Video Reviews

Goodbye Cruel World

D: David Irving, Nicholas Niciphor (1982); with Dick Shawn, Chuck "Porky" Mitchell, LaWanda Page, Priscilla Pointer, Cynthia Sikes. Comedies don't get much stranger than this one, but what do you expect from a feature co-directed by Irving (C.H.U.D.II: Bud the Chud) and Niciphor, the screenwriter of Tusk, the legendary unfinished behemoth directed and abandoned by Chilean twisto Alexandro Jodorowsky? The plot of Goodbye Cruel World is a fascinating one, though hardly one primed for laffs -- a suicidal television news reporter (Shawn), who has seen his psychologist father descend into madness and has himself been driven to the brink of insanity by the experience, decides that before he ends his life, he will leave as his legacy a documentary on the world around him to show just how hellish and unacceptible life on this planet truly is. Naturally, this is a black comedy. Somehow, though, it also wants to be a zany madcap caper as well, and thus it is peppered throughout with blackout gags, fake commercials, and wacky one-liners à la Kentucky Fried Movie or The Groove Tube. To top that off, the movie is preceded and occasionally interrupted by framing sequences by a narrator who explains that the film has been made in "Choice-O-Rama," a gimmick that allows the audience to decide with their applause which direction the plot will take (of course, there are no real choices -- the narrator makes it clear that such options as killing off the main character early would be foolish and therefore will be dismissed). The "review" of Goodbye Cruel World on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) consists of the warning "do not watch this movie under any circumstances," but that's simplifying matters a bit too much. After all, Mad Mad Mad Mad World co-star and Mel Brooks regular Shawn is one of those actors who's funny in just about anything he appears in; second, the level of surreality achieved by the juxtaposition of the "serious" plot and the endlessly intruding fart and sex gags is way up there near Ed Wood Jr. level, if not beyond. Third, the movie is blessed with the acting talents of the late, great Chuck Mitchell, the enormous star of the high-grossing, lowbrow Porky's film series, seen here as Shawn's jobless brother-in-law, who proudly spouts Reaganisms to his starving family as his children turn to punk rock and the Nazi party as their sociological saviors. Shawn's multimillionaire twin brother (also played by Shawn) is seen to be the epitome of greed, his ex-wife a living symbol of narcissism, his frail grandma a sad example of the ravages of aging (though she does manage to rid the world of a greedy developer by throwing a piano out of a second-story window and crushing him to death). In the end, the filmmakers are torn -- do they show us the cruel, inevitable reality of death coming to our hapless, hopeless "hero," or do they opt to cop out with a happy, snappy big musical finale? As ever, Choice-O-Rama ignores the viewers' decision and gives us ... both! It's safe to say there has never been another film quite like Goodbye Cruel World. Deciding whether or not that's a good thing is about the only real choice that you have regarding the matter.