“I just chunked my pants.”

To hear the review

      I am giving Black Sheep an extra star because of the involvement of Gary Busey.  Having seen Busey and his mildly crazy behaviour over the past few years, I now watch Black Sheep wondering a little if he was acting.  Or whether Penelope Spheeris just filmed him being crazy.  Like, maybe he was just prowling around the studio lot with a rifle and camouflage clothing, and he managed to sneak into so many scenes that they decided to give him a role in the movie.  I would like to think that this is the case.  I would like to think that, because it gives me something to think about while watching Black Sheep, other than how truly dreadful this movie really is.

     I would not go so far as to call Tommy Boy a classic.  Truly, Chris Farley and David Spade have some great comedic chemistry in that movie, and Farley does some excellent physical comedy, but Tommy Boy, without those two, would be simply awful.  Black Sheep, on the other hand, trying to capitalize on the box-office success of the Spade-Farley pairing, could not be saved by anyone.  You could put the Marx Brothers in the lead roles.  Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Bogart and Bacall, any one of the great comedy teams of the past century.  And you would still have a movie that is a gigantic steaming pile of rotten turd.

     Black Sheep fails despite Farley and Spade.  It fails because of Farley and Spade.  It fails with them, it works against them, it fights itself, and I fight the urge to poke myself in the eyes.  And I imagine crazy Gary Busey stalking around the Paramount lot with a rifle.  None of the phyiscal comedy Farley does so well works in Black Sheep.  He and Spade are terrible together in this film, mostly because the dialogue is useless.  The entire concept, which feels as though it was lifted scene-for-scene from Tommy Boy, does absolutely nothing to pique my interest, at any point in the film.  I was about to say the movie hits its nadir when Spade gets crushed by a fridge.  Then I thought, no, it was that scene where Farley got his tie caught in the trunk of the car.  And then I realized that it began with the opening credits and ended with the closing credits.

     I know, some people will think I am being too hard on Black Sheep.  Some people think Chris Farley is the funniest man who ever lived, and all he has to do is show up and fart and they will laugh uproariously.  But they are likely “hopped up on crack cocaine”, as Harold so succinctly put it during the movie.  While Chris Farley had his tie stuck in the trunk of the car.  For the rest of you, I would suggest that Tommy Boy is a vastly superior movie, and it has been out on Blu-Ray for a few months now.  A much better purchase than Black Sheep, which comes out on Blu-Ray May 12th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 4:02 am and is filed under 1996, Blu Ray, Chris Farley, Comedy, David Spade, Garbage, Gary Busey, Julie Benz, Penelope Spheeris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.