Perfect Summer Fare

Rating: 9/10 (31 May 2016)

Just a few lines about a great, funny, sunny movie that makes me laugh every single time I see it. I think Harold Ramis' Caddyshack works like a big, joyous block party. You can't help but like every single character, every moment of crude and lewd, right down to Brian Doyle-Murray telling a caddie to "Pick up that blood!"
I think Caddyshack's peer, John Landis' Animal House is a funnier movie because of the chances it takes spearing sacred cows, but Caddyshack may be the smoother-frothier?-film because it avoids lagging at the start of the third reel, something that Landis throws in to build up steam for his big, obnoxious cherry-bomb-in-the- toilet ending.
Caddyshack just ambles along, all big-heart and Lacy Underalls.
Animal House is, at its core, something serious. There's an edge to the humor and to the end-of-Camelot story. I wrote a long review of AH some years ago. The boys and girls at Faber College ("Knowledge is Good!") are about to smacked upside the head by the hideous specter of Vietnam. It's their last moments of freedom before history arrives unannounced.
Both have that feel of reading something hysterically funny in National Lampoon, and danged if it doesn't feel as if everyone is working his or her butt off to come up with a really good, really funny work of renegade art.
What I've noticed about Caddyshack is that the power of Bill Murray ad-libbing his way through his duties as an assistant groundskeeper has, for the better part of forty years, provided inspiration for Caddyshackers to twist their mouths into a Joe Walsh mumble and utter the victorious cry, "It's in the hole!"
It's what cultures are built on . . .
I think.