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.