This is the work of a big time film fan who has...not a lot of cinematic talent. He's the goofy guy people said was funny, pushing his low-brow sense of humor as hard as possible across a quick 77-minute long thing that resembles a movie. It's interesting to see this kind of desperate attempt for a laugh after finishing the work of Preston Sturges which always felt so effortless (well, until the end), but that kind of screwball mentality is what gives John Landis the little appeal the film has. It's not really a story. He can't build anything across a scene or the film at all. All that's really there is the weird guffaws at odd behavior and base comedy that come along with regularity. It's enough to get me through the movie, at least.
The banana killer is attacking a small California town, killing hundreds at a time, and Detective Sergeant Wino (Saul Kahan) would rather stay safe in his house than investigate, but he must because it's his job. Interviewed by television anchorman Joe Putzman (Eric Allison), who interrupts his reports to describe the movie of the week (always the fake See You Next Wednesday, a 2001 reference) or update the audience on the "guess how many bodies are in the bags" contest the station is running, Wino is at a complete loss and does not know what to do. Four teenagers accidentally come across the lair of Schlock (Landis in Rick Baker makeup), a pre-history man-like creature that has been frozen for millions of years and is now terrorizing the countryside, as explained by Professor Shlibovitz (Emile Hamaty).
It's easy to see Landis' love of 50s scifi movies pop through all of this. Much like Joe Dante and Piranha, it's the kind of influence that reeks of children sitting around the TV in the middle of the night watching scientists explain nonsense that thrilled the generation of genre filmmakers who came up in the 70s. There's no real satire of it, though. It's more like base parody, kind of like Mel Brooks at his least imaginative (usually without Gene Wilder) with people acting the roles in lightly comedic manner. It's mostly deadpan delivery of silly dialogue (I wonder if there's a Monty Python influence here). But the dialogue is only intermittently amusing, mostly the proto-version of "lolwut...so random" type of joking.
For instance, there's a scene where a blind girl, Mindy (Eliza Garrett) has her bandages taken off from her eyes. First, the bandages end up much more than expecting, coming to a large pile on the floor. That's a kind of funny image. It doesn't come from anything or feed into anything else, though. There's no build up. The other thing in this scene is the doctor walking into a closet with a sliding door, very obviously a closet mind you, to leave the scene. It's meant as a joke, gets a guffaw, and quickly moves on. That is both the film's appeal and limitations in terms of its comedy. It's constantly trying for laughs (it's easy to see why the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams would hire him to make The Kentucky Fried Movie), but the laughs are all isolated, thin, and never really all that funny.
So, what it amounts to is a long series of individual attempts at comedy that never connect, relying almost entirely on the strength of the comedy within those individual moments to provide the entertainment. It's essentially a skit show centered around Schlock wandering around and being a fish out of water. There's an extended sequence in a movie theater (apparently added after the main production to add length for the distributor) where Schlock struggles with an ice cream machine, terrorizes the concession girl into giving him candy, gets scared at dinosaurs on screen, is fearful of a clip from The Blob (50s scifi, mind you), takes a kid to the bathroom, and has the poster outside the theater changed repeatedly (The Blob, See You Next Wednesday, King Kong vs. Godzilla). You see, it's just a random series of slightly amusing things that don't build to anything.
The irony is that Landis built this film on a well-worn structure, the 50s scifi monster movie, but he doesn't understand how they work narratively at all. He can poke fun at moments here and there, but they don't actually cut the material at all. In addition, the jokes don't piggyback off of the narrative to build to something bigger. All we get is Schlock climbing the gym roof with Mindy, throwing her off harmlessly in fear of some thrown flares, and then a King Kong reference. Some of this is funny (honestly, the last line of the film is probably the height of it because it's actually satirical in nature), but it's just all so disconnected from everything else except in the most basic, mechanical ways of plot.
I'm reminded, in contrast, of how Lubitsch built jokes on top of each other until the Super Joke that made audiences burst into laughter.
Oh well, I'm not that down on the film. It's not good. It's kind of bad. In taking nothing seriously, not even the comedy, nothing really lands or builds, but there are a surprising amount of chuckles along the way. That made the experience far better than it had any right to be.
