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Leo the Lion is groggy as the show kicks off, the camera moves behind the MGM logo and there's Bob (Rick Moranis) and Doug McKenzie (Dave Thomas), taking the lid off the medium and showing you the pieces. ("Do our new movie theme, eh?" cf. Lewis' The Errand Boy.) The formal dilemma is discussed in this pre-credits sequence, the brothers' cinematic opus (The Mutants of 2051 A.D.) flops with audiences despite being shot in "Hoserama," moths in the projection room facilitate their escape. After a tour of Toronto's suburbia that pays loving tribute to Mel Blanc, the crisis is stated—a beer shortage, thus the mouse-in-the-bottle trick that lands the heroes in Elsinore Brewery in the middle of a management change. The murdered owner's ghost resides in a short-circuiting security tape, his oafish brother (Paul Dooley) is a patsy in the scheme to take the plant away from the heiress (Lynne Griffin), the true mastermind (Max von Sydow) is introduced in the secret urinal behind a world map. Out of the loony bin and onto the ice, drugged beer and hockey masks to control the masses: First Oktoberfest, then the world. "Welcome to 1984. The rise of machines and the fall of man." Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sloshed, as imaginative as more famous Hamlet adaptations and a good deal funnier, too. They drive a truck into the sea and survive on the air from empty bottles, then roll down the window to show their license to underwater rescuers. (Top Secret! the following year benefits mightily from the Moranis-Thomas approach, so does Spaceballs.) It ends happily with Hosehead to the rescue à la Underdog, Bob and Doug apologize for "a couple of minor story flaws" during the end credits. With Angus MacInnes, Tom Harvey, Douglas Campbell, and Len Doncheff.
--- Fernando F. Croce |