Skidoo (1968) At long last we steeled ourselves to sit down and view this loony-toon disasterpiece, whose reputation as the craziest, most wrong-headed, most train-wrecky of 60's movies only grows and grows.......
We had a fairly good idea of the idiotic lunacy that awaited us.....but nothing could prepare us for the experience of actually watching 'Skidoo'.......
Back on 6/20/17 we did an extensive post on the crash-'n-burn atrocity of director Otto Preminger's "Hurry Sundown" (1967), a film that forever put an end to Preminger's series of Big Star, Big Budget, Big Issue spectacles.....(such as "In Harm's Way", "Exodus", "The Cardinal" and "Advise And Consent").
Desperate to recover some shred of cinematic validity, Preminger, like a few other directors of his aging generation, foolishly thought to tap into the exploding revolutions of the youth culture.......even though the counter-culture upheavals of the late 1960's were as foreign and unknowable to Preminger and his contemporaries as the dark side of the moon.
Even worse, he decided to fashion his excursion into hippie-dom as a zany comedy, even though the blustering self-promoting director never once displayed a sense of humor in his life and entire career.
The result is a madhouse of a film that's akin to watching a youtube video of a fatal 50 car chain reaction accident on a busy freeway. There isn't a minute of its 98 minutes that doesn't defy belief.......with scene after scene brimming with sights you wish you could unsee.....but you simply can't look away......
This 'Gangsters Meet The Hippies' farce features Jackie Gleason as a retired Kingpin who's forced by his former crime lord boss to sneak into Alcatraz and murder a fellow thug (Mickey Rooney) who snitched on the mob. The Boss, known only to one and all as 'God', is played by an addled, exhausted Groucho Marx, grossly made up to resemble a waxworks figure of his 1930's self..
While all this goes on, Gleason's nubile daughter (Alexandra Hay) hooks up with mellow hippie guru 'Stash' (John Phillip Law) and his coterie of flagrantly stereotyped movie hippies.....(or at least Preminger's fractured cornball idea of what those 'wild 'n crazy' kids were like.)
And before we go on with more insanity, let's not forget to mention pop-eyed, gravel-voiced stage diva Carol Channing as Gleason's wife.......who, incredible as this may sound, functions as the movie's sex object, having her prance around in a bra, panties and go-go boots......(a sight we dearly hope will drift from our memory someday soon....
So off we now go to prison, where Gleason and the entire prison population, inmates and guards alike, all end up deliriously trippin' on LSD......(and please, we beg of you, don't ask for the plot machinations that led to this).
This all leads to the movie's penultimate sequences.......dancing trashcans saturated in blinding psychedelic tints, Gleason's prison escape in a hot air balloon made from vegetable sacks, a flotilla of hippies laying siege to Groucho's yacht while Carol Channing croaks out the title tune in a 'Pirates of Penzance' costume. (Watching all this, you might begin to think you're tripping harder than Gleason.....)
As final icing atop this Mt. Vesuvius of Madness, an offscreen Otto Preminger introduces songwriter Harry Nilsson and a chorus to sing the entirety of the film's cast and credits......for those in the audience, we suppose, who've been left too dumbstruck by the film to even read the names that appear on the screen.......
And that cast! Like Stanley Kramer's bloated, misbegotten, and equally unfunny "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", you'll spot dozens of veteran character actors Cesar Romero, Arnold Stang, George Raft, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, Slim Pickens, Fred Clark, Frank Gorshin, Richard Kiel and, sorry to mention, the ever unctuous, inevitable Frankie Avalon........
Once again, in the interest of common sense reviewing, we'll supply two separate ratings for anyone daring to consider approaching "Skidoo".....
FOR AUDIENCES OF TRADITIONAL MAINSTREAM MOVIES: You gotta be kidding, right? Think of this movie as being trapped in a closet with a coughing, sneezing, drooling, recently infected COVID patient.....who's a hugger. Zero stars (0).
FOR AUDIENCES WHO YEARN TO SEEK OUT OFF-THE-BEATEN-TRACK, LUNATIC HARD-TO-FIND, ONE-OF-A-KIND CULT MOVIES: Congratulations......you've struck gold, hit the mother load, ascended to Valhalla.....4 stars (****)
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