Ha ha to everybody, and again I say ha ha!
It’s Burl, and I’m here to review a picture by the name of Tulips! Now, in response to this you’ll surely say “Tulips? Ha ha, nope, never heard of Tulips!” And there’s no reason you
should have heard of it, so don’t worry! It’s an obscure Canadian tax shelter
production that looks to have been more troubled than most, given that it had
at least three different directors, working under the umbrella pseudonym of
“Stan Ferris!” Ha ha!
The picture stars the rosy, bearded lips of
Gabe Kaplan, which fleshy proboscises you may recall from Fastbreak! They play the rosy, bearded lips of Leland Irving, a
tuba player and introvert whom we are informed is a genius, though little
evidence of this is seen! His brother, played by the King of Kensington
himself, Al Waxman, whom you’ll remember from his grisly inflations in Spasms, is constantly giving him advice
on how to get out and meet people! After the hair plugs he endures at his
brother’s instruction net him only ridicule, Leland decides to kill himself!
His attempts are repeatedly foiled, so he hires an effete hit man called Mr.
Avocado, played by Henry Gibson from Nashville
and Innerspace, to do the job for him!
Meanwhile, kooky waitress Rutanya, played
by Bernadette Peters, who is well known from Vigilante
Force, The Jerk and of course Heartbeeps, quits her job and is
rejected by her married-man boyfriend, and so falls into a similarly suicidal
funk! Ha ha, God save us from kooks and kookiness! Of course the two characters meet and fall in love, and many allegedly hilarious things
ensue, and then Leland remembers he’s to be assassinated and that puts a pall
on the romance! It all ends with a confusion in which Leland plants a bomb in
Mr. Avocado’s car, but then Rutanya ends up inside the car as she tries to
plead for Leland’s life! The car blows up, apparently incinerating both Rutanya
and Avocado, and a devastated Leland crawls into the gutter and swallows a
bottle of pills! Ha ha!
Of course there’s a happy ending in which
Rutanya turns out to have jumped out of the car at the last moment, and
Leland’s pills don’t actually kill him! But my goodness, even with that, it’s
one of the least funny movies ever made! I’ve never found suicidal
depression especially uproarious, but if there’s dark humour to be mined from
such situations, this picture never strikes a vein! The funniest thing in the
whole affair is Leland’s tuba playing, and that’s not any funnier than any tuba
playing is!
Like Taking Lives, the movie takes place in an undisguised Montreal, but absolutely no
special use is made of this location! The cast has some talented people in it,
notably Bernadette Peters, and she’s the only one who seems to be trying! Ha
ha, Kaplan must walk that fine actor’s line between depressive and
disinterested, and though I feel he was probably committed to the role, he
doesn’t really sell it! The spark that is supposed to exist between the two
leads is pretty damp, too! And Henry Gibson, so nicely if arbitrarily evil in The ‘burbs, mostly just lurks here! Ha
ha, he lurks outside of windows, on bridges and across streets, lurk, lurk,
lurk!
If you’re wondering what the title means,
“tulips” is some sort of code word Gibson uses to indicate he’s ready to start
his program of assassination! It doesn’t make any more sense than anything else, and nor
is it funnier than anything else! And nothing else is very funny at all! I give
Tulips half a hair plug, which is among my very lowest ratings!
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