Release Date: September 17, 2004
Starring: Will Friedle, Chris Owen, Louise Lasser, Renée Taylor
Directed by: Gary Preisler
Written by: Gary Preisler
Distributed by: Lady Killers Productions
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (crude and sexual humor, some drug related material)
When you see how atrocious National Lampoon’s Gold Diggers is, you’ll understand why producer Don Ashley and writer-director-producer Gary Preisler had to distribute the movie on their own. It’s such a moronic, unfunny, and tasteless film that it has the makings of a straight-to-video comedy, only worse. It features an unoriginal premise, untalented actors, and not a shred of the humor the people at National Lampoon used to endorse. Needless to say, it’s far-removed from -- heck, not even in the same universe as -- comedies like Animal House and Vacation.
The gold diggers are Calvin (Will Friedle) and Leonard (Chris Owen), two lazy young men who can’t stand their dead-end jobs and will do anything to strike it rich. So of course they resort to illegal activities and are so inept at it that they get caught not once, but twice. The second time, dressed up as a nun and rabbi, they attempt to mug two elderly sisters (Louise Lasser and Renée Taylor). But the women drop the charges on the boys and offer to have them as guests in their home. The boys, who think the old ladies are filthy rich, devise a plan to marry the women and inherit their fortune when they die, hopefully soon. But the women are actually quite poor and are hoping themselves to marry the young men and kill them to collect on their life insurance policies.
It’s quickly established how lazy and dishonorable Calvin and Leonard are. But that’s really funny, right? Because in reality we all want to be like that, but we can’t, so we enjoy watching fictional characters act that way for us.
Except that everything about Gold Diggers is so dull and uncreative and crude that there’s virtually no reason to be interested. The characters are poorly acted, and the jokes are so dull they’re not even worth a smile. There’s nothing funny about any of the situations, which range from the mugging of an amputee, an awkward prison encounter, a disgusting sex sequence involving the old women and the boys, and a series of attempted murders gone wrong. Each moment lacks the charm that would make these badly written scenes at least somewhat tolerable.
It’s hard to tell whether the movie is trying this hard for laughs or if it knows it’s this bad. That Gold Diggers perseveres without ever getting better or funnier makes that question harder to answer. But everything has such a cheap feeling that it’s probably safe to guess that this film was an intended failure from the start. The actors are almost all unknowns (which wouldn’t be something to complain about if they had been good) and the sets and props have less value than those used in a fourth-rate TV sitcom. At one point, an apparently dead character actually blinks his eyes when he’s not supposed to.
So either National Lampoon has completely lost its sense of humor (or respect) and Gold Diggers is their last stand, or someone made a really big mistake. Perhaps more likely, though, the answer is both.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)