Before watching the movie:
I’ve been a little intimidated by this movie for a while because trying to read a small amount of what it is doesn’t seem to actually provide any useful information. I’ve been interested because it’s by the writing team that made Airplane!, so it seems like something that would be fun, but with a 70s R rating, I don’t know how much it will keep to my sense of what’s appropriate for my blog.
After watching the movie:
In a series of spoofs of the kinds of programming one would see in movies and television, news, commercials, and movies are all satirized. News promos break in with promises of increasingly worrying stories with film at 11, ridiculous products are promoted, trailers for absurd movies are seen, and a “feature presentation” is included. In the feature, “A Fistful of Yen”, Master Loo is tapped by British Intelligence to infiltrate a Dark Lord’s compound hidden in the mountains and locate his nuclear weapons.
At times this seems like it’s meant to feel like flipping through channels on TV, but the lengthy movie trailers are presented more like they are in theaters than they ever are on television. There are also some breaks for more traditionally framed sketches that still usually mock entertainment media (notably “Feel-A-Round”, which portrays a movie where the gimmick is that an usher stands behind each audience member performing various tactile cues from the movie on them). There are only two sketches that were uncomfortably explicit, though one was specifically spoofing adult films. Surprisingly, neither of those sketches were the one where a couple try to follow along with a step by step vinyl record guide to making love, as their underwear stays on the entire time.
Aside from the graphic nudity, I was getting into the rapid-fire loosely themed sketch comedy, and then the “Feature Presentation” arrived and I had to completely change gears. The strength of anthologies is that if you don’t like one segment, it will move on to the next one swiftly. Choosing to include a 31-minute (more than a third of the runtime) direct parody of Enter the Dragon completely throws away that advantage. I could get into the mood to see a direct parody of Enter the Dragon, but its only connection to the rest of the movie (aside from a couple of small callbacks) is that it’s presented as the feature presentation among all of the Coming Attractions. Just about the time I was able to accept the new tone, it was over and back to the same mix of sketches as before. I ended up having to go back a little within the segment and found more appreciation for some of the jokes (and the compound’s alarm klaxon was always funny), but I had to be in a completely different headspace than what the first third of the movie had set up.
I’m not sure if I can say which group of the shorter sketches I liked best. The commercials are certainly the easiest and shortest and therefore the most numerous. I found the segments directly spoofing the news to be very good, but there weren’t as many as I remembered. Possibly the funniest single sketch was a fake educational film. The movie trailers were the most hit and miss, but movie trailers are a fun genre to spoof because they can hint at a complete story without having to lay out the bones of it, and with a movie-sized budget, they can do some pretty amazing things without any of the need to set them up in a fleshed-out narrative.
I think I would like to see the concept done with a similar sense of humor at a softer MPAA rating. Maybe the karate movie could be expanded upon to stand on its own, but I didn’t care for its inclusion in what’s otherwise a much more fast-paced movie. Maybe something around half its length and more thematically connected to the subject matter of the rest could have worked as a feature presentation. I can definitely see the beginnings of what became movies like Airplane! here, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as that classic, except for the segments that do.
Yesterday's Movies 