The Great Outdoors

 Year:  1988

Director:  Howard Deutch

Screenplay:  John Hughes

Starring:  Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Stephanie Faracy, Annette Bening

Running Time:  90 minutes

Genre:  Comedy

Chicago resident Chester "Chet" Ripley (Candy), his wife Connie (Faracy) and their two sons are spending their summer at a bucolic lake resort.  However, their holiday takes a turn for the worse when Connie's sister Kate Craig (Bening) arrives uninvited with her obnoxious investment broker husband Roman (Aykroyd) and their twin daughters.  Soon a peaceful lakeside vacation turns into a catalogue of misadventures and disasters.

This is a moderately funny family comedy.  John Candy plays the gentle Chicagoan who just wants a peaceful holiday for some family bonding and Dan Aykroyd is well-cast as his annoying yuppie brother in law.  Stephanie Faracy and Annette Bening, in her film debut, really don't have much to do as the supportive wives and mothers.  Scripted by John Hughes, who became something of a celebrity in the 1980s, with scripts including National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), Pretty in Pink (1986) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), as well as writing and directing The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and the John Candy starring Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987).  The film feels like a watered-down Vacation film with the same episodic structure moving from comic set-piece to comic set-piece, before a heart-warming conclusion.  None of the cast has anything to stretch themselves, and there are moments where the film looks surprisingly cheap, like a scene where they are fishing at dawn and the lake is very clearly a stage set.  However there are some very funny and memorable scenes, such as Candy's disastrous trip on water skis, and a scene where Roman persuades Chet to take the "Old 96" challenge in a local restaurant and eat a 96 pound steak.  From Candy's reaction when the crazed-looking chef in a blood stained apron sets down the huge slab of meat in front of him and his mute pleading and suffering as he is forced to finish this mass of food, is a wonderful piece of silent comic acting.  By the way, there is a restaurant in California that does serve an "Old 96" in tribute to this movie.  It's recommended for between four to six people.  One of the funniest things in the film are the racoons that periodically try and get inside the tourist's rubbish bins, and talk in their own chittering language, which is subtitled.  The romantic sub-plot between Chet's teenage son Buck (Chris Young) and local girl Cammie (Lucy Deakins) is done well and is actually quite moving, but there is not enough of it for it not to feel like it was just shoe-horned in at the last minute.  Director Howard Deutch, who previously worked with Hughes on Pretty in Pink, does a serviceable job.  It's not a great film, but it is  enjoyable enough, and there are enough laughs to make it an entertaining diversion.

John Candy and Dan Aykroyd in The Great Outdoors
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Planes, Trains and Automobiles

 Year:  1987

Director:  John Hughes

Screenplay:  John Hughes

Starring:  Steve Martin, John Candy

Running Time:  92 minutes

Genre:  Comedy

Uptight advertising executive Neal Page (Martin) is desperate to get from his business meeting in New York City to spend Thanksgiving with his family in Chicago.  However, when his plane is diverted to Wichita, Kansas, Neal embarks on a race against time, packed with disasters and misadventures.  To make matters worse, he is in the company of good-natured, but very irritating, salesman Del Griffith (Candy).

Writer/director John Hughes made his name with teen films such as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), and this was seen as something of a change of pace, but the plot and structure are fairly similar, in many ways, to National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), which Hughes wrote, and which also deals with a disastrous road trip.  The film starts off with a very realistic and relatable situation.  Steve Martin as Neal Page is desperate to get back to Chicago from New York, but the business meeting is running frustratingly long due to his indecisive client, then he has to get to the airport, but the streets of New York are chockablock with people trying to get away for their Thanksgiving weekends, and then when he finally does get on to the plane, which is delayed, he s downgraded from first class to coach, and has to sit next to overly friendly salesman Del Griffith, and the plane is diverted to Wichita due to a snow storm in Chicago.  Then the situations become ever more absurd and farcical as Neal desperately tries to get back to Chicago by any means necessary before Thanksgiving, which is three days away.  Also he is unable to shake off Del, who both helps and hinders his efforts.   This is a road movie and, like most road movies, is very episodic, but the jokes and comical situations come thick and fast, even if they don't always land, enough of them do to make it consistently funny.  Steve Martin and John Candy were both great comedians and they bounce off each other very well.  Martin has a fine line in seething, buttoned down frustration, and Candy, of course, is the chatty slob who is lovable, but who you know would drive you to distraction after awhile.  The film has it's silly moments, which don't really sit with the more realistic tone of the earlier scenes, but it still works, and the inevitable friendship that springs up between Martin and Candy is well drawn and quite believable.  While it may not be a classic, it is a fun comic romp.  Kevin Bacon has a cameo early in the film as a businessman racing Steve Martin for a taxi.  

Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Heavy Metal

Year of Release:  1981
Director:  Gerald Potterton
Screenplay:  Daniel Goldberg and Len Blum, based on stories and artwork by Richard Corben, Angus McKie, Dan O'Bannon, Thomas Warkentin and Bernie Wrightson
Starring: John Candy, Jackie Burroughs, Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis, Richard Romanus, Alice Playten, Susan Roman, Percy Rodriguez
Running Time:  90 minutes
Genre:  Science-fiction, fantasy, horror, animation

This Canadian adult animated anthology film adapts several stories from the comic book Heavy Metal.  A young girl is terrorised by "the sum of all evils", a glowing green orb called the Loc-Nar (Rodriguez) which shows her several stories to illustrate how it has spread chaos and destruction throughout time and space:  In the nightmarish New York City of 2031, cynical taxi driver Harry Canyon (Romanus) tires to save a woman from hired killers; A nerdy teenage boy (Candy) is transported through time and space to a bizarre fantasy world where he is transformed into a bald, musclebound warrior; On a space station a witness in the trial of a criminal space captain transforms into a giant rampaging monster; In the Second World War, a badly damaged B-17 bomber heads home after sustaining heavy casualties, but, under the Loc-Nar's influence, the dead come back as zombies;   A woman (Playten), abducted by aliens, forms a relationship with a robot; A silent warrior woman avenges a brutal attack on a peaceful city.

Since it's release, this has become quite a major cult movie, although it really has not aged well.  Loaded with sex and violence, it's very juvenile and, to put it mildly, it is problematic.  Loaded with gratuitous nudity, women are almost always depicted as sex objects, and in  a couple of places sexual assault is played off as a joke.  It feels like a missed opportunity to bring adult animation and more edgy fantasy into the mainstream, but feels like a compendium of all the things that the genre is criticised for.  On the plus side some of the animation is very good, each story had it's own animation team and so each has it's own distinctive feel, and some of the imagery is really startling, so it never really gets dull. As you would expect from a film called Heavy Metal the soundtrack is packed with heavy metal and hard rock songs, which now just feels kind of quaint.  Coming across at times like the cover of a seventies rock album or fantasy paperback cover come to life, this can be enjoyed as mindless, noisy, late-night fun, but it lacks any charm, and there's a nasty quality to it that leaves a bad taste. 

An alien arrival in Heavy Metal