Well hello there, it’s Burl, here to review
an 80s oddity for you, as I’ve done many times before! This one comes from
those Golan-Globus boys, but it’s one of their more obscure efforts and an
altogether kooky concoction! Believe it or not, it was directed by Walter
Matthau’s son Charles, and the picture’s called Doin’ Time on Planet Earth!
I recall many years ago reading an article
about this movie in a magazine called Cinemafantastique
(a combination Fangoria and Starlog for the wispy-moustache set), but
I nevertheless knew little about it, other than a spinning restaurant is
somehow involved! Ha ha, and indeed that proved to be true! But for much of its
scant running time it seems like a belated, point-missing entry in the teen science whiz
subgenre, with a clever black sheep family-oddball type called Ryan who is roundly loathed
or at best barely tolerated by his family!
Ryan’s dad, played by Hugh Gillin from Psycho II, runs the Holiday Inn with the
spinning restaurant on top; his mom is a ghostly nonentity; his brother hates
him and is about to get married (the brother’s wedding plays a bigger part here
than the comparable event does in My Brother’s Wedding); and his sister, played by Paula Irvine from Phantasm II, hates him even more, in
fact detests him beyond even the pathological rage of the sister in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or the
justifiable contempt of the one in Teen Lust!
Meanwhile, as in an ordinary 80s high
school picture, the gormless Ryan’s main concern is Losin’ It! Ha ha, and the object of his virginal
desire, a lounge singer at the revolving hotel played by Andrea Thompson from
Hot Splash, returns his puppy love with the same opprobrium he receives from
his family! Only a weird bus-driving couple played by Adam West from The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (and who
I met at a car show once!) and Candice Azzara from Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About
Me? show Ryan any respect, and that’s because they believe him to be born
of alien DNA just as they and their Heaven’s Gate-type followers are; and
furthermore that he is the star navigator who will lead them back to their home
planet in the spaceship that is currently disguised as a revolving Holiday Inn
restaurant! Ha ha!
It’s a movie that tries to be many
things at once: a high school coming-of-age comedy, an oddball comedy about
feeling out of step with the world, a speculative sci-fi eccentricity! If it
aspires to anything, it’s to join the ranks of Repo Man, Rubin & Ed
and UFOria! But it doesn’t accomplish
this to any satisfying degree, despite a few lightly amusing lines and cameos
from old warhorses like Roddy McDowell from Fright Night and Heads, here playing a
preacher, and Maureen Stapleton from Interiors
and The Money Pit as a wacky balloon
lady! Ha ha, even the big chocolate bar-munching oaf from Friday the 13th part V shows up!
None of it works terribly well thanks to
inconstant direction, some dicey performances, and a script carved from real
butter! The revolving restaurant is theoretically a nice touch, and to be sure
it’s featured heavily, but in the end, like the narrative itself, all it does is
go round and round! (I did like the band that plays the climactic wedding
party though, led by a non-singer singer called Cecil Hill!) Ha ha, I watched
this with my fairly uncritical eight year-old, and even he complained about the
unsatisfying resolution! Doin’ Time on
Planet Earth is obscure, but, while I appreciate that it’s trying something
different, and its heart is in the right place, so far as I’m concerned it’s
not something that requires rediscovery; so after all is said and done I give it one and a half helium
inhalations!
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