Today this blogger's fancy and short attention span turns from silent movies (and the great Raymond Griffith) to the world of sketch comedy. July 1 is Dan Aykroyd's birthday, so we shall doff our always battered fedoras to the prolific comedian, actor and screenwriter.
First and foremost, here are a few of Aykroyd's funniest and most original SNL skits.
Of the dozens of Saturday Night Live players, he is among the few who made a relatively seamless transition from TV to movies.
Trading Places, due to the superb and hilarious character acting from Hollywood veterans Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy, lots of lively interplay between Akyroyd and the brilliant Eddie Murphy - and the presence of such SNL stalwarts as Al Franken & Tom Davis - remains my favorite.
Neighbors was an interesting homage to The Twilight Zone TV show. What makes it interesting? The Aykroyd and Belushi roles are reversed, with Dan playing the lunatic and John cast as a meek, mild-mannered nebbish. The excellent character actress Cathy Moriarty and fellow Second City/SNL alum Tim Kazurinsky are added pluses.
Spies Like Us, co-starring fellow SNL cast member Chevy Chase, is - like many movies featuring Saturday Night Live and SCTV cast members - in the flawed but still mostly funny category.
Dan was teamed with Tom Hanks for the 1987 sendup of Dragnet. All of us who watched the entire run of the unintentionally funny Dragnet 1967 TV show got a few laughs from this flick, and especially from Aykroyd's ability to mimic Jack Webb's distinctive walk and verbal delivery.
Last but not least, Dan produced, directed and co-wrote the creepiest and most nightmarishly disturbing of all 20th century horror-comedies, the Razzie Award winner Nothing But Trouble, a hallucinatory Beetlejuice-influenced compendium of Gothic grotesquerie.
The reviews of Nothing But Trouble were brutal, reminiscent of the In Living Color Men On Film sketches in which David Alan Grier and Damon Wayans say in unison. . . HATED IT!
Described by Vincent Canby in The New York Times as "a charmless feature-length joke about the world's most elaborate speed trap," this haunted house flick presents an intermittently inspired one-of-a-kind fever dream. In the central role as the hideous 106 year old "hanging judge" of Volkenvania, Aykroyd presides as the ringmaster and frequently ventures into unabashed gross-out territory.
Why Warner Brothers released Nothing But Trouble to theatres in February 1991, instead of postponing it in October and specifically marketing the delirious American Gothic piece as a Halloween "monster movie," nobody knows.
Perhaps the suits concluded that Nothing But Trouble, originally pegged as a Christmas 1990 release, cost so much money to produce, it had to get out in the theatres post-haste to have any chance of recouping the investment. That strikes this writer as both a marketing failure and failure of imagination, as it is clearly a haunted house horror-comedy with a Halloween theme, even though David Lynch didn't direct it and the Three Stooges and Bowery Boys are nowhere to be found.
While Nothing But Trouble is a tad too grotesque to get laughs, it succeeds as American Gothic with garish flying colors, reverb-filled echoes of theremins and imagery a la horror-meister Tod Browning's The Devil Doll, Freaks and West Of Zanzibar viewed through a shattered funhouse mirror. . . with a musical number by Digital Underground thrown in for good measure.
We raise a toast of Crystal Head Vodka to Dan and hope he's doing well on his birthday. Cheers - and thanks a million for the laughs!
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