Reviews

There are 10 episodes that tell a story. No more, no less. And if one doesn't commit to watching all 10, start to finish, it might be understandable that a viewer finds it disappointing. But as a whole, a 10 hour movie broken into parts, there has never been anything even vaguely like this. If someone needs a genre to pigeonhole things into, this metaphysical/spiritual/sci fi/ surf/ family/soap opera fires on too many cylinders and hits a target too often for a thinking person to not appreciate. This is one of the too rare examples of a television show that challenges viewers to understand and appreciate the subjects it covers. "Breaking Bad" occasionally makes a viewer participate in becoming emotionally involved with wrong characters, but this show draws one into a no good guys story line with metaphysical implications with no real moral victory for "good"

The old t.v. show had its undeniable quirky charm. this should be self evident, otherwise a 2 season sitcom from 1961-63 would have been long forgotten, and no studio would have thrown a 1990's budget at so weak a concept as to make a movie of an obscure t.v. relic. But the people behind the film had no concept of what made this show stick in peoples' craw, and that was the ridiculous innocence and banality of the crimes that mediocre good guys Toody, Muldoon, etc. encountered and dealt with in the big, bad city of New York on an episode by episode basis. Making Muldoon a crusader, rather than an equally bumbling ineffectual creature like Gunther Toody obliterates the charm of the sitcom. The whole idea of anyone from the squad actually approaching a ":real" or "serious" crime kills the whole premise of "Car 54 Where are You?" This is a relic of a sheltered and surreally unrealistic time, and this attempt to have one foot in this world and another in the semi post-repression non reality of contemporary aesthetics just doesn't cut it. Besides that, this is a bad mess of a movie on all standards.

This failed exercise in satire or commentary on the human condition easily earned a place as one of the 10 worst movies I've ever seen. I'm seriously considering buying a copy, if I can find one dirt cheap, to chase away unwanted company. It's honestly that bad. I view it as some kind of anti-personnel weapon. If you're the kind of person who just has to see a train wreck to witness the carnage, then this movie is a gem. Just to be fair, Kelsey Grammar's character has 1 line that almost works, but doesn't quite. Other than that everything in this movie strives to be insightful, but misses the mark by approximately the distance between earth and the nearest pair of colliding galaxies. I usually can appreciate a book or movie where the protagonist suffers from some sort of existential angst, but the angst presented here is so unbelievable and over the top, and the movie doesn't even address the nonsense it presents in any valuable way. If you are familiar with the term "word vomit" then you may get some picture of the cinematrocity. Oh, and the narrative structure is ill conceived, pretentious and amateurish. It has failed on both style and substance. If you really hate someone, invite them over for a double feature of this movie and "The Terror of Tiny Town," an all midget western from the 1930's and put them in restraints with their eyes forced open "A Clockwork Orange" style. But that probably violates some provision in the Geneva Conventions.

This movie is fun. And it's great in that it is remarkably fun, as opposed to "about anything." If you can take it in context of "Punk-Western" as a "rock" movie and a western the bar is not set incredibly high to begin with, and this clears the hurdle with ease in merging two genres that usually droop into the exploitation movie quality level. Penelope Spheeris's prior works: Decline of Western Civilization and Suburbia were genuine and earnest portraits of punk-rock music, the first from a documentary perspective of the performers, and the second from the subjective fictional live of the fans of the genre. this is an attempt to launch these concepts into the language of mainstream genre cinema and succeeds better than adequately. Admirably, exceptionally, debate and quibble about the adjective. no matter what. this is approximately 1 1/2 hors of fun movie watching with that little extra to think about. And I occasionally entertain the bizarre notion of building a religion around Daredelvis. If one respects a youth culture as an anthropological phenomenon, tis film shines out as the "punk" take on westerns almost in the way that "LITTLE BIG MAN' was a 60's hippie western