howling had apparently beat An American Werewolf In London with the same type of physical effects earlier in the year.  Still this was a milestone in film effects which were eventually superseded by computer generated imaging.

The writer/director John Landis had a fondness for this genre and since it was the 1980's he updated it with a lot more violence, blood and of course sex.  Landis cast a couple of unknowns in the main roles and the rest of the cast was made of up British actors.

The film is effective in parts but I think a big issue with this film was the story.  Landis was good at writing the set pieces but he really didn't have much of a plot to tie them all together. Even the character development is on the weak side.  Exactly what does Jenny Agutter see in David Naughton anyway? When you got down to it, even at 97 minutes the story kind of dragged.  If you saw one werewolf killing with someone getting their throat ripped out, you kind of saw them all.

 

In the end the film comes down to watching Rick Baker's monster makeup.

Running time,  97 minutes.

1983 - TWILIGHT ZONE THE MOVIE, is pretty bad considering the talent

Four big names directors pay tribute to Rod Serling's anthology series and for the most part the segments can't touch any old black and white episode of the series.

John Landis directs, Time Out, the only original episode in the series.  This was the notorious episode that killed the actor Vic Morrow and 2 children.  It's a hit you over the head story about racism that is about as subtle as a steamroller.  Pretty bad.

Steven Spielberg directs Kick the Can and he directs poorly.  This slop about elderly people at a nursing home discovering their youth brought out the worst in the director, the sloppy overblown music, the too glowing photography, the sentimental garbage about old age and childhood, it’s just awful.  This is a director barely in control of his story, possibly the worst thing he has ever been associated with.

Joe Dante directs It's a Good Life and sort of redeems the film.  Dante is able to indulge his interest in cartoons and does make the segment his own.  The problem is that the original episode was a brilliant horror story and Dante chooses cartoonish silliness over horror.

The director of The Road Warrior George Miller, directs Nightmare at 20,000 Feet like it's a Mad Max movie but he has the same problem as Dante, he can't really capture the  horror of the original black and white episode, still probably the best of the short films.  John Lithgow's over the top hysterical performance is pretty fun but he can't top the original actor William Shatner.

 Considering how influential The Twilight Zone still is, this is a pretty poor tribute.

101 minutes, written by John Landis, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson and Melissa Mathison.

1973 - SCHLOCK, silly John Landis comedy spoof of grade B movies.

Schlock the missing link has shown up in a small California town.  The police are in hot pursuit as they try to stop his reign of terror in this very silly film with a lot of tiresome  shoveling food in the ape man's mouth jokes.

This is the first film from John Landis and it has a lot of funny stuff in it.  Rick Baker the makeup artist did the gorilla suit and the film has jokes and references from other classic films particularly 2001: A Space Odyssey, Frankenstein and Abbot and Costello's In Society.  You have to have a pretty good appreciation of cult and old movie to get most of the jokes.  Then again at times the humor is so stupid it's hard to believe Landis even went there with some of the silly stuff he put in it.

Even at the start of his career this was a typical Landis picture.  Schlock has his fascination with slapstick scenes of violence and things getting wrecked.  Landis also seems to have a real thing going about having cops shoot lots and lots of bullets as can be seen in The Blues Brothers, Beverly Hills Cop III, Into the Night, and just about any other John Landis film. 

Schlock is probably one his better films, but you can see the seeds of his comedy downfall even at the start of his career.  His tendency to beat a joke to death, his uneasy mix of violence and humor and his inability at times to understand when a situation is more stupid than funny.

80 minutes, written by John Landis.

1980 - THE BLUES BROTHERS, would be a pretty entertaining film if The Blues Brothers weren't in it

Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered the pinnacle of hip in cultural comedy in the 1970's and 80's.  Watching their mediocre performances in The Blues Brothers leaves me scratching my head as to what they were all about 20 years later.

Aykroyd took their two Saturday Night Live characters Jake and Elwood Blues and along with the director John Landis developed them into a large scale musical/comedy film.  Aykroyd's idea of having two white guys dressed in black suits and wearing sunglasses is supposed to be the ultimate in hipster cool.  Even so Landis must have known that Belushi and Aykroyd doing this extended SNL sketch wouldn't hold up for a two hour film so he loaded the film with large scale car chases and destruction sight gags to keep the audience interested. 

The guest stars in the musical numbers were famous black performers like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway and James Brown.  Unfortunately Landis shoots them in such a pedestrian manner it doesn't really spotlight their skills as performers.

Then there are the two stars of The Blues Brothers, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.  I would never argue that Belushi and Aykroyd couldn't be funny, but something about their movies always rang a little hollow.  Once Belushi stumbled onto his Blutto character from Animal House, he repeated that character constantly until it got completely tiresome.  Belushi tried to move away from the Blutto character in a couple of films.  However his actual performing skills outside of sketch comedy seemed pretty limited.  Dan Aykroyd probably had more of a commitment to this project and an acting career in general but he's not really much better.

The real problem with the stars of The Blues Brothers is that they can't sing or dance very well.  John Landis must have been aware of this.  He doesn't let them perform with any of the musical guest stars and he doesn't feature very much of their dancing.  What worked as a short SNL sketch looks amateurish in a feature film.

Landis loads his film up with his usual stunt casting.  Twiggy shows up for a bit.  Frank Oz, the voice of Yoda, is in the film.  Carrie Fisher has a completely useless role as a woman trying to kill The Blues Brothers with a rocket launcher and even Steven Spielberg gets dragged into this.

You can however take pity on Landis since he had to deal with Belushi's very serious drug problems, something he refers to in the "making of" feature on the DVD. 

So what is the reason to watch The Blues Brothers?  It's the car chases.  This is probably one of the few films where car chases were filmed on a massive scale.  Demolishing a real shopping mall with real cars and the amazing amount of cars crashed on an Illinois freeway and in Chicago is something to see.

Running time, 133 minutes, written by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis.

1985 - INTO THE NIGHT, the very poor man's version of The 39 Steps.

Driving around  Los Angeles one night, an insomniac picks up a hot blond who is being chased by four Iranian gunmen.  This starts a series of Hitchcock like adventures around the cultural landmarks of the city.

The director John Landis, straddles his film between old Hollywood and new Hollywood.  His earlier film,  Kentucky Fried Movie was a send up of Hollywood genres.  He made a lot of money for Universal with National Lampoon's Animal House where he was able to combine college nostalgia with raunchy humor.

John Landis a greater admirer of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which mixed comedy with horror attempted to update that genre in films like An American Werewolf in London and Innocent Blood.

Into the Night was his shot as a Hitchcock type of chase thriller/comedy while mixing the then fashionable 1980's trends of violence and nudity.  But Landis doesn't really pull off combining the two genres.  He documents a gag with a curiously distant manner as if afraid to bring the camera in close to show it.  The script isn't really very clever or funny, it mostly seems to be a collection of situations designed to move the "couple on the run" from one LA location to another.

Jeff Goldblum's performance as the insomniac is very tentative and laid back.  The idea is that Goldblum will come into his own as a hero like Cary Grant in North by Northwest. But Goldblum seems more bored than heroic throughout this film. A young Michelle Pfeiffer the cute little bundle of trouble Goldblum hooks up with can't seem to work up any couples chemistry with him.  Since this was one of Pfeiffer's first major roles she was probably coerced into doing the gratuitous nude scene that shows up in the picture.

What the film's known for are the number of in-joke cameo appearances of Hollywood film directors.  Alfred Hitchcock put himself in his films but I don't think a major mainstream film ever saw anything like this.  Listed below are just some of the filmmakers and personalities appearing in this film:

• Jack Arnold, director of  Gilligan's Island,  as the man with the dog in the elevator.
• Rick Baker, make-up artist on An American Werewolf in London, as the drug dealer.
• David Cronenberg, director of Videodrome, as Goldblum's supervisor in the boardroom.
• Jonathan Demme, director of  The Silence of the Lambs , as the federal agent with glasses.
• Richard Franklin, director of Roadgames, as the aerospace engineer sitting next to Goldblum in the cafeteria.
• Carl Gottlieb, who co-wrote Jaws , as the large federal agent with mustache.
• Amy Heckerling, director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, as the clumsy waitress.
• Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, as the man on the phone talking to Burt.
• Colin Higgins, who wrote Harold and Maude,  as the actor in the hostage film.
• Lawrence Kasdan, writer and director of Body Heat, as the police detective who interrogates Goldblum.
• Jonathan Lynn, writer of Yes, Minister, as the tailor who fits the Iranian killers.
• Paul Mazursky, director of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and An Unmarried Woman as, the beachhouse owner and accused drug dealer.
• Carl Perkins, performer and composer of 'Blue Suede Shoes', as Mr. Williams.
• Daniel Petrie, director of A Raisin in the Sun, as the director of the hostage film.
• Dedee Pfeiffer, actress and sister of Michelle Pfeiffer, as the hooker.
• Waldo Salt, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, as the derelict who tells Goldblum his car having been towed.
• Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry, as the man caught with a girl in the hotel bathroom.
• Roger Vadim, director of And God Created Woman and Barbarella , as Monsieur Melville, the French kidnapper.
• Clu Gulager, a veteran character actor as a federal agent.
• Vera Miles, one time protege of Alfred Hitchcock.
• David Bowie, as a professional killer who gets in a fight with Carl Perkins (probably the only real clever scene).  

John Landis even sticks himself in the film as one of the Iranian killers  (he's second from the right.  These killers are supposedly to be funny.  ButLandis appears to have put all of his energy into thinking up funny little bits for his director buddies.

 

This seems to be the real reason Into The Night was made, an excuse for Landis to party with his director buddies on Universal's dime.

 115 minutes, written by Ron Koslow.

1987 - AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON, not to funny spoof of genre films

Pretty poor, a rehash of The Kentucky Fried Movie by people who should have been able to make this thing a WHOLE lot funnier. A very interesting cast was completely let down by a creative group behind the camera who should have been able to get the job done. Even the nudity ( and there is a lot of it) was extremely boring.  
 

THE CREATIVE TEAM

Joe Dante: He's made a career studying and speaking about cult and camp movies he should have been able to knock this out of the park with his eyes closed. Probably the only good section in the movie was "Reckless Youth". But even this wasn't as funny as "Reefer Madness".

John Landis: He's known for his admiration of movies that mix genres such as "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein". He at times seems to have a sense of humor and he tries to incorporate traditions of slapstick and violence in his movies. However he didn't have one funny segment in the entire movie. His preoccupation with women running around topless is kind of disconcerting.

Carl Gottlieb: Is a veteran screenwriter, He wrote "Jaws". His segment "Son of the Invisible Man" was probably the funniest.

Peter Horton: Is an actor, director and production executive. He directed a couple of segments and starred in the very lame hospital scene with a very young Michelle Pfeiffer who was big time paying her dues.

Robert K Weiss: The real auteur. Is the producer of, (Superhero Movie, Scary Movie 4, Scary Movie 3). Michael Barrie: A writer for David Letterman for many years.

Jim Mulholland: A writer for David Letterman and Johnny Carson.

Running time, 85 minutes.

1994 - BEVERLY HILLS COP III, You can't go home again.

My son has been working his way through the Beverly Hills Cop trilogy, which is not to be confused with the Star Wars trilogy or the Samurai trilogy or the John Ford Cavalry trilogy.

It has a lot of gunfire, an unsubtly tries to get some laughs with staging a lot of shootouts at a Disneyland like amusement park. I think the point was to contrast the violence with this make believe world in a comedic way, a rather obvious point.

The director was John Landis, who at this point in his career is definitely on the downside. He does some of the commentary for the "Trailers from Hell" website that Joe Dante created. He is a very amusing guy on these commentaries.

 

However this film just doesn't work anyway you cut it.  This should have been a slam dunk of a film but clearly something went very wrong during the production of Beverly Hills Cop III.

 104 minutes written by Steven E. de Souza.