Product: Eight Crazy Nights [VHS] (2002)
Rating: 3.0
a mixed bag but some of it is fun
"Eight Crazy Nights" is like an animated holiday special as it might be envisioned and conceived by the Farrelly Brothers - rude, crude, vulgar, yet surprisingly conformist in its values and themes.The people actually responsible for the film are director Seth Kearsley, and writers Brooks Arthur, Allen Covert, Brad Isaacs and Adam Sandler. Sandler also provides the voice for the lead character, Davey Stone, a 30-something curmudgeon who hates the holidays and goes out of his way to ruin them for everyone else. As a public menace, Davey finds himself assigned by court order to assist a sweet, but addled septuagenarian who coaches a youth basketball team.Part of the fun of "Eight Crazy Nights" comes from the strange dichotomy between the film's crude humor and the picture postcard small town setting. This film looks like every Christmas special ever made, yet when the characters open their mouths...well, all I can say is that "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or "Frosty the Snowman" this ain't. Some people may be offended by the antics contained in this film, and it is certainly not recommended viewing for very small children. But the film is really no worse in tone than the average Sandler comedy and the humor is nothing that every prepubescent boy hasn't heard or even indulged in himself (though the scatological sequences involving some deer are a bit much). In fact, one of the criticisms that can be leveled against the film is that it really isn't raunchy enough, that it wants to have it both ways. It wants to come across as a daring and iconoclastic image-buster, yet it can't resist employing the very same heart tugs that virtually all other holiday films employ and which this film is supposed to be a reaction against. Unlike, say, "South Park," which makes no concessions to sentimentality, "Eight Crazy Nights" loses its nerve and becomes just another warm-hearted and cuddly holiday-themed film at the end. That's too bad because we really could use a corrosive tonic long about this time of the year. After all who decreed that all holiday films had to be pure sweetness and light? Isn't running over grandma with a reindeer also a holiday tradition?Still, "Eight Crazy Nights" does have some very shrewd, very clever, very funny moments contained within it, enough to almost compensate for the conventional gooey ending - and it does a nice job parodying the musical interludes generally found in more conventional Disney-type animated features as well. Moreover, "Eight Crazy Nights" has historical significance in that it is the first movie I can remember in which Chanukah achieves equal billing with Christmas. That's a long overdue correction, I must say, although I'm just not sure that Jewish mothers quite had this in mind when they envisioned it finally happening. Oy vay!