Cracking Up (1977)
What would happen if a 9.7 magnitude earthquake were to strike the L.A. area? This is what "Cracking Up" looks at from the lighter side. The movie is composed of individual skits of original material by the actors spun around this hypothetical disaster.
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Well Deserved Praise
Masterful Movie
Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant
A different way of telling a story
What do you get when you combine Ace Trucking Company, half of Firesign Theatre, The Credibility Gap, The Tubes, film and video cameras, and presumably, a lot of drugs? Chaos. The film is a revue of troupe comedy sketches, some of which are brilliant, very loosely strung to the plot of a massive earthquake. My guess is that a large amount of cocaine convinced people that making the film was a good idea. Fred Willard and Harry Shearer are already at the top of their form. Michael McKean and David Lander (Lenny and Squiggy) make their (addled by something) film debuts. It was painful for me to sit though the main story and the many off-key sketches, waiting for the great pieces, although Bergman and Proctor's goofy Walter Concrete and Barbara Halter's characters were occasionally politically relevant enough to be hilarious; and I was not offended by the generous serving of gratuitous nudity.The film is a scavenger hunt for diamonds in the rough.
The plot of this film really only stands to showcase the acts of comedy groups that deserved better (The Credibility Gap, The Ace Trucking Co., etc. -- in their own acts, which have nothing at all to do with the "story"), and doesn't enhance anything, but makes it more annoying and grinding to watch. It would have been nice to see these comedians in something tolerable, but, unfortunately, we get this. A movie by a group of people who could have made a much better movie, but didn't. Still, on the note of the Credibility Gap, I own and sometimes watch this movie (fast forwarding, of course, to those key parts), and I can only really recommend this movie to fans of the actors in it; otherwise, save an hour and skip it.
This is a really bad movie. This is what happens when Americans get influenced by Monty Python's Flying Circus and someone has a rich parent that can sponsor this disaster of a movie. The obvious rip-ofs starting with the animated intro are just annoying for me as a MPFC fan. To add to the disaster they try to add some naked people to make the whole thing funnier and the only thing I can say is "Benny Hill does this better!".
This film opened in Seattle in 1978 as a bottom third of the triple bill in one drive-in (with a mini-ad), so I guess Arkoff at A.I.P knew he had a bomb in his hand. Part of the film is shot on video and transfered into film, so it's grainy looking. The rest of the film is on film, and you know you're in trouble when only 10% of the joke works. The title theme is annoying that it'll never leave your mind after seeing this film. The film is not on video, but it's on video in Japan. Maybe Japanese comedy fans might get 90% of the unfunny jokes. Big disappointment for any TUNNELVISION fans.