Taking home a VHS movie to watch in your own living room was an amazing, novel thing to do.....such a novelty, that if the store was all out of copies of the hot new Hollywood release, customers would opt for "Night Of The Bloodsucking Barbarian Gladiators of 2099" and still go home happy.....
Little video stores flourished and thrived, customers flocked to them (weekend nights resembled Times Square on New Years Eve) and everyone was happy.....(well, not everyone. Studios loathed and despised video stores as the store owners accumulated rental revenues from the one-time wholesale purchase of the tapes.....with none of that rental money shared with the studios....)
And into this burgeoning marketplace came video companies like Vestron, grinding out cheapo knockoffs of Hollywood studio films to fill up the video store shelves.....
Featuring rock bottom budgets, casts and production values (some of them looked like they were shot with 8mm Kodak Brownies), Vestron pumped out an ocean of direct-to-VHS sludge.....incredible as it may seem, they even started a 'lower-budget' label, Lightning Video, with even worse movies for stores to stock up on.....(joining this avalanche of trash came the 'Go Go Boys', Golan and Globus with Cannon Films, but they're a story for another post......)
A favorite genre for Vestron and the Go Go Boys to duplicate was the 'gross-out party animal' comedy, made famous by 'Animal House' and Tom Hanks' "Bachelor Party"......this involved wild 'n crazy anti-establishment slackers sticking it to stuffy, stuck-up villains by throwing an all night booze-and-sex bash.......
That's why nostalgia overtook us watching "Office Christmas Party", which really functions as nothing more than a bigger budgeted, better acted version of a Vestron VHS party animal movie.....
This genre, whether it comes from studio filmmakers or fly-by-night shlockmeisters, works on a simple theory......spew out of hundreds of one liners and visual gags rapid fire....and some of them are bound to get a laugh. ...this equation hasn't changed or altered in decades....
"Office Christmas Party", in true desperate VHS fashion, flings everything it has at you....even a cloud of cocaine. If you didn't laugh at one particular bit, don't worry........another five or six yocks will be along in a minute.
Did we find any of it funny? By the law of averages, with the sheer amount of gags hurled......or course we did. But it's an exhausting, formulaic thing to sit through......and keep in mind, as a former video store movie buyer, we dutifully sat through all of these Vestron party animal movies.......watching "Office Christmas Party" was something akin to a tour through a roadside 'Museum Of 1980's Pop Culture Video"......after ten minutes, we looked for the 'exit through the Gift Shop' signs.......
For its few amusing moments, we toast 2 stars (**) to this party......we smiled....but only because of those kinder, gentler 80's memories, when everyone enjoyed their VHS machines......
No comments:
Post a Comment