Pandemonium (1982)

Eureka.

I found it.

This is without a doubt the downright stupidest, most half-thought, overdone Airplane!- wannabe comedy I have ever seen in my life.

So why did I watch it over and over again every time it popped up on TV in my youth?

...besides the fact that I was a stupid young man and would tend to watch anything back then?

As I said, this is another comedy that throws every odd bit of business in its plot it can think of to try - never mind if it works or not - and hope for the best. For some movies it works (Airplane!, Top Secret!, The Naked Gun), but for others (Jekyll & Hyde...Together Again, The Underground Comedy Movie) it sure as heck doesn't work.

Director Alfred Sole, who is most famous for directing Communion (aka: Alice Sweet Alice, Holy Terror), that low-budget horror flick that starred Brooke Shields in her very first "big" role (take THAT, Louis Malle!), felt it would be a good idea to jump on the parody wagon and give the world a horror/mad slasher spoof.

Good idea; worked so well for movies like 1981's Student Bodies or 1982's Wacko.

Heard of 'em?

No?

EXACTLY.

In fact, after the advent of 1980's Airplane!, any movie that wanted to be a comedy felt it had to do as the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team did to guarantee its success. Dozens of films tried this and dozens of films failed. Any video store, in fact, would have rows of tapes with faded blue covers in their "Comedy" sections that attest to this fact.

There's something about Pandemonium, though. Watching it again as I did then, I was struck by the thought that maybe - just maybe - this could have worked.

It didn't, understand. But it could have.

How it goes down: in her youth, cheerleader-wannabe Bambi (Candace Azzara) is the only survivor of the horrible murder of several cheerleaders by shish-ka-bob (but not the way they did it in Happy Birthday to Me). Now older and operating her own cheerleader school, Bambi takes in a new group of young cheerleaders-in-training who are now systematically being murdered by an unseen assailant. Is it recently-escaped insane furniture maker/killer Jarrett (Richard Romanus)? Can the stalwart Mountie Cooper (Tommy Smothers - yes, of The Smothers Brothers) stop the onslaught? And what about Pee-Wee Herman? I don't care what part he's playing - it's PEE-WEE HERMAN!!! What's he up to??! Huh?!!

Many of you probably did an "ahhh yeah..." when you saw those names and you'll continue to do so when I rattle off the rest of the cast. Carol Kane, Debralee Scott, Miles Chapin, Marc McClure, Kaye Ballard, Donald O'Connor, Eve Arden, Judge Reinhold, Troy Donahue, Edie McClurg, John Paragon and Luca Brasi himself: Lenny Montana.

I know: wotta cast, huh?

Well...it's not like a gigantic comedy cast or anything that puts you in the mind of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. You recognize most of them as funny people who can raise a laugh or two when called to. At least, they can be funny when given funny things to say or do.

And that's the whole problem: writers Jaime Barton Klein and Richard Whitley seem to have been the class of writers who were somehow related to the producer's best friends or something, or worse yet had just got out of college with a collection of jokes and sight gags that seemed to be hilarious when they were hopped up on the hallucinogens of their choice.

For instance, the events are set in the small town of It Had To Be, Indiana, and Bambi's cheerleader college is called It Had To Be University...or It Had To Be U, cue the popular 1920s-era song. Ha ha?

Another couple of jokes rotate around the cheerleader students being named Candy, Mandy, Sandy, Randy, Andy and Glenn...Glenn Dandy. Naturally, Glenn is the outcast of the group.

There's also a couple of jokes dealing with the Japanese that just aren't funny. Not that they're all that demeaning or racist, they're just...bland. When you have a cameo by Godzilla that doesn't even raise a smile, maybe it should have been edited out.

One joke that was good was that the hero of the piece was a Mountie, since most all of these slasher movies of the Eighties were filmed and produced in the land of Our Neighbor to the North. Remember The Cunningham/Mancuso Directive?

The acting is the problem here. Everyone tries to overact their way around jokes and gags that aren't funny so often that they threaten to shake the film right off its sprockets. There is quite literally so much jumping around and running and wide eyes and overly-exaggerated facial tics that you'd think the actors didn't know they were using sound film and reverted back to the Mack Sennett school of filming.

Even Carol Kane, who is usually so funny and sweet in movies like Carnal Knowledge, Annie Hall and Harry and Walter Go to New York, struggles to pull off her slightly off-balance giddiness that so many other times was effortless. She even sounds forced when declaring her excitement at the prospect of finally using her diaphragm.

So this film was made. It must have been released to theaters at some point, if even for a week, out of contractual obligation. I wonder if anyone who saw this in a theater would admit it today? I wonder if any of the actors would admit remembering being in it, or pull a Richard Dreyfuss (a la Whose Life Is It Anyway?) and wash their hands of it?

This thing could have cost $500 to make and not only would I believe it, I would also believe if it never made back as much as half its budget.

Like I said earlier, this could have worked. With a better script, smarter ideas, if it wasn't so tightly-bound by its PG rating and had the nudity, blood and guts that were in the movies it was wanting to make fun of.

I think that was the biggest problem with Pandemonium - it was too afraid of offending anybody. It wanted to be cute and cuddly and have its Mad Slasher cake, too.

Just like every movie can't support a horse in full dress uniform, neither can any spoof film shy away from its subject matter. Wes Craven understood that with Scream, and that's why his series worked. Unfortunately, this is something Alfred Sole and company failed to realize.

Pandemonium: this is one movie that was aptly named.

By the way, did you know that co-writer Richard Whitley also co-wrote that classic musical Rock and Roll High School? Talk about two extremes....