Burl reviews Nothing But Trouble! (1991)

Ha ha and ham candies, it’s Burl, here to review one of the stranger Celebrity Dream Projects ever to have been made: Dan Aykroyd’s Nothing But Trouble! Ha ha, I’ve been consuming information about this thing for years, but until yesterday I’d never seen it! Everything, but everything I’d heard was bad, though; and Aykroyd is by all accounts an unusual fellow, so the prospect of a weird-looking movie written and directed by him, and of course featuring him as some sort of bloated, scab-covered old man, was a daunting one! I was prepared for a truly terrible movie-viewing experience, ha ha!

The picture’s original title was Valkenvania, and I maintain that whatever timid, unimaginative studio exec decided it should instead be called Nothing But Trouble did both the picture and its legacy a grave disservice! Ha ha, what’s in a name you might say, especially if the film itself is as inept and pointlessly grotesque as people say it is! But movies, even bad ones, are fragile and finely-wrought creations, like pixies or unicorns, and so with them everything matters, and the slightest misstep can be like coughing on a house of cards!

There’s a strong comedy cast: not just Aykroyd from Ghostbusters, but also Chevy Chase from Vacation, who must have got along with Aykroyd when they worked together on Spies Like Us, and John Candy, with whom Aykroyd co-starred in The Great Outdoors! Demi Moore, well known from her role in Parasite (the original; accept no substitute, ha ha!), is in here too, along with familiar faces like Taylor Negron (with whom I had lunch once, and who was a garrulous and maximally entertaining dining companion) and Brian Doyle-Murray!

Chase plays some sort of Manhattan financial player who meets his new neighbor Moore, a lawyer, and almost immediately offers her a ride to some kind of event in Atlantic City! With two annoying faux-Brazillians tagging along, they detour through the town of Valkenvania, where they run afoul of local constable Candy! He escorts the BMW full of yuppies to Valkenvania’s reeve, an ancient crank played by Aykroyd in leperous maquillage, who entraps them in his mansion/junkyard/funhouse and torments them with conveyer belts, pop-ups, and piles of bones!

Malefactors whom the reeve likes even less are sent immediately to Mister Bonestripper, a big machine that grinds people into skeletons! Ha ha! Meanwhile, Moore is stuck with two enormous, filthy diaper babies, one of whom is also played by Aykroyd! Ha ha, with all that time in the makeup trailer it’s amazing he had time to direct the movie! But direct it he did, and while I won’t say he did a great job, I can say I’ve seen worse! The busy production design and experienced cinematographer (the portly Dean Cundey, who shot The Thing and many other fine films was behind the camera here) certainly help the picture seem professionally made!

It’s really just an elaborate comedy version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which already had its elaborate comedy version, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), but merely the fact that it was this story and no other that Aykroyd wanted to tell in his directorial debut is simply delightful! Ha ha, it’s true that Chase puts in a particularly low-key, possibly even lazy performance, and it’s true the narrative is shapeless and deflated, like something I might have written in high school, but I nevertheless found plenty of laffs in the picture! It’s weird and gross and goofy-bad, but it's undeniably ebullient, and I felt very much that I was on its wavelength, that I was picking up whatever it was Aykroyd was laying down! (I sort of wish I’d been wearing gloves though, ha ha!)

The big diaper babies alone make it an irresistible treat! There are some extremely annoying characters you wish could take a trip through Mister Bonestripper post-haste, but there’s also an obliging hip hop crew who perform a number and who are freed by the reeve possibly because one of them, like the reeve himself, wears a false nose; and there’s a second, mute performance by Candy as a lady with unearthly strength! I wasn’t expecting to like this picture, but I did! I give Nothing But Trouble, alias Valkenvania, three cans of Hawaiian Tropic!