I can well appreciate who so many people don't like this film. First time I saw it, the first episode made no sense at all to me as I didn't understand what was being parodied, although I must admit that any movie with Candy Clark will certainly get my vote. Up to that time, however, I'd never seen a personal growth film or advertisement. Now I really enjoy this segment. I've always loved the spoof of the Greek tycoon. In this one, however, it's the lovely Ann Dusenberry on whom the camera really shines. (I was surprised to discover that she has made so few movies to date, preferring TV by a very wide margin.) However, my favorite of the three episodes is most definitely the third. Going right against his usual trademark, Richard Widmark is absolutely priceless as the do-nothing cop.

National Lampoon's Movie Madness (1982) 1/2 (out of 4) Extremely bad and embarrassing comedy is perhaps one of the worst that the decade had to offer. This film has three different spoof's of popular movie genres but none of them are funny. The first has Peter Riegert (NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE) playing a lawyer who asks his wife to leave him so that he can go through some personal growth. The second story deals with a woman who was gang raped with a stick of butter so she sets out to bring them down by making margarine the item to use. The third film has a stupid rookie cop (Robby Benson) tries to track down a serial killer (Christopher Lloyd) who likes to leave a copy of his driver license on the body of his victims. All three stories are incredibly bad but if I had to pick the best one I'd go with the first. It at least has Riegert and his certain style of comedy getting a few laughs and we also have some rather strange nudity. The second film seems to be spoofing TV shows like "Dallas" but it doesn't get any laughs. The third film is just downright annoying because it keeps going and going and never appears to know what it's trying to do. The major fault of this disaster has to be pointed at the screenplay, which just isn't funny. Non of the spoofs are that far out there and one could argue that none of these items needed to be spoofed because their own films did a good job at that. Did we really need this cop comedy when there was something like POLICE ACADEMY out there? The performances are all fair to bad but acting isn't what people come to a film like this for. The second and third films are without any laughs and what's really scary is that there was a fourth film spoofing disaster movies that was cut before the movie was released. With these three shorts being so bad you can't help but wonder how bad the fourth one was for the studio to decide that was the one to leave on the cutting room floor.

Wow. I read about this movie and it sounded so awful that I had to see it, and my gosh, I can smell it in St Louis. Where do I start? National Lampoons was trying to follow up 5 years later on the success of Animal House, but they completely missed the mark. I'll go chronologically with these short flicks.Short Film #1 Poor Peter Riegert (Boon from Animal House). Apparently, he wasn't working back then, so the boys at National Lampoons probably called and said "hey, we're making a c**ppy movie, wanna be in it?" Peter was like "well, I'm not doing much these days, why not?" He was a great side character in Animal House, but he couldn't carry this sorry short flop for 5 minutes.POSSIBLE SPOILER The premise is funny enough, with Jason Cooper (Riegert) telling his wife to leave him, she needs to find herself. It's too weird that they're actually in a happy marriage. So he chases her off, there she goes, and Cooper is in charge of the kids. This, off course, leads to him burning the house down, losing several of the kids, and sleeping with an assortment of New York bimbos (including an ever so young Diane Lane). Then the wife comes back, wants the kids, and the film ends with a coin flip that'll decide the fate of the children. The idea was actually somewhat clever, but the director stunk. The characters all seem like they're falling asleep, they HAD to be doped up. Sorry Boon, your legacy was tarnished with this flop.Short Film #2 MORE SPOILERS Enter Dominique Corsaire. Pretty girl, recently finished college, not sure what to do with her life. So she becomes a slut, starts sleeping around with some mega rich guys, takes their money when they die, and she doesn't stop until she beds the most powerful man in the world, Fred Willard (Ooops, I mean the president of the United States). Once again, it could have been funny, and though I was happy that Corsaire (Ann Dusenberry in real life) wasn't afraid to bare all, her acting was horrible. What a waste of time.Short Film #3 I can't believe I made it this far. Here's the rookie cop Brent Falcone (Robby Benson) with veteran Stan Nagurski (Richard Widmark). Falcone is young, naive, thinks he can really help people, though he becomes cynical after being shot several thousand times. Nagurski, really, has just given up caring. He watches muggings, assaults, you name it, and never intervenes. He figures the world is lawless and he'll probably get sued if he does anything. Even Christopher Lloyd (at the end of Taxi's run) gets in on the action, getting the police called on him, committing a crime, but having his lawyer there to protect him. God bless America!!Once again, could have been funny, the performances were intentionally campy, but goodness, no energy whatsoever. Henry Jaglom and Bob Giraldi should be ashamed of having their names on this schlock. I think the writing wasn't bad, the ideas were there, but the execution was pulled off as well as the rescue attempt in the Iranian hostage crisis. If I had been a part of this film, I would want my name removed, it's horrible. Then again, that's why I watched it.The only good thing about this garbage is that Dr John did the film score (repeating "Going to the Movies" over and over again) and the film isn't much longer than an hour and a half. Show this one in film classes with the heading "what you should NEVER do in film-making." This script should have been left on the shelf because yep, it's that bad.

Good movie to watch when there is nothing else to watch. There are a few funny lines. The highlight of the movie is the appearance of Elisha Cook. A real change from Wilmer in the Maltese falcon. Being three skits of about 20 minutes each, it is ideal to watch it when you are micro waving a tv dinner