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(1998)
Directors: Tommy Blaze, Phil Morton, Eddie Beverly, Richard Peters In the spirit of The Groove Tube and Kentucky Fried Movie, Viewer Discretion Advised is an uproarious '90's look at media-warped culture. Ted Smith (Tommy Blaze of The Newz) watches far too much television. One day, he awakens to find himself the star of sexy public services announcements, wild westerns, hair-raising horror movies, and goofy game shows. Tune in. Turn on. Crack up. Viewer discretion is definitely advised. That's what
the written description on the back of the video
box claims
Viewer Discretion Advised is all
about. From this description alone, the movie
sounds like it just might be a laughfest, right?
However, if you know a few facts surrounding
this movie, you'll start to get more of a
feeling
Blaze does indeed play a character named "Ted Smith", but that's about all the video box description has in common with the actual movie. The Ted Smith in the movie doesn't watch too much television - in fact, I can't recall even one shot of him watching television at any moment during the running time. There's also no scene of him awaking to finding himself the star of various TV programs, or even just simply awaking. Also, he's not in any game show parodies, and he's not in any sexy public service announcements - in fact, there's nothing really coming across as a public service announcement of any kind in the movie. And as for it being "an uproarious '90s look at media-warped culture", well, I'll get to that later. Instead, the movie starts out in the style of Kentucky Fried Movie, one skit coming after the other. The movie starts with a commercial with the representative of a state government selling off its execution equipment after capital punishment was abolished. A little later there is a sketch concerning some cowboys around a campfire comparing the awful experiences they've had, each subsequent one becoming more outlandish. One fellow claims he was kicked by a horse, his bones broken and eyes gouged out in the process. "Forged a new nervous system out of clay, used my face. Stood up, popped my eyes back in, finished shoeing the horse. Don't tell me about pain!" With there also being some clips
of a condom commercial, as well as some footage
from a generic action flick thrown in, by the end of that
cowboy sketch, we are all prepared to watch a
continuing string of unrelated sketches. But
then, things
I'm almost halfway through this review, and I see I've yet to start commenting on whether the movie itself manages to be entertaining despite the mishandling in its packaging (both for the video box and the way the sketches are assembled.) Is it any funny? Well, sometimes it is. I liked it when Ted Smith was in his teenager personality and saw his pathetic romantic life as a horror movie trailer (Just Friends - where female zombies stalk him and moan "No sex" and "You're like a brother to me.") My favorite sketch was one concerning the TV game show I'm Sorry ("A show where you have to beat the show to win!") It's very funny, with the sarcastic game show host (played by George Cahill) mockingly saying the title to the female contestant who has played and won for days on end but is getting nothing. She's pissed, but is somehow willing to play the game once more when she's promised a million in gold bars... if she manages to dodge the arrows fired from bikini-clad female archers who are blindfolded. Though its production values are horrendously cheap, everything else about the sketch works. Cahill and the anonymous woman playing the furious contestant play their parts with the right amount of exaggeration to be hilarious. Plus the writing and editing pace out the sketch so that it not only clips along at a good speed, it stops at the right place before it begins to overstays its welcome. There are some other
sketches that have some equally good ideas
behind them, as well coming up with a few
genuine gags from these ideas. However, they not
only go on far, far beyond the point where we
get it and we don't need to see anymore, but
they play out with a slowness that makes them
Some sketches not only suffer from this deadly slow pacing, but from the fact that the idea behind the sketch - even a legitimate idea - is just not properly thought out, even during the few opportunities the sketch has to rip it up. Take the longest and last sketch, a spoof of slasher films, where a group of young people go to an isolated country home for a weekend retreat. Though the slasher movie genre at first thought seems ripe for parody, when you think about it, the genre is kind of a parody of itself. We already know about the various elements that keep popping up in these movies - a place where there were violent murders years ago, sex before death, the girl who has never put out, etc. - so it's not terribly funny in this sketch when people simply repeat what we already know, as when at one point when someone says, "Well, since I'm the only one without someone, I might as well go downstairs to get the beer." Occasionally the sketch does take these gags a step further and make them somewhat amusing, such as the times when Blaze's character pleads with the cameraman not to cut to a point-of-view shot, or asks the cameraman if he had just cut away from a shot of the monster. But most often the sketch simply recreates the clichés, and thinks that is funny by itself. If it weren't for those few times when the sketch goes the extra mile to spoof those clichés, plus a few other somewhat amusing gags (such as the gruesomely funny fate of the fat loser in that basement), the whole sketch would be quite painful to sit through. Then there are
the sketches that simply have a bad idea behind
them, so the sketches have a further hurdle to
accomplish along with the slow pace and the
movie's beat-to-death attitude. The gag behind a
specialty cable channel spoof is that
While
Viewer Discretion Advised is definitely
not the worst sketch comedy movie out there -
for one thing, it does have some genuine laughs,
which is more than you can say about
Outtakes or
Cracking Up
- it could be considered the laziest of its
kind. Even in the worst of what this genre has
to offer, you can sense that at least everyone
involved was trying hard to make their
enterprise funny. In this movie, you get the
feeling that (except for the game show parody)
that nobody is really giving a full and
thought-out effort, Tommy Blaze included. Though
he plays several different characters, he seems
to think that just playing these stock
characters in the same exaggerated way (read:
ham), that he'll automatically be funny. It's
not funny, and it's quite exasperating that we
have to sit though most of this movie with this
mugging actor. The only times he is funny is
when he's given a line that's funny, not because
he is funny (if you follow me.) This might be
the explanation as to just why Blaze hasn't made
any new appearance for the past few years -
maybe the Hollywood people in charge of casting
viewed him enough to make some industry-wide
discretion. UPDATE: I received this letter: "My name is George Cahill & I'd like to
thank you for the review of that terrible movie
I did! I played the game show host & later went
on to win a Silver Telly for my role as Mr.
Greenjeans on THE ALL-NEW CAPTAIN KANGAROO SHOW
which ran for three seasons along with a
spin-off called MISTER MOOSE'S FUN-TIME Check for availability on Amazon (VHS) Check for availability on Amazon (DVD) See also: Cracking Up, Outtakes, Prime Time |
that the description is actually a sign
of desperateness rather than an accurate
indication of what's to come. So the movie
apparently stars someone famous, someone from a
TV comedy show? Sounds good, until you find out
that The Newz wasn't exactly a hit TV
show, only lasting one season. And as for
starring someone famous, well, Blaze was only
hot enough after The Newz to generate two
more acting credits before disappearing to who
knows where. Incidentally, none of those credits
include this movie; despite the release date of
this movie being 1998, the movie was actually
made before The Newz, in 1991.
From that fact alone, it's pretty obvious to
conclude that the end results were so
unappealing to potential distributors that none
of them wanted to pick it up even when Blaze
became "hot" when his show came out. In fact, it
took three more years after The Newz went
off the air before Troma finally picked it up.
Though Troma isn't exactly known for releasing a
lot of quality movies, it's obvious that after
they screened Viewer Discretion Advised
that they were quite desperate to try to catch
the attention of renters, and not just from the
way they plug "star" Tommy Blaze on the back
cover.
suddenly change with the
introduction of the Ted Smith character, a
schizophrenic with several personalities who is
under the care of a psychiatrist. Each
appearance he makes in the movie has him
visiting his psychiatrist with a different
personality (teenager, cop, army veteran, etc.),
which makes the excuse of showing this alternate
personality of Ted Smith in an extended sketch.
Then the movie subsequently goes back to the
Kentucky Fried Movie format for
several minutes after the end of each Ted Smith
sketch. With such an awkward narrative device at
work here, a closer examination of it can only
bring a conclusion that some kind of disaster
befell the movie during the middle of
production; even though I've seen plenty of
badly handled movies, I can't imagine that
someone actually intended this movie to go this
way. The most plausible explanation is that the
movie was intended to be a complete mix of
unrelated sketches, but financial problems
prevented the building of extra sets and the
hiring of extra actors. So with Tommy Blaze
happening to appear in several sketches
(probably because he helped to write and direct
the movie), he and his brothers in film used
what was left in the budget to build one set,
hire a few more actors, and shoot all the
psychiatrist clips at one time. All of which
just adds to the feeling of desperateness that
surrounding the movie.
even more of an agony to sit through. For
example, take that cowboy sketch I mentioned
three paragraphs ago. The gag behind this sketch
is that each cowboy tells his friends an example
on how macho he is by telling them a horrendous
experience he went through and survived. Then to
further prove to each other how macho they are,
they start right there around the campfire to
cut their wrists, shoot themselves in the feet,
cut off their legs with a rusty saw, etc. It
sounds funny, and it could have been
consistently hilarious had it been reasonably
paced and trimmed of excessive fat. But because
of its bad execution, it's only worth a couple
of laughs at the most. To begin with, the... cowboys...
talk like... this when they tell those stories
about what happened to them in the past - and
they tell too many of them, to boot. And while
activities like a cowboy blowing the back of his
head off and leaving a big bloody smear on the
bale of hay behind him may sound lively and good
gory fun, they execute... this stuff... with the
same... degree of... slowness. As well, just
like with the cowboys' stories, they keep
showing one gory activity after the other far,
going beyond the point of humor and into the
"yeah yeah we get the gag" realm.
all the
channel does is give out live reports as to what
time it is at the home office and various places
around the world. That's it. A news report on
another channel - World At War - has a
feature from a guy in the Khyber Pass, who all
of a sudden is blown up during his report.
That's it. There's are several spoofs on that
"this is your brain on drugs" commercial, which
simply consist of putting one object in another
("This is a tennis shoe. This is a tennis shoe
in a blender." Zzzzzzzzzzz. "Any
questions?") That's it. The worst of these
sketches - winning by default simply because of
its ungodly length - is the one where a
businessman and his partner go to a bar... have
a drink... one of them sees an attractive
woman... goes to her... starts hitting on her...
attracts her... she leaves the bar with him...
they go to her place.... they get into bed....
they start having sex.... and then (heh heh, get
this!)... the condom police break in to
apprehend them, because they are not using a
condom! And the poor guy will have to go into
custody for six months while they fully test his
blood, and the woman will have to go though
something similar! That's it.