Slapstick (Of Another Kind)

This film is considered by most who've seen it to be one of the worst movies ever made, so I had to include it in my 1984 deep dive, revisiting my favorite year of cinema. Slapstick of Another Kind stars Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn as a rich, beautiful couple who give birth to deformed alien twins who, according to the Two-inch tall, miniaturized ambassador of China (Pat Morita), are the smartest people on the planet when they put their heads together. Lewis and Kahn also play the incestuous children with prosthetic noses, ears, and foreheads. While the film is indeed labored, ugly, offensive on several levels, and unpleasant on many more (and easily qualifies as the worst film of 1984 and one of the worst films of the decade), I can't say it's any more difficult to sit through than dozens of other movies I've seen. If nothing else, it is unique and unpredictable. And Madeline Kahn, even when she's playing a grotesque, can't help but be adorable and sympathetic. What's truly depressing about this picture is that it is based on a highly personal novel by the great Kurt Vonnegut and the screenplay is written (or credited, anyway) by the author himself.

The film is directed by Steven Paul, the 22-year-old former actor and talent manager of folks like Jon Voight, Gene Wilder, Michael Cimino, and Bob Clark. Paul had played Paul Ryan in the stage and screen productions of Vonnegut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June. He secured the rights to Slapstick: Or Lonesome No More! from Vonnegut and made it his second directorial effort. But the resulting film is much more aesthetically indebted to late-career Jerry Lewis and a director who is at heart a talent agent with a love of signing up has-been guest stars for projects than it is to the work of darkly satirical novelist known for The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and countless short-stories, plays, and nonfiction books.

Vonnegut's novel was written after his sister passed away in the mid-70s. Vonnegut and his sister had an unusual closeness that no one understood, and the novel was partly an attempt to convey that relationship through fiction. He described the book as "the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography" and that while it's not about his life, it is about "what life feels like to me." But this movie is lifeless. It features the usually hilarious Marty Feldman in a tedious role as the butler to the children, a very checked-out Jim Backus as the President of the United States, and legendary outsider filmmaker and novelist Samuel Fuller as an annoying drill sergeant. This is not a so-bad-its-good kind of movie, but it is far more watchable than something like The Room.