Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 30%
I had never heard of this movie until Netflix suggested it to me. It doesn't seem like many other people have, either. Usually I only resort to the audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes when I'm dealing with a made-for-TV movie, but as far as I can tell, this was released in theaters. Yet Rotten Tomatoes didn't have a single review for it.
The movie is hard to describe. Its plot, if you can call it that, is that a trio of cult leaders wants to assassinate a crusading Congressman (Pat Hingle, the commissioner from Batman) by hypnotizing his son-in-law (John Candy). This might be an homage to The Manchurian Candidate, or it might not. I would estimate that this plot occupies less than a third of the movie. The rest is taken up by a string of unrelated scenes. The only connection between one event and the next is John Candy's character.
John gets arrested and escapes custody, hand-cuffed to a killer (Ernie Hudson). The killer then dies, and John has to drag his body around in a strange prefiguring of Weekend at Bernie's. After John's friend Chick (Joe Flaherty) helps him remove the cuffs, they just abandon Ernie Hudson's body in a bar, where a talkative old friend is conversing with the corpse. The police never come looking for John or Ernie Hudson; the whole story is just dropped.
In another scene, John goes into a restaurant called Mom's, which has apparently transformed into a biker-punk bar. The punks pick a fight with John, he fails to talk sense into them, they spray-paint his clothes, and he leaves peacefully. Then he knocks their bikes over with his car. This gag actually made me laugh, but it had zero connection to anything else that happened in the movie.
John's fiancée Nancy is Alley Mills, the mother from The Wonder Years. She is effectively a non-entity, so I can't much comment on her performance. Early on, we're told that her father the Congressman is out to shut down the aforementioned sinister cult, but once this fact is established, it is never discussed again. Obviously we had to be told about this animosity between the Congressman and the cult, because the movie's climax is an assassination attempt against him. But you would think that this would warrant some kind of development or at least a few lines of dialogue.
Eugene Levy is also present as DiPasquale, a sleazy hack of a filmmaker who (for no apparent reason) wants to make a movie of John and Nancy's wedding. DiPasquale has previously produced a movie starring John and Chick called "Kung Fu U." It's a combination of a campus comedy and a martial arts flick, and we are of course treated to an extended selection.
I'm aware that I'm just describing isolated scene after isolated scene, but believe me, that's the name of the game. Clearly they had a lot of ideas for individual scenes, and the story was just an afterthought. Most of the participants in this movie came from the comedy troupe The Second City, and it reminded me of a later Second City production, Strange Brew, which was equally nonsensical but with funnier characters.
Even I once wrote a screenplay that was nothing but a bunch of disconnected "funny" scenes. It was even more incomprehensible than this movie. My excuse is that I was 15.
John Candy was one of the greats, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is one of my favorites. But for a guy as funny as he was, he really had a talent for appearing in stupid movies. I guess it's a testament to how great John Candy was that I don't really mind watching this stuff as long as he's in it. I guess that's also a testament to my taste in movies.
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