Rejected By Rod(?): Part Five - Repossessed
Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 6:00AM Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:
Rejected By Rod(?)
Repossessed
(1990)
How much should a group of men be blamed if their works of genius are inexpertly imitated by morons and result in creating far more pain than the amount of pleasure originally wrought? As great as The Naked Gun, Kentucky Fried Movie and Top Secret remain today were they worth the terrible scattershot “parody” films they inspired? Does one Airplane justify the existence of one Disaster Movie?
It’s a tough question and it’s not made any easier by Repossessed, a early 90s rip-off of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker formula that proves if you try hard enough it is possible to attempt a joke in every single shot of your movie and still fail to earn a single laugh.
It’s really rather simple. All you have to do is fail to understand what a joke actually is.
What it isn’t is the repetition, replication or mere invocation of a pop cultural artifact. Having a character repeat someone else’s famous catchphrase is not a joke, unless they do it in a way that comments on the significance of the phrase and its place in the zeitgeist. Without that commentary you’re no different than that asshole at work who expects you to laugh every time he repeats something from an old Mike Myers or Jim Carrey movie. And you don’t want to be that asshole, because we all hate that asshole.
Seriously, asshole, we all want you to suffer and die.
That said, I can’t knock Repossessed too much, because it stars Linda Blair and I love Linda Blair, except when she’s in the original The Exorcist, which I hate and which Repossessed is a parody of and which therefore requires me to admire it, if only just a little. I’m complicated like that.
