1987 - SPACEBALLS, Mel Brooks takes on Star Wars.

After having exhausted just about every film genre he could think of.  Mel Brooks and his writing team turned their attention to the Star Wars series with very mixed results.  The outcome is a combination of bad jokes, lots of jokes about men's crotches and even more jokes about women's breasts, and this was clearly a film aimed at the adolescent Star Wars adolescent. 

As was the way with Brook's recent films at the time he wrote a substantial part in the film for himself, in this case two parts as he drifted between the role of President Skroob, (get it) and the Yoda character in this case named Yogurt, (ha ha).  The rest of the main cast is as dull as dishwater.  Bill Pullman is "Lone Star" the Han Solo character, John Candy is "Mog," the Chewbacca character and Daphne Zuniga is stuck with the Princess Lela character who unfortunately has to put up with a lot of jokes about being a Drudish princess (get it again).  And so it goes. I guess it's okay for Brooks to do the ethnic Jewish humor jokes.

 

The film is also loaded with a bunch of sight gags which are mostly not funny although you occasionally get a few gems.  Brooks and his writing team have stuck fairly closely to the plot line of the Star Wars films with some nods to Star Trek and Planet of the Apes.  The humor is not of the sophisticated Ernest Lubitsch caliber and the whole movie probably plays best for gross 13 year old boys.  Since that is what Brooks seems to be at times.

 

The film was written by Mel Brooks, Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan.  Spaceballs is now considered a cult film but you can be sure this writer didn't vote for it. The running time is 96 minutes.

1991 - LIFE STINKS, Mel Brooks goes for pathos and sentimentality

Mr. Unsubtle plays a billionaire who makes a bet that he can can survive in the slums of Los Angeles for a month without money.  This is the plot of Sullivan's Travels with a lot of Charlie Chaplin like stuff mixed in.

Life Stinks is one of the better later period Brook's films and that's not saying much.  Brooks as usual isn't capable of any kind of subtlety in his acting or his direction.  Every scene is constantly hammered into the viewer with the great auteur the constant focus of attention.  Preston Sturges could mix slapstick, sentimentality and drama into his films but even Sturges had a hell of a time walking that tightrope in some of his films.  Brooks is no Sturges.

The rest of the cast does what they can to keep the film on track.  Jeffrey Tambor doesn't get the good lines, but he knows how to deliver a funny and clever performance.  One time Disney ingenue Lesly Ann Warren star of such classics as The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band and The Happiest Millionaire is the sexy bag lady he takes up with.  One of Mel's old buddies Howard Morris who apparently trained at the same school of overbearing comedians that Brooks came out of is a street person who Brooks befriends.

It would be easy to write something like "Life Stinks and so does this film."  But the film doesn't really stink, it's just another mediocre comedy in a long list of mediocre comedies

92 minutes

1995 - DRACULA DEAD AND LOVING IT, another so called comedy from Mel Brooks

With his camera pointed at the cleavage of almost every woman in the cast, Mel Brooks films another genre parody this time of vampire movies. 

An incredibly unfunny comedy.  Almost every joke and gag seems really forced and tired and also 20 years out of date.  Leslie Nielsen was hired to lure the suckers in thinking they were going to see another Airplane or Naked Gun type of comedy.  What they got was a bunch actors hamming and milking supposedly comic situations so broadly they made Abbott and Costello look subtle.
 

It's always amazed me that Mel Brooks got away with his tired genre rehash comedies as long as he did.  He's seen a lot of old movies and knows all the cliches so he knows what to make fun of.  Mel Brooks was also smart enough to put enough schoolboy smut into his films to make them seem a little contemporary even though his interest was clearly in recreating and spoofing old films.

Dracula Dead and Loving It is so out of funny ideas that even with all the breasts on display,  Brooks has to stick in two musical numbers just to pad out the running time.  In the old days of The Producers or Young Frankenstein he played these musical moments for laughs, now it seems like he is actually taking them seriously.

This film was a complete bust and appeared to be the end of his film making career.  In 2001, Brooks turned The Producers into a Broadway musical and he was proclaimed a comic genesis all over again.  However the film musical version of The Producers turned out to be a big flop supposedly due to Brook's constant interference with the director Susan Stroman.

88 minutes