Posts Tagged "comedy"

It's fine. It even made me laugh a few times. But it could have been truly wacky and not just rehashed Nic Cage (as much as I like some of his movies.)

Okay, so it's a reboot. Normally that would send me running away screaming. But this is everything a remake should be. It captures the spirit and the charm of the original, and would be enjoyable by the same audiences. It doesn't shoehorn in political correctness. Even the running time of 80 minutes is a throwback to a simpler world where everyone knew that was plenty of space in which to tell a story. Movies today gobble up two and a half hours of your life, or three hours, or they get split into two entire movies, all for storylines that could have been told in 90 minutes if the editors had just found their fucking balls.

My test for the quality of a comedy is simple. Does it make me laugh out loud? If so, how many times?

Revenge of the Nerds drew at least two genuine laughs. The first was when Lewis emerges in the smoking jacket: the gag caught me so off guard that I had to grope for the keyboard, laughing hard, to pause the movie until I was ready to resume. My other big laugh was at the ridiculousness of the beer-fueled tricycle race; this was partially because the antics of Takashi (Brian Tochi) reminded me so much of internet prankster Filthy Frank. Honorable mention goes to the reveal of the nerds' elaborate musical number near the end of the film.