Born Again (1978)

          This milquetoast religious drama credits Jesus with the redemption of lawyer-turned-Nixon-advisor Charles Colson, who was convicted and imprisoned for his role in the Watergate cover-up. Based on Colson’s book, the movie takes its title from Colson’s conversion to fundamental Christianity in the period between his departure from the White House and his entrance into a federal work farm. Viewers are asked to believe that the Charles Colson who naïvely followed Nixon’s orders was a different man from the Charles Colson who bravely accepted responsibility for crimes against the U.S. Constitution. And if this sounds like an awfully convenient explanation, then, well, who ever knows the truth of what happens inside another man’s soul?

          Written and shot in the perfunctory style of an assembly-line TV movie, Born Again stars Dean Jones—best known for a string of silly Walt Disney comedies—as Colson. His performance is adequate at best, because whenever Jones peels off his glasses to cradle his face in his hands and weep, he seems more robotic than sincere. Like Jones’ performance, the script by Walter Bloch depicts Colson’s conversion without actually making a case for why viewers should believe what they’re seeing. During the heat of the Watergate investigation, Colson’s rich friend Tom Phillips (Dana Andrews) explains that he was born again after realizing that wealth is an empty reward. This encounter flicks a switch in Colson’s mind. Overnight, he begins spouting Bible passages. He also builds bridges with onetime political enemies who share his love for Jesus. By the time Colson is an inmate, leading Bible-study lessons and wooing African-American criminal Jimmy Newsom (Ramond St. Jacques) to the bosom of the lord, the whole movie feels a bit silly, especially since scene after scene is underscored with saccharine music.

          Yet the most egregious shortcoming of Born Again might be the way the filmmakers lay all the blame for Colson’s problems solely on Nixon. After all, wasn’t the lesson of Watergate that we need to beware political conspiracies, not just overzealous individuals? And doesn’t the suggestion that Nixon was some earthly agent of the devil absolve people like Colson of personal responsibility? With all due respect to the faithful people who made this movie—which was coproduced by an entity called Prison Fellowship Ministries—briskly discarding issues of ambition, complicity, greed, moral relativism, and willful ignorance seems both rhetorically and socially dubious.

Born Again: LAME

Mr. Superinvisible (1970)

In between cranking out family comedies for Walt Disney Productions, actor Dean Jones made this rotten flick for a consortium of European companies. Riddled with frenetic camera zooms, horrible voice dubbing, and weird musical scoring, Mr. Superinvisible tries to mimic the Disney formula and fails on nearly every level. The plot is convoluted and stupid, the slapstick gags and verbal jokes are unfunny, and the special effects look cheap. By comparison, even the weakest of the movies that Jones made for Disney seems like masterpieces of kid-friendly entertainment. In Mr. Superinvisible, Jones plays Peter, an American scientist working in a European lab on a cure for the common cold. Concurrently, one of his colleagues discovers a formula for rendering living beings invisible. Through silly circumstances, Peter becomes invisible shortly after criminals steal his current experiment, which they mistakenly believe is a biological weapon. Peter uses his invisibility to defeat the villains—but not before wasting enormous amounts of time embarrassing suave coworker Harold (Gastone Moschin), a rival for the affections of beautiful scientist Irene (Ingeborg Schoener). Mr. Superinvisible is filled with things guaranteed to annoy any thoughtful viewer. One of the supporting players gives a Peter Lorre impression instead of a performance. A fluffy dog is the most developed supporting character. One scene involves Jones, while invisible, blowing raspberries in order to give the impression that Harold is flatulent. The climax involves exploding eggs. All of this drags on for 91 dreary minutes, replete with music suitable for a softcore sex farce. Even though Jones gives his usual valiant effort, his affability is not nearly enough to make Mr. Superinvisible tolerable.

Mr. Superinvisible: LAME

Snowball Express (1972)

One of the weaker products to roll off the live-action assembly line at Walt Disney Productions, this plodding and unfunny “comedy” stars Disney regular Dean Jones as Johnny Baxter, a beleaguered office drone who inherits ownership of a hotel in Colorado. Uprooting his family and relocating to Colorado, Johnny discovers that the business is actually defunct, so he contrives a scheme to transform the hotel into a ski resort. Meanwhile, evil local banker Martin Ridgeway (Keenan Wynn) tries to exploit Johnny’s financial vulnerability in order to buy the business, because he wants to harvest and sell lumber from the abundant woods on the hotel’s sprawling property. Since the preceding story is obviously better suited to a drama or even a thriller, it’s no surprise that the makers of Snowball Express must strain to generate jokes. The picture’s two longest sequences are extended ski runs during which Jones and others flail their way down steep hills, but instead of actually integrating impressive stunt footage, the filmmakers rely on flimsy process shots. This methodology is especially frustrating seeing as how much of Snowball Express was shot on location in Colorado; whereas inconsequential scenes feature big skies and wintry atmosphere, key moments feel phony. Adding to the enervated nature of Snowball Express are tiresome running gags about mischievous animals. Even worse is the clichéd material about an ornery old prospector (Harry Morgan) who loiters around the hotel and then—surprise!—becomes a loveable porter once Johnny opens the ski resort. Every single beat in Snowball Express follows the Disney family-values playbook, from the judgmental subplot about a homewrecker (Joanna Phillips) to the trope of the hero’s plucky son (Johnny Whitaker) surprising his father by demonstrating unexpected resourcefulness. By the time Snowball Express climaxes with an interminable snowmobile race (occasioning another volley of anemic FX and idiotic pratfalls), the picture has achieved complete tedium.

Snowball Express: LAME

The Million Dollar Duck (1971)

          Based on a story by Ted Key, who created the characters Hazel and Mr. Peabody and Sherman, this amiable live-action picture from Walt Disney Productions offers a modern spin on the old Aesop fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. Adhering to the Disney trope of building stories around bumbling professors, The Million Dollar Duck stars Dean Jones as Albert Dooley, a kindly young professor with financial troubles. One day at his lab, a duck that hasn’t proved useful as a research animal wanders out of its cage and into a neighboring lab, where the fowl gets irradiated. Albert takes the duck home, only to discover that the duck now lays eggs made of pure gold. This development delights Albert’s scatterbrained wife, Katie (Sandy Duncan), even though the couple’s son, Jimmy (Lee Montgomery), simply enjoys having a pet. (He names the duck Charley.) Seeing a way out of his fiscal woes, Albert conspires with his buddy, a lawyer named Fred Hines (Tony Roberts), to sell the eggs and make a fortune. Meanwhile, Albert’s next-door neighbor, U.S. Treasury employee Finley Hooper (Joe Flynn), suspects Albert is up to something. Farcical intrigue ensues.

          All of this stuff is completely silly, of course, and The Million Dollar Duck is filled with tomfoolery along the lines of adults sitting on all fours and barking like dogs to make Charley do his trick, since the duck has a phobia about canines. Per the Disney formula, the picture also features a very long climactic chase filled with questionable special effects. (Picture Jones riding the cherry picker attached to a truck, then squealing every time the truck nears an overpass.) Nonetheless, the filmmakers keep things simple in terms of narrative elements, so instead of trying to anthropomorphize the titular critter, The Million Dollar Duck merely depicts what happens when Albert, Fred, and Katie get greedy. Chances are you can guess whether the major characters learn to accept wholesome values by the end of the story. Flynn and Jones provide their usual competent work, while aggressively wholesome costar Duncan, appearing in one of her first movies, makes the most of a trope about her character spewing malapropisms along the lines of “You don’t have to yell at me—I have 20/20 hearing.” Plus, it’s hard to get too stern about a flick that features crusty supporting player James Gregory speaking this unlikely dialogue: “Yes, there does seem to be a certain degree of duck involvement here.”

The Million Dollar Duck: FUNKY

The Cat from Outer Space (1978)

A lesser offering from the live-action arm of Walt Disney Productions, The Cat from Outer Space features the tepid mixture of science fiction and slapstick that was all too common among the company’s ’70s offerings. The filmmakers try to enliven a fundamentally uninteresting premise by bludgeoning viewers with elaborate production values, familiar character actors, and laborious plotting—yet it’s hard to know which exactly which audience the people at Disney had in mind for this one. The main plot is silly nonsense about an alien, who happens to look like an ordinary housecat, enlisting the help of earthlings in order to repair his spaceship, while at the same time avoiding capture by soldiers and by a crime boss who wants to use the alien’s technology for nefarious purposes. However, a major subplot revolves around a hard-drinking compulsive gambler and his attempts to defraud bookies and gangsters by using the aforementioned technology in order to change the outcomes of sporting events. And then there’s the requisite infantile love story, because the cat’s main human accomplice is a nerdy scientist who can’t find the courage to court the coworker he loves. The gambling stuff and the romantic material would seem to be of little interest to very young viewers, and yet it’s hard to imagine grown-ups tolerating endless scenes of special-effects tomfoolery. (Picture lots of objects and people levitating.) Making matters worse, The Cat from Outer Space is dull and flat, despite fairly brisk pacing, simply because the character work and storytelling are so perfunctory. By the time the movie lurches into a convoluted rescue sequence at the end, all traces of charm and novelty have disappeared. Anyway, the picture does boast an eclectic cast of comedy professionals, each of whom does what he or she can with the script’s limp gags. Actors appearing in The Cat from Outer Space include Ken Berry, Hans Conreid, Sandy Duncan, James Hampton, Roddy McDowall, Harry Morgan, and McLean Stevenson—yes, that’s two commanding officers from the classic sitcom M*A*S*H for the price of one.

The Cat from Outer Space: LAME

Herbie Rides Again (1974) & Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977)

          It doesn’t speak well of American culture that the biggest domestic box-office hit of 1969 wasn’t Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Midnight Cowboy or Romeo and Juliet. No, the top grosser was Disney’s The Love Bug, a ridiculous special-effects comedy about an anthropomorphized Volkswagen Beetle that plays matchmaker for two unsuspecting humans. Starring the amiable Dean Jones and the grating Buddy Hackett, The Love Bug makes almost every other live-action Disney flick seem sophisticated by comparison. Given this success, it’s odd the Love Bug back didn’t hit the road again until 1974, when Herbie Rides Again was released.

          The second time around, the hero is not Jones’ racecar-driver character, but instead Willoughby Whitfield (Ken Berry), the nebbishy nephew of cutthroat real-estate developer Alonzo Hawk (Keenan Wynn). Hawk wants to demolish an old firehouse occupied by widow Mrs. Steinmetz (Helen Hayes), so he sends Willoughby to sweet-talk the old lady. This puts Willoughby at odds with the widow’s spunky granddaughter, Nicole (Stefanie Powers), and the widow’s even spunkier VW, Herbie. (Mrs. Steinmetz is the mother of Hackett’s character from the original movie.) Herbie Rides Again is laborious and tiresome, with idiotic scenes like Herbie driving up the rails of the Golden Gate Bridge while an oblivious Mrs. Steinmetz sits behind the wheel, focused on her grocery list. The only memorable sequence is Hawk’s trippy nightmare vision of armies of Herbies attacking him, some flashing gaping “mouths” lined with sharp teeth, others dressed like Indians and tossing Tomahawks that scalp poor Alonzo. Berry, Hayes, and Powers are likeable, and Wynn is appropriately cartoonish, but the stupidity factor is almost unbearable.

          Things don’t get much better in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, for which Jones resumes leading-man duties. The filmmakers overlook the fact that Jones got married at the end of the first picture, since he’s inexplicably single, and they never explain why he’s got a new best friend/mechanic, Wheely Applegate (Don Knotts). Nonetheless, he heads to Europe for a racetrack comeback in the cute little VW with the “53” on the side. The plot thickens when jewel thieves hide a stolen diamond inside Herbie’s gas tank and when Herbie falls in love with a sexy Italian sportscar. Veteran British thesps Bernard Fox and Roy Kinnear try valiantly to make their slapstick scenes as the bumbling crooks work, but the lifeless script renders their efforts futile. Worse, the long scenes of Herbie courting the sportscar seem creepy after a while, since the vehicles do everything short of consummating their attraction. The moronic plot also calls far too much attention to the imponderables of just how self-aware Herbie really is; since the car drives itself for most of the movie, what purpose, exactly, does Jones’ character serve during the big race?

          Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo did well enough to justify a final sequel in the franchise’s original run, 1980’s Herbie Goes Bananas (without Jones), plus a short-lived TV series in 1982 (with Jones). The spirited VW returned yet again in 2005, when Lindsay Lohan starred in Herbie: Fully Loaded.

Herbie Rides Again: LAME

Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo: LAME

The Shaggy D.A. (1976)

In a word: woof. This live-action Disney comedy is a sequel to the studio’s minor 1959 hit The Shaggy Dog, about a young boy who turns into a sheepdog thanks to a magic spell. In the sequel, the boy has grown up to become reputable attorney Wilby Daniels (Dean Jones). When his house is robbed in broad daylight, Wilby decides to run for district attorney because the current D.A. is soft on crime. Unfortunately, that old magic spell gets reactivated, so Wilby starts turning into a sheepdog at inopportune moments, like when he’s preparing to get interviewed on television. Meanwhile (there’s always a meanwhile), current D.A. John Slade (Keenan Wynn) conspires to eliminate our hero before the lycanthropic litigator  can discover that Slade is in bed with the Mob. Disney regular Jones is amiable and diligent, investing considerable energy to give insipid scenes bounce and spunk, but not even the most gifted comedian could make Don Tait’s hackneyed screenplay sing. Very small children might be amused by vignettes of Jones growing hair on his face and by scenes of the sheepdog galumphing about while speaking with Jones’ voice, but grown-up viewers will have a hard time sitting through this barrage of cartoonish slapstick, clunky effects, and labored plotting. Matters are not improved by Tim Conway’s supporting performance as a dim-witted ice cream man, because his bumbling-idiot routine gets tired very quickly. And for dog lovers, presumably one of the movie’s target audiences, it’s a drag to watch the scene of the hirsute hero getting herded into an animal shelter’s gas chamber before he stages a four-legged jailbreak, since puppy euthanasia ain’t exactly comedy gold. Twenty years after this sequel was released, Tim Allen starred in a CGI-heavy remake of the original film.

The Shaggy D.A.: LAME