Lucky Stiff
(1988)
Director: Anthony
Perkins
Cast: Joe Alaskey, Donna Dixon, Jeff Kober
The acting role that actor Anthony Perkins will always
be immediately associated with is the role of Eben Cabot in the 1958
film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play Desire Under The Elms,
no doubt due to the hot and steamy feeling he brings to the love scenes
his character engages with with his stepmother (played by Sophia
Loren.) Just kidding. That was one time when Perkins was really
miscast. Of course, the role that comes immediately to mind when
thinking of Perkins is that of Norman Bates in Psycho
(and to a lesser extent, the three sequels to the movie.) Although he
had been in some leading roles before this movie (such as the baseball
movie Fear Strikes Out), Psycho was
without doubt his breakthrough role that made him a cult star. But some
say that his acting in that movie was a curse on his career, that it
subsequently made it hard for him to get work, and that the little work
he got were roles that were similar to his character in Psycho.
I know that's what I thought when I was younger. But a careful look at
his career proves that wasn't exactly true. First, it's true that
Perkins went to Europe for several years after Psycho,
just like a number of other Hollywood stars did in the '60s when they
found work drying up for them for one reason or another. But he worked
steadily without interruption during these years, and the roles Perkins
played in these European movies were not psycho killers. For example,
he played comedy with Brigttte Bardot in the spy spoof The
Ravishing Idiot, and he did Fraz Kafka in the Orson Welles
movie The Trial.
Even after Perkins returned to the United States, he did
not fall into that depressing pit that I mentioned in the previous
paragraph. It is true that from this point up to his death in 1992, he
acted in a number of movies where he played oddballs with something
seriously wrong with their minds. There are the cult movies Pretty
Poison and Crimes Of Passion, and less
well-known movies like Mahogany and Edge Of Sanity.
But he also appeared in a number of roles in this period where his
character was not so crazy, and in different genres. Among these films
are the black comedy Catch-22, the space epic The
Black Hole, and the action movie ffolks. And
looking at his entire resume, one will see that he was never inactive
for long between movies. He even got to work behind the camera several
times. The first time was when he wrote, along with his friend composer
Stephen Sondheim, the murder mystery The Last Of Sheila
(an excellent movie that I highly recommend.) And he directed movies
twice, the first time with Psycho III, the second time
with the movie being reviewed here, Lucky Stiff, working
with a script written by comedy screenwriter Pat Proft (The Naked
Gun, Scary Movie 3 and 4.)
Lucky Stiff is a black comedy, something
that probably greatly appealed to Perkins after playing so many serious
roles for years, especially those roles that had him playing someone
with something seriously wrong with their minds. And it is a pretty
original premise, even though it contains certain elements that have
been done in other movies (comedies and other kinds of movies) before.
The events of the movie center around the character of Ron Douglas (Alaskey, presently the voice actor for many of the
classic Looney Tunes cartoon characters), a fat glasses-wearing man who
is not only a definite nerd, but a nerd who is a loser. After just a
few minutes in the movie, we see him at his wedding, but it doesn't go
well; his fiancé dumps him at the altar just as they are about to say
their vows. It's just the latest in a long line of failed relationships
for the poor Ron. Crushed, he takes his friends' advice and he decides
to take a trip to get away from it all, deciding to go to Lake Tahoe
for the Christmas holidays. At the ski lodge, he meets Cynthia Mitchell
(Dixon, Bosom Buddies). On one of their first meetings, she
astonishes Ron by telling him she was attracted to him the first moment
they met. Ron is attracted to her as well. So when Cynthia asks him to
join her and her family for Christmas dinner, he is thrilled. What Ron
doesn't know is that Cynthia and her family are cannibals - and he has
been selected by Cynthia and her family to be the main dish for their
Christmas feast.
You might be thinking that I have just committed one of
the most unpardonable sins a movie critic can make - spoiling a movie's
big twist. But that's not the case with this review. The movie makes no
attempt to hide this twist; we learn that the Mitchell clan are
cannibals just a few seconds after the opening credits end, and that
they are looking for someone to be their Christmas feast. This is not
the only problem to be found in the script. Pat Proft is sometimes a
good comedy screenwriter, but more often than not his attempts at this
genre fall as flat as this movie does. The early revealing of the twist
in Lucky Stiff might have been forgiven if the movie had
been funny, but for the most part it isn't. There are a few mildly
amusing sequences in the movie, such as when Ron has breakfast at the
hotel restaurant, where he encounters waiters that unintentionally jab
at his loneliness, as well as a rude little boy who eventually gets a
punishment that will please anyone who has ever had an experience with
a bratty child. There's also a giggle later in the movie at the
Mitchell residence, where Ron has a pre-Christmas dinner with the
family. One of the Mitchell clan believes he is a ghost, and at the
dinner table starts acting up in front of a bewildered Ron, and head of
the family "Pa" Mitchell (William Morgan Sheppard, Transformers)
eases the situation for Ron in a quick and unexpected way that I admit
made me laugh - though I was so dying for a laugh at this point that
most anything could have made me laugh.
Aside from those isolated moments, I did not laugh at
all, finding the screenplay pretty unbearable for a number of different
reasons. First of all, there is a lot of wasted potential for humor,
one example being the scene when extended members of the Mitchell
family arrive at the home and are introduced to Ron. This could have
been a classic scene, introducing us to new characters that reveal
their individual craziness to an increasingly uneasy Ron in their
individual introductions. But what does the movie do instead? Within a
few seconds of their introduction to Ron, someone throws a record on
the record machine and everyone starts dancing (and dancing normally,
not in a humorous fashion.) No attempt is made subsequently to develop
any of these newly introduced characters. There are things in the movie
that are supposed to be funny but go by with no explanation for them.
Near the beginning of the movie Ron is at church with his fiancé to get
married, but just before they say their vows, she turns around and
walks out forever. She doesn't say why, and the movie offers no
subsequent explanation (funny or otherwise) for her action. There are
moments when the movie forgets it is supposed to be a black comedy, and
just goes for the black. One scene has one of the Mitchell clan tell a
story about a family of foxes. When the foxes didn't have any food to
feed their pups, the mother fox let the pups chew her paws off. This
isn't funny, it is just tasteless.
Most of the time, the movie just piles on one gag after
another that aren't funny for one reason or another. There are a lot of
jokes that the audience will have seen hundreds of times before in
other places (on a ski slope a skier blocks from the beginner skier Ron
a sign pointing the way to an expert downhill run, and the Mitchell
family property is built on a former toxic waste dump.) There is
attempted humor that will have viewers wondering why Proft thought they
were funny, such as when Ron tells the story of a past girlfriend
dumping him for a Harlem Globetrotter ("I should have known when a
couple of times making love she'd whistle 'Sweet Georgia Brown'.")
Faced with such bad material, it's a wonder that the actors in the
movie still make an effort. Alaskey has some charm and generates some
sympathy for his character when the scene is serious, but most of the
movie has him cracking unfunny wisecracks that don't endear him to the
audience. Dixon makes an effort as well, but her character has been
directed to come across as cold, sometimes not even looking into the
eyes of Ron, making us wonder why anyone would be attracted to her. In
fact, the rest of Perkins' direction is just as off. Though he proved
he could direct in the somewhat underrated Psycho III,
he seems unable to salvage anything here. Maybe it was the combination
of a lousy script and an obviously low budget that makes the movie at
times look like it was shot in someone's back yard. Whatever the case
might have been, the movie ended up being pretty much a total stiff.
Check
for availability on Amazon (DVD)
See also: Destroyer, Fire Sale, Sonny Boy
|