Ha ha mon, it’s Burl! I’ve got yet another review of a
marginal 80s comedy picture of just the sort I ignored when it came out, and
ever since! Until recently, I’d never seen such a gallery of cracknel biscuits
as Protocol, Armed and Dangerous, Funny Farm and The Money Pit, and now
I’ve seen them all! Some of them I liked less than others, ha ha, and it’s my
terrible duty today to place Club Paradise
on the lower rung of these pictures!
It shouldn’t have been that way! Ha ha, it was directed by
Harold Ramis, who’d done fine comedy work helming Caddyshack and Vacation;
starred Robin Williams, who was capable of being funny; and filled its
supporting cast with as many SCTV stars as there are in the sky, with the
crucial exception of John “The Silent Partner” Candy!
The plot is some kind of crazy nonsense! Williams is a
Chicago fireman who gets exploded out a window and covered in a pile of bricks!
With his insurance settlement he retires and relocates to the Caribbean island
of St. Nicholas! The progression of events is hurried and vague, but he becomes
friends and then partners with Jimmy Cliff, who plays a lite-Reggae singer who
also runs a downmarket resort with what is frequently referred to as a very
nice beach!
Somehow Twiggy becomes his girlfriend (the whys and
wherefores of that are very obscurely presented indeed!), and that great voice
of trailers, Adolph Caesar, whose last movie this was, is strutting around like
he owns the place! The late, lamented Peter O' Toole plays a cork-pulling consul straight out of a Graham Greene story who strolls through a scene now and again, sometimes in mufti, sometimes not! Suddenly a bunch of wacky tourists descend on the place, and
vignettes, one or two of them amusing, are played out like games of
tic-tac-toe!
The real keepers here, I think, are Rick Moranis and Eugene
Levy, playing a pair of mock-Jewish mashers, both named Barry, with a
particularly grotesque line in woopatter! They have many adventures on the
island and are separated, and their reunion, after much deserved trial, is
actually kind of touching, particularly because of Moranis’s outfit and Levy’s
giant bag of marijuana!
It’s all very brightly filmed by Peter Hannan, whose
versatility is proven in that he shot both this and its polar opposite, Withnail & I! But take your pleasure
where you can with this one, ha ha, because frankly speaking it’s just not very
good! The music is surprisingly terrible – ha ha, The Harder They Come this isn’t – and the script is unbelievable
lazy, both with the jokes and with the politics! At least its sympathies are in
the right place, I suppose, but everything is pretty cartoonish, so “the right
place” is pretty unpinpointable! Finally, and most damnably perhaps, is that
the picture suffers from a noticeable lack of pep!
Poor Twiggy – this is one of the most undeveloped female
roles in modern American cinema, and that’s saying a lot! It’s not much better
for Williams though, whose character is frequently something of a jerk! But not
a jerk chicken, ha ha! So I’m sorry to say that, while at least the location is
far more colourful, the mis- or under-used network stars and the croakball of a
script will keep you away from that mellow place you should be in with such a
movie! I give Club Paradise one
parasailing mishap!
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