Eight Crazy Nights (2002)

An Exercise In Nonsense

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

I recently watched this film, having heard that it was considered one of the worst animated films. Upon watching it, I found a film with good animation, a nice story and a couple of good overall messages to the plot. Not enough films will openly address male mental health and the impact of ideals of manliness. It felt like someone had put some work into coming up with a good holiday film premise.However, there were some extremely clear points that made it feel like someone was trying to derail the entire thing. There was the over-the-top toilet humour, such as the deer licking the frozen poo off of Whitey, occasionally bizarre character design, such as a woman with three breasts, and a couple of casting decisions that should have been stopped immediately, such as Adam Sandler playing Whitey with a voice like a pubescent bat.In conclusion, watching this film will make you feel torn: there are moments where it feels like someone was trying to put together a good holiday film and you will start to be drawn into it, but be warned that soon some deer are going to start defecating on themselves.

First of all... I am an avid Christmas movie buff and love holiday movies. With that being said, I thought this movie was full of holiday spirit along with a pretty solid message. I love the fact that everyone and their mother has to be super negative when it comes to new movies and such.. I thought this movie was full of comedy and cleverness. The songs were pretty catchy and very holiday oriented. I found Adam Sander along with his wife (Jackie) very talented and funny. Loved the movie and plan on making this a classic every year on my Christmas must watch list... Cheers and happy holidays!

Boy, am I glad that I didn't watch Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights during the holiday season. I would've been more morose than when I watched Bad Santa two weeks before Christmas last year. But after viewing that I was morose in the kind of way that is a tad more welcoming than hurting. If I had seen this film weeks leading up to Christmas, I'd feel slightly contemptible and sad inside.This is a cynical, depraved film that, even worse, has no reason to be so cynical and depraved. It's expected of Sandler to include scatological humor and slight-offensiveness in his films, sure, but it's unexpected of him to include such derogatory representations of his own culture and unnecessary rudeness in the time of the holidays. I can only imagine the stunned reactions of parents that were lured into this with the appeal of Christmas images and holiday sweetness on TV only to be met with one smarmy, laugh-free punch after another. It's so rare we get a film that deals with a holiday aside from Christmas during the December month; did the one Hanukkah film we get have to be directed by Adam Sandler? He voices several characters in the film, one of them Davey, who he also resembles, a Jewish man in his mid-thirties, deeply loathing of the holidays and all the cheer they bring to people. After being convicted of public drunkenness in yet another offense, just when he's about to go away to prison, Whitey Duvall (voiced by Sandler, as well), the local youth basketball coach, offers him a job as a referee down at the gym to which he accepts. Whitey is a short, kind old man, who lives with his wife Eleanor (also voiced by Sandler), and whole-heartedly believes that Davey could do right if he put his mind to it. The problem is Davey doesn't have any ambition to do right and consistently puts everyone around him down because he himself can't be happy with the cards he has been dealt.There's only so many times I can watch a man belittle and harass a sweet older man until it becomes nearly unwatchable. The constant abuse Davey brings to Whitey's life is mean-spirited just for the sake of being mean-spirited and rarely results in a laugh or a smile. Davey's attitude, alone, never sparks any particular laugh either. There's a big difference between someone who adopts a sour attitude because of past life experiences that have scarred him and a person who adopts one purely out of choice. Davey has one event in his life that happened at a young age that was supposed to spawn this cynicism and disgust for human happiness and holiday cheer. That was years ago and you think the anger and hostile would've worn off with the passage of almost two decades. Not a chance. He remains as mean and as nasty as if the event occurred yesterday.The film is also a musical, which isn't as awful as that sounds. Some songs, particularly "Davey's Song," are kind of infectious in their contempt for the holidays. "Technical Foul," the song Whitey sings when he's introducing Davey to all the rules of his own, is a cute little anthem as well. However, none of which allow Eight Crazy Nights to surpass its codger attitude to everything it sets up. But it feels even more insincere when the film abandons its mean-spiritedness for the fluffy, Hallmark-card cuteness that it feels obligated to tack on in the last act of the film to show Davey really has come a long way as a human. I would've had more respect for the film had it stayed true to its inherently grumpy roots.Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights is an unhealthy film for the holidays. A cheap, trite ordeal, at only seventy-six minutes, it's an obnoxious pictures that gives a new meaning to the word "humbug." It's a blatant ripoff of A Christmas Carol, and tries to justify its mean-spirited qualities as the formula for a "reformation," change-of-mind story that we've seen time and time again in better, more tolerable films.Voiced by: Adam Sandler, Jackie Titone, Austin Stout, and Rob Schneider. Directed by: Seth Kearsley.

Originally published on Dec. 6, 2002: If there's one thing worse than an Adam Sandler film, it's an ANIMATED Adam Sandler film, and the newest Columbia release, "Eight Crazy Nights," is certainly no exception to this rule.And despite some allusions to Dickens' tale of redemption and forgiveness in "A Christmas Carol," this story is vile, depressing and mean-spirited with absolutely no redeeming value but to give the normally intelligent viewer a terrific migraine.The title refers to the eight nights of Hannukah and is about as respectful to the Jewish faith as a Yassar Arafat speech in the West Bank or Adolf Hitler's Nuremberg Laws.Plot has Sandler-voiced Davey Stone, a bitter alcoholic (can you feel the Holiday spirit?!) sentenced to community service by a judge with as much sense as Lance Ito.This punishment, which involves him as a referee for youth basketball games is like putting Jeffrey Dahmer in charge of a Boy Scout picnic. In this position, Stone is sheltered by another ref, Whitey (also voiced by Sandler), a small, goofy old man whose kindness is repaid by being shoved down a hill while using a porta-potty.Sidesplitting so far, isn't it? Another scene we're supposed to laugh at is when Stone insults a pudgy boy by making fun of his breasts. Comedy like will most likely appeal to drunken idiots or college frat guys with absolutely nothing better to do.Another problem with this film is that with each rotten insult, each lame joke and each failing gag is that the viewer - if he or she has ANY brains at all - actually feels embarrassed to be in on it. In other words, there is nothing even remotely humorous about this horrid dung-heap.And Stone, even though a cartoon, is such a revolting, nasty, unsympathetic lead that one feels nothing but open disdain for his character. Even the script's lame attempt to justify his behavior by making his parents die on the eve of Hannakah when he was a kid, does not illicit one bit of positive emotion at all.To make things even worse, the picture is sprinkled with several Holiday song parodies, including a new version of Sandler's "Hannakah Song," making it one of the worst musicals since "Grease 2" and "Newsies." Like any number of Sandler movies (with the possible exception of "The Water Boy" and "The Wedding Singer"), intelligent dialogue is substituted with maniacal outbursts and acts of bizarre violence, while comedy is replaced with vulgarities and just plain stupidity.Then, there's the artwork, which features Stone drawn to look just like Sadler, but other principal characters inked like poor versions of Yoda, while several of the star's stable-mates, including "SNL" alumni Rob Schneider and Kevin Nealon, among others fill up the non-talented vocal cast.All in all, "Eight Crazy Night" is about as cheerful and watching an embalming and is a film that only Ed Gein would enjoy - although he might have had better taste than that now that I think about it.