Boxing Finds Andy Hardy

TCM did a programming tribute to Mickey Rooney on the centenary of his birth last September. One of the movies that I hadn't blogged about before which they ran is Killer McCoy. So I DVRed it and watched it to do a post on here.

Rooney plays Tommy McCoy, a young man who makes money for his family selling newspapers, because it's not as if his parents are bringing in any money. Mom (Gloria Holden) is a housewife, while father Brian (James Dunn) is a former vaudeville star waiting for a comeback that's never going to come. Dad deals with this by drinking and wasting whatever money the family does get. But the local church hosts a boxing night with entertainment, that entertainment being Brian and Tommy doing a dance number.

Not long before, Tommy had gotten in a scrap with another newspaper seller who he thought was honing in on his territory, Tommy ignoring licensing laws. That other guy shows up at the fights, and Tommy challenges him to a fight, which he wins. That gets the notice of lightweight prizefighter Johnny Martin (Mickey Knox), who barnstorms the country and invites Tommy and Brian to be part of the performance.

Eventually Mom dies, with Dad missing out because he's too busy getting drunk at all the bars on the road. Johnny also loses a fight, and announces his retirement to start up a ranch with his wife, leaving Tommy to try to start a career in boxing. Tommy has some success in the ring, but Dad is taking all the purses and gambling on the horses with numbers runner Jim Caighn (Brian Donlevy), even eventually selling Tommy's contract to Jim.

Tommy has a big fight lined up, but the opponent has to back out injured, so who gets brought in to replace the guy by Johnny Martin, who's gone broke and needs the money despite being badly out of shape. Tommy wins the fight, but it comes at the cost of killing Johnny with a punch, giving Tommy the nickname "Killer McCoy".

Tommy tries to quit the ring, but needs the money and so goes back to Caighn, who still has Tommy's contract. Caighn offers Tommy a secluded training sight at the house of a Mr. Carrson, and while training there, who should show up but Carrson's daughter Sheila (Ann Blyth)? She's being educated at a private school and didn't know anything about Tommy's presence, so she's miffed, but once things get ironed out, the two fall quickly in love. Very much complicating matters is the fact that Sheila shows Tommy a picture of her father, who is... Jim Caighn, not that you couldn't have figured that one out.

Meanwhile, back in the ring, Tommy has a killer right hand, but Caighn has come up with the idea that he should avoid using it to get rich bettors to think that Tommy is just a palooka, with Caighn making a killing off of them. Caighn also finds out his daughter is seeing Tommy, and is none too pleased with it because he doesn't want his daughter to know the truth about him. (It turns out she already does, but has never let on to Dad that she does.) One of the bettors finds out about Caighn's deception, and kidnaps Brian and Sheila to force Tommy to throw the fight.

The story in Killer McCoy is not particularly special; in fact the movie is a remake of The Crowd Roars which I have not yet seen. Despite the silly ending, Killer McCoy is worth a watch thanks to the fine performances of Mickey Rooney and Brian Donlevy. As for Dunn, people will probably come to diametrically opposed views on him. He's such a jerk that some people are probably going to hate him, while other people will probably have some sympathy for the fact that his life has been empty for years and has nothing to live for other than his son's success.

The boxing scenes are also well-photographed, although as someone who's not a fan of boxing I don't know just how inaccurate they are. The dance number at the beginning, to "Suwanee River", was directed by a very young Stanley Donen, and a young Shelley Winters has a bit part.

Killer McCoy received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The Catcher Was a Spy

Many years back, I heard a radio interview with the author of a book called The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. I had read over the years that there were plans to option the book for a movie, but those plans apparently fell through until a few years ago when the movie The Catcher Was a Spy was finally made. I recorded it during one of the free preview weekends, and recently watched it.

Moe Berg (Paul Rudd) was a backup catcher for a bunch of Major League teams in the 1920s and 1930s. Berg was also very bright, having gone to Princeton, and very intellectually curious. On a baseball goodwill tour of Japan, for example, several years before Pearl Harbor, Berg went ostensibly to visit someone in hospital but used this as an excuse to get up on the roof to film the harbor as it was an important military target.

World War II eventually comes, and the Nazis declare war on the US. Berg offers his knowledge to the OSS, which was the forerunner to the CIA. Berg was probably too old and had too bad knees to do regular military service, but as a very intelligent man who could speak multiple languages, spy work could be right up his alley. So the OSS take him on and groom him for any number of missions, eventually trying to get Italian scientists to defect to America. Berg meets one of those physicists, and asks an important question the Allies would like to know the answer to: how far along are the Germans in their attempt to build a fission bomb?

History tells us that this was an extremely difficult question to answer, in no small part because the German physicist leading the German research into nuclear physics and its potential use as a weapon, Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) was thought by some (and apparently still considered today) to be deliberately trying to go slow to keep the Germans from getting the bomb first. (By the same token, it's been debated whether the real-life mission depicted in The Heroes of Telemark, preventing heavy water from getting to Germany, was necessary because the operation wasn't efficient enough and the Germans weren't far enough along in their nuclear program anyway.) However, there's also a pretty big risk. As one of the spymasters says, if there's a 5% chance of stubbing your toe in the dark, you take that risk rather than turning on the light and waking up your wife. But if there's a 5% chance the Germans can get the bomb first and win the war, what do you do?

The Allies know that Heisenberg has a physicist friend, Paul Scherrer (Tom Wilkinson), who lives in Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Also, Heisenberg has been known to visit Scherrer on multiple occasions, while Scherrer has some sympathy for the Allied cause. So Perhaps Scherrer could get Heisenberg to come for another visit to Zürich to give a lecture, which Berg can attend to try to ascertain just how far along the way the Germans are to getting the bomb. If they're close enough, Berg's mission is to kill Heisenberg to prevent the Germans from getting the bomb.

Moe Berg's real-life story is a fascinating one, but unfortunately, the movie version of The Catcher Was a Spy doesn't quite tell it as well as it perhaps could. The opening portion is too concerned with Berg's sexuality (he never married and had a girlfriend Estella (Sienna Miller) who wound up marrying another man at the end of the war), while the middle is a bit too slow in having Berg engage in less relevant operations. This leaves the last portion, the meeting with Heisenberg, to be rushed even though the movie is only a little over 90 minutes. Still, it's an interesting story, and one that definitely deserves to be better known.

The Catcher Was a Spy is available on DVD.

Where's Poppa?

Back in July, TCM did a programming tribute to the late Carl Reiner, running a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. This gave me the opportunity to watch Where's Poppa? recently, and finally do a post on it.

George Segal plays Gordon Hocheiser, and the movie starts with his morning routine in his Manhattan apartment. Part of this routine involves getting breakfast ready for his mother (Ruth Gordon). Dad died some years back, and Mom is now suffering from dementia although it's not called that in the movie. Gordon cuts up mom's orange, and she complains that it's only cut into four pieces, not the six that she likes, a sign that she can be a bit demanding.

Well, a bit demanding is putting it mildly. Mom keeps wondering where "Poppa" is, making life extremely difficult for Gordon, and aready having driven off multiple care nurses. But it's not just Gordon's home life that's a mess, as the lack of sleep and running around caring for Mom has made it harder for him to function properly in court, as we see with the trial where he's currently a defense attorney.

Gordon is interviewing new nurses to take over the job and get Gordon some relief, and when he meet Louise (Trish Van Devere), he knows he's got the right nurse. Of course, it's the right nurse for Gordon as he falls in love with her at first sight. Gordon brings Louise home, and Mom bollixes everything up as she's afraid of this strange woman.

The obvious solution is the difficult decision to put Mom in a nursing home, but there's a catch. Gordon and his brother Sidney (Ron Leibman) promised Dad on his deathbed that they would never put Mom in a home. Heck, Gordon has actually had thoughts of killing mom, a la Throw Momma From the Train. Not that Sidney would go for that either. And Sidney also has a wife who has no sympathy for the situation, not even wanting her husband to help Gordon out in an emergency.

Where's Poppa? goes on like this for about 90 minutes, purporting to be a black comedy. Unfortunately, I found the whole thing grating and had a whole bunch of problems with it. First, there surely have to be nurses out there who understand dementia, even back in 1970 when the movie was released. Louise, in her defense, says that her references are poor, but you'd think the agency would send nurses who could handle dementia patients.

Second, a lot of the stuff that happens away from Mom feels like it doesn't necessarily fit into the movie and is often not funny. Neither of the trialsat which Gordon is a lawyer works (watch for Rob Reiner as a defendant), but even worse is the indignity Sidney has to suffer. He walks through Central Park to get to Gordon's apartment, and gets waylaid repeatedly by a gang of muggers who, in one case, force him to commit rape. None of this works at all.

Still, some people may enjoy this sort of stuff, so as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Ah yes, it's Daylight Savings Time again

So we've reached that time of the year when, in most of the US and Canada, people move their clocks ahead one hour so that we have more of the daylight later in the day. This always causes havoc with TV schedules as everybody is used to programming for 24 hours, not 23 or 25.

Surprisingly enough, however, it seems as though both TCM and FXM (I didn't check the other movie channels) got their programming down pretty well this time around. TCM has Noir Alley as always starting at midnight between Saturday and Sunday, this time being The Night Holds Terror, running 86 minutes plus the usual longer intro and outro from Eddie Muller. For the repeat of Noir Alley a 10:00 AM, this is in a 1:45 time slot, but tonight it's in a two-hour slot. No mention of what short will fill out the time since there's clearly at least 15 minutes to fill. (And yes, the lack of listing the shorts on the new schedule is still irritating.) That two-hour slot ends right as the clocks are supposed to move forward in the Eastern Time Zone, so at 3:00 AM we get Kim Novak: Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival, followed at 4:00 AM by Jeanne Eagels, since that of course starred Kim Novak.

Over on FXM, they're running Pride and Prejudice and Zombies at 12:30 AM, in a 2:11 time slot. The movie itself is 108 minutes, so I'm assuming 23 minutes of commercials plus whatever they get in by shrinking the credits. Since this takes us past the time change, next up at 3:41 AM is one of the FXM Presents featurettes they have about whatever programming they're trying to promote; I have to admit I'm not recording stuff that picks up these featurettes so I haven't seen one in years. Then, at 4:00 AM, the FXM Retro schedule begins, with Tony Rome. It's not the only movie that's on tomorrow morning's schedule that I blogged about some time back; there's also Conrack at 7:05 AM Sunday and The 300 Spartans at 11:10 AM.

Oddly enough, my DirecTV box guide has FXM Presents, but not the Kim Novak interview.

Tropical Siren

Some months back, I recorded the Silent Sunday Nights airing of Siren of the Tropics. It's been a little while since I've done a silent feature, so I recently watched this one to do a post on here.

The movie will be remembered for the performance of Josephine Baker, but she doesn't show up for a good 20 minutes or so. Before that, we get Sévero (Georges Melchior), a wealthy French businessman who's got a wife, the Marquess, and a goddaughter Denise that the couple has apparently raised as a sort of foster child. Sévero turns out to be a rather nasty man, as he's got the hots for Denise and is hoping to divorce his wife so that he can marry Denise, even though she doesn't seem to want this! Obviously the Marquess isn't up for a divorce either, and she's not going to let her husband cavort with Denise.

Denise, for her part, doesn't want the Count either. She's got a fiancé in André Berval (Pierre Batcheff), who is a mining engineer for Sévero's firm. This gives Sévero an idea. He's got some new land holdings out in the Antilles, so he's going to send André out to the Caribbean for a year to do some prospecting to see what sort of mineral wealth the land holds; that will also give him the professional experience necessary to make him a more suitable groom for Denise. Of course, that's the nominal reason. The real reason is that Sévero has an even nastier man, Alvarez, overseeing the Caribbean holdings, and Sévero impresses on the amoral Alvarez the need to ensure that André never returns to France.

It's in the Caribbean that we finally see Josephine Baker. She plays Papitou, a peasant girl with an alcoholic father who keeps the family going by... well, that's never explained. But Alvarez owns the land that all the peasants rent, which is how she's able to come into contact with André. André saves Papitou when Alvarez tries to waylay her while she's bathing, and it's love at first sight, at least on Papitou's part. André doesn't have anything against Papitou, but of course he's engaged and faithful to Denise. But when Alvarez tries to kill André, it's now Papitou who comes to the rescue.

Unfortunately for Papitou, she learns that her love is unrequited when it transpires that Denise and the Marquess have come to the Caribbean to see André. Considering all that's happened to him, the three decide to return to Paris to have an immediate wedding. Papitou hears this and figures she's going to get to Paris too, by hook or by crook, just to see André one more time. This even though she has nowhere near enough money for boat passage to France.

Of course she makes it to Paris and gets discovered as a dancer, where she could make big money in the nightclubs. However, she refuses to dance unless she gets to see André again. This gives Sévero the idea to make it look like André and Papitou had an affair out in the Caribbean, which will get Denise to break off the engagement and leade Denise for the count! Eh, it doesn't quite work like that.

Siren of the Tropics is an interesting movie, although the plot is all over the place, as if the writers had some ideas for two-reelers and didn't quite know how to turn it into a feature-length film. The story does more or less hold up, but it's really a vehicle for Baker. This is a silent, so she doesn't get to sing, but of course she gets to dance and that's a treat. There are some odd tinting choices for some of the scenes, while I also found parts of the score didn't quite work.

Baker's three films were released in a box set some years ago, and that box set is available at the TCM Shop; I'm not certain if Siren of the Tropics is available as a standalone.

Thursday Movie Picks #348: Movies that Haven't Aged Well

Editors' Note: I switched to the Brave browser recently, which seems to have a glitch with Blogger in that it often publishes posts to draft rather than publishing them directly to the public. I overlooked this when I posted this yesterday, which is why you're getting the Thursday Movie Picks on a Friday.

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "Movies that have aged badly", which is fairly obvious, but I suppose also subjective. So I went with three movies that have aged in different ways:

Mission to Moscow (1943). After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, America's communists quickly went from being relative isolationists, a position they took after the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, to full-throated support for war. Indeed, in that period Dalton Trumbo wrote the book The Remarkable Andrew with the ghost of Andrew Jackson telling Americans to stay out of war. (The book was turned into a movie I have not yet seen, but from what I've read it doesn't quite follow the book.) At any rate, once the US entered the war after Pearl Harbor and the Nazis declared war on the US, Americans were treated to all sorts of propaganda about why Stalin was really an OK guy. (Maybe the Soviets wouldn't have suffered so badly in the first years of the war if Stalin hadn't killed off almost the entire officer corps in the 1930s purges.) In this movie, strongly promoted by Franklin Roosevelt, Walter Huston plays the US Ambassador to the USSR Joseph E. Davies, who really whitewashes those purges.

I'll Take Sweden (1965). Tired Bob Hope generation gap comedy in which his daughter (Tuesday Weld), having fallen in love with a man Dad doesn't approve of, leads Dad to transfer the family to the company's Swedish branch, where we learn that Sweden is, well, every sterotype that America had about liberal and sexually liberated Sweden. Lots of aging stars were trying to stay hip and made movies like this (see Deborah Kerr in Marriage on the Rocks for another horrifying example), most of which fall flat.

THX 1138 (1971). George Lucas' first feature film, about a man (Robert Duvall) in a future dystopia where everybody is drugged into emotionlessness, who sufferes a breakdown when his female roomate switches his drugs. The movie isn't bad although others will probably like it more than I did. The problem is that, like most cinematic looks at the future, the future is in many ways stuck in the present day that the movie was made. Total surveillance on reel-to-reel tape?

Champagne Charlie

FXM doesn't show too many of the B movies made at the studio during the golden age before the advent of television. One that is currently in the rotation is Champagne Charlie, which is getting another airing tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM.

We don't see Charlie for a while, which is odd consdering the movie is only about 59 minutes. The film starts off with ship's bartender Mr. Fipps (Herbert Mundin) going on about his love of Charlie, who was his former boss for 15 years, but has been dead for about a year. Coming onto the boat are several people. One, Linda Craig (Helen Wood), already knows Fipps although they haven't seen each other since Charlie's death. She's there with her fiancé Tod Hollingsworth (Thomas Beck), who had been a rival of Charlie's for Linda. There's also Linda's female companion Lillian (Minna Gombell) who is there with her latest husband.

Seeing all of this happen from a chair at the side of the lounge is one Pedro Gorini (Noel Madison). He's another man that Fipps knew, and Fipps knows that Gorini means bad news. Later that evening, Gorini calls Linda's cabin to try to blackmail her, and when she goes to see Gorini, she finds that he's already dead. Fipps demands to see the ship's captain about a very urgent matter, telling he captain that he just killed Gorini. Linda shows up and says no, it was actually she who killed Gorini. Cue the flashback, and how we finally get to see Charlie....

Charlie (Paul Cavanaugh) was an inveterate gambler who traveled around Europe with his manservant Fipps. At the roulette wheel at Monte Carlo he runs into Linda who seems to have one of those "systems" for winning at roulette that always seem to show up in the movies even though there aren't any such systems that work in real life. Linda wins a ton of money while Charlie loses. Charlie has a pair of backers, the aforementioned Gorini and his friend Suchine (Montague Love) who are understandably pissed, although why anybody would back a professional gambler like this is beyond me.

Anyhow the backers have a scheme. Linda is an heiress to a copper company, and worth $20 million. Apparently, whoever marries her gets some sort of prenup worth $1 million, with the rest of Linda's money off limits or some oddity. So the backers want Charlie to woo and ultimately marry Linda, with him getting half of the million and the backers getting the other half. Unfortunately, he falls in love with Linda for real, forcing him to come up with some sort of double cross.

Champagne Charlie isn't exactly terrible, at least not by B movie standards. The big problem is that there's a whole lot of nothing wrapped around a plot that's way too convoluted for its own good. I don't know that Herbert Mundin ever got a bigger role than this, and he runs with it for all it's worth. The others aren't bad, but there's just not all that much reason to care about them. Of course, since it's only a B movie, the studio was just trying to churn it out quickly.

Amazingly, Champagne Charlie did get a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, although the TCM Shop claims it's only available on backorder. There was also a British movie with the same title but a different plot which is also available on DVD.

For the George Arliss fans

I notice that Voltaire is on TCM tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM. A search of the blog suggested I mentioned it once before, when it was part of a TCM Bastille Day line-up many years ago. I think I watched it more recently than that post, but it's still been at least a couple of years, so the movie isn't quite so fresh in my mind.

As you can probably guess from the title of the post, George Arliss plays Voltaire, the French writer from the reign of King Louis XV (Reginald Owen) who has views that were relatively radical for the time although I wouldn't be surprised if there are idiots somewhere who think he should be canceled. In this movie version, Voltaire has some support from the King's mistress, Madame de Pompadour (Doris Kenyon), she of the hairdo, but is opposed by the King's chief advisor, the Count de Sarnac (Alan Mowbray).

Voltaire writes some controversial stuff calling for one M. Calas to be spared the death penalty, but that doesn't happen, and part of the punishment is also to be dispossessed, which is a problem for Calas' daughter Nanette (Margaret Lindsay). She, looking for help, runs off to Voltaire, but for him to hide her in his house is legally problematic for both of them.

How to save himself? Well, Voltaire wrote a lot, so in this movie, he extricates himself from the situation by writing a new play which is an allegory for the situation he is in, with a King of some other country in a more exotic part of the world doing the things Louis did. It ought to be a fairly obvious reference, but this Voltaire, and of course George Arliss, are so darn charming that the King can't help but have sympathy for Voltaire.

The plot may be a bit frustrating at times and some might suggest that Arliss could be prone to mugging to the camera. I think I'd say that's a bit more true in the historical dramas like Voltaire, and less in the contemporary dramas, where Arliss is usually quite good, raising mediocre material to something worth watching. As with those, Arliss is the big reason to see Voltaire, as he really is that charming.

I don't think Voltaire has ever gotten a DVD release; it probably should have one one of those four-film box sets that TCM and Warner Home Video used to release. There are quite a few Arliss movies that would be better at the box-set price point.

Overboard

Kurt Russell's birthday is on March 17, which is St. Patrick's Day, so unsurprisingly TCM will be running a bunch of Irish-themed movies that day instead of Kurt Russell films. Instead, TCM has a double-feature of Kurt Russell's movies tomorrow morning concluding at 8:00 AM with Overboard.

Russell plays Dean Proffitt, a handyman carpenter in the coastal Oregon town of Elk Cove who has a rather modest living. That's because he's a widower with four kids, and has more or less decided that he's going to give his four sons the minimum of what they need and otherwise let them grow up on their own.

Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) is fabulously wealthy, living on her yacht with her husband Grant Stayton III (Edward Hermann). Joanna basically spends her days making life hell for everyone around her, with the closest to her other than her husband being her butler Andrew (Roddy McDowall). Their yacht docks in Elk Cove, which is how Joanna first meets Dean. She's dissatisfied with her suite on the yacht, and wants a new closet. So she hires someone and gets Dean. Since she's so nasty, however, she decides not to accept a closet made of oak, an won't pay Dean one red cent out of the $600 Dean charges, even eventually throwind Dean and all his tools overboard.

Later that evening, Joanna has to go back up on deck to retrieve her wedding ring. As you can probably guess from the title of the movie, in the dark she slips and falls overboard, with nobody recognizing that she's gone missing until it's too late. She's picked up by a garbage scow, but... she has the sort of case of amnesia that one only gets in the movies or on soap operas.

The yacht is still close enough to Elk Cove that it can receive the local TV broadcasts, and so Grant sees the mug shot of the lady who doesn't know who she is and is in the psychiatric unit of the hospital, realizing that the woman is of course his wife. Grant goes to the hospital to retrieve her, and then decides that Joanna has been such a jerk that he's going to say no, he this isn't his wife, and go back to the yacht and party.

Dean also sees the news reports, and decides that he's going to get some revenge on Joanna for the way she treated him. He claims that the mystery woman who doesn't remember who she is is in fact his wife Annie. Fortunately for Dean, Joanna had been wearing such a skimpy bathing suit that he recognized a birthmark in a sensitive area, something only a husband could be expected to know.

Dean takes "Annie" home with him, expecting to have he work just enough to pay off the $600 for the closet. But any number of things happen that again, you can probably guess. Dean's children come to learn that they need a mother, and would like her to stay. Dean finds himself falling in love with Annie, even if he doesn't want to admit it. And Annie likes the children, although she's not so certain that she likes Dean.

You also know that Grant is going to come back into Annie's life, although that occurs in part from the proding of Joanna's mother (Katherine Helmond). It's the presence of Grant that finally wakes up Annie from her amnesia, and she has a choice to make, although again, you can probably figure out what's going to happen.

Overboard is a predictable movie, but the sort of thing that works well thanks to the chemistry and acting of the cast. Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn have been together for close to 40 years now, and even though they'd only been together for a few years at the time they made Overboard, they look like they belong together. The kids are obnoxious at times like most movie kids, but that's in part because the script requires it for the first half of the movie. Hermann and Helmond show themselves to be fairly adept at comedy, too.

The plot of Overboard requires a fair bit of suspension of belief, but if you can do that, it's a really enjoyable little 1980s movie. It's also available on DVD and Blu-Ray if you miss the TCM showing.

Booty Call

Some time back, I recorded Booty Call during one of the free preview weekends. It's going to be on again several times over the next week, starting with tomorrow at 12:35 PM on Showtime Next, so I sat down and watched it.

As you can guess from the title, Booty Call isn't one of those elegant screwball comedies, but a raunchy sex comedy, not that there's anything wrong with that. Tommy Davidson plays Rushon, a nice professional who has another date with his girlfriend Nikki (Tamala Jones). Rushon has been going with Nikki for all of seven weeks, and he thinks that's more than enough time for him finally to get some sex out of the relationship. But there's a bit of pressure on going out on such a date all alone, so he's decided to make it a double date.

Rushon has a friend Bunz -- yes, with a Z -- played by Jamie Foxx, who seems like the sort of smooth operator where you wonder how exactly he makes his living. Nikki has a friend living in the apartnemt across the hall, Lysterine -- yes, with a Y -- played by Vivica A. Fox, who is also unattached, so Rushon and Nikki set up Lysterine and Bunz.

Now, the box guide on my DirecTV gives the synopsis as, "Absurdity rules on a double date but does nothing to quell the couples' quest for passion". And the date gets absurd fairly quickly, even before the date begins, considering that Lysterine is snobby enough to complain that she's been set up with a guy named Bunz with a Z. Come on Lysterine, surely you've gotten enough ribbing for your name, and that's what you're going to complain about? Anyhow, the two couples go to a restaurant in Chinatown, where we learn that Lysterine and Bunz might not be so compatible, as Lysterine seems to be the sort of professional-class woman who you'd think would be better paired with Rushon, not that Nikki is necessarily wrongly paired with him. But Bunz and Lysterine both speak Chinese so one point for something in common.

They're still not necessarily comitted to sex yet. That is, until they go back to Nikki's apartment for a nightcap and some cards. There's a little bit of footsie, but more importantly is Nikki's little yippie dog, Killer, who spices things up between Bunz and Lysterine although they don't realize Killer is playing the part of catalyst. But the job having been done, the two couples retire to the women's respective apartments with the expectation that they'll finally get it on.

Not so fast, since we're nowhere through the film's running time. Benz apparently forgot to bring any condoms with him, and Rushon only seems to have the one, which Killer intercepts. Nikki especially is insistent that she have safe sex. So Rushon and Bunz have to go out and procure condoms. And if you think the movie was absurd before this point, it's about to get a whole lot more absurd, as everything the two men try seems to backfire on them. with Rushon ultimately having to be taken to the emergency room.

OK, there's not really that much of a plot to Booty Call, as it's more a series of sketches. But I don't think one should really expect a whole lot of plot development in a movie like this. It's incredibly raunchy, and if you're either prudish or not in the right mood, you're probably going to hate the movie. (You probably wouldn't have considered watching it in the first place if you're that prudish.)

I was in the right mood, and for the most part found it quite funny. There were certainly some flaws, such as the waiter in the Chinese restaurant. The hospital scene also made me think of Richard Pryor's Critical Condition, but I don't know that the writers were truly unoriginal here. Some of the characters, such as the two Punjabi convenience store workers, may push some viewers' stereotype buttons, but I didn't mind those scenes.

Obviously, Booty Call isn't going to work for everybody. But it worked for me.