Here Come the Tigers

This is the worst film I've ever seen. Nothing but a "Bad News Bears" ripoff, tasteless and dull, with one of the most motheaten plots ever. This film was to juvenile sports movies what "Mac & Me" was to juvenile Science Fiction movies. Everyone concerned with it deserved to be blacklisted from H-wood and never permitted to work in movies again!

The saddest part of this is the fact that these are 87 minutes I'll never get back. I knew this was terrible from the get-go, with the guy dressed as a lunatic Indian chief on top of the roof. (See if they could get away with that in 2008). My 10-year-old boy is really into baseball right now, so we decided to rent it on a rainy day. Even though he seemed to enjoy parts of it, I had to cringe when I heard all the needless foul language. Bad, bad movie. This was an awful ripoff of Bad News Bears. Completely shameless and completely predictable. I don't mind a predictable movie if it's done well, but this one absolutely was not.

Have not watched kids films for some years, so I missed "Here Come the Tigers" when it first came out. (Never even saw "Bad News Bears" even though in the '70s I worked for the guys who arranged financing for that movie, "Warriors," "Man Who Would Be King," and "Rocky Horror Picture Show," among others.) Now I like to check out old or small movies and find people who have gone on to great careers despite being in a less than great movie early on. Just minutes into this movie I could take no more and jumped to the end credits to see if there was a young actor in this movie who had gone on to bigger and better things--at least watching for his/her appearance would create some interest as the plot and acting weren't doing the job. Lo and behold, I spied Wes Craven's name in the credits as an electrical gaffer. He'd already made two or three of his early shockers but had not yet created Freddie Krueger or made the "Scream" movies. Maybe he owed a favor and helped out on this pic. More surprising was Fred J. Lincoln in the cast credits as "Aesop," a wacky character in the movie. F.J. Lincoln, from the '70s to just a few years ago, appeared in and produced adult films. He was associated with the adult spoof "The Ozporns," and just that title is funnier than all of "Tigers" attempts at humor combined. Let the fact that an adult actor was placed in a kids movie be an indication as to how the people making this movie must have been asleep at the wheel.

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen, but seeing it did give me a funny story to tell people. Usually, before seeing a movie, I know quite a bit about it from reviews, etc. I decided one day to go out & see a movie that I knew nothing at all about, just as a kind of change of pace. And the movie I selected was "Here Come the Tigers". Was it a nature documentary? An environmental horror story? A jungle adventure? Who knew?? Well, as it turned out, it was nothing more than a cheap, vulgar rip-off of "The Bad News Bears" made by people who apparently saw nothing attractive in that film but the obscenities. So "Here Come the Tigers" is filled with "funny" scenes of children cursing and engaging in "hilarious" infantile hijinks. This movie was so awful that I was on the verge of leaving the theatre & the few other people who were enduring it with me were openly making fun of it. I was *really* *really* regretting the money I had just laid out for this junk (money being short supply for me back then). Just then, magic happened. One of the reels somehow got put on the projector wrong so that the film suddenly began running backwards!! Since most of the last part of the film concerned the dramatic "big game", scenes of backward baseball players making weird squeaky noises was hysterical. It took the theatre people about 15 or 20 minutes to notice what was going on and, since they weren't able to rectify it, everyone in the theatre was given their money back!!! So I may be one of the few people to have seen this movie to get any enjoyment out of it.

as a long-time baseball fan who has seen many baseball movies, there have been many hits such as Field of Dreams, Major League, The Natural and my all-time favorite The Bad News Bears. But there have been a number of errors in the mix, including Here Come the Tigers.

First of all, almost all the common player stereotypes that were in the successful Walter Matthau movie, except for the fat catcher were in this one. The two additions were the Japanese home run hitter who can also hit balls with his fist, even though he only utters the sound "OOH!" throughout the movie since he doesn't speak English. The other was a deaf-mute pitcher who got into a fight with some members of the rival Panthers at an arcade and suffered a broken arm but recovered in time to pitch in the championship game.

Second, there are no name actors in the movie. Is Richard Lincoln a household name? I'm sure a lot of people have never heard of him. It seems that the producer didn't have the money to pay a "name" actor to play the Tigers coach, so they went with unknowns.

As for the movie, it suffers from predictability and a weak script. It also has the standard slow-motion cliché scene of the big hit and the end of the movie.

The only bright spot was that when the movie first appeared in theaters, the long time Voice of the Yankees Mel Allen did the promo. Other than that, it's a forgettable baseball movie that definitely goes down swinging.