Originally intended by Hollywood to star Cyndi Lauper and Dan Aykroyd, the feature film Vibes instead stars Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Goldblum. While both Aykroyd and Goldblum are the quintessential movie nerds, each would have played the character of Nick Deezy very differently, with Goldblum’s being the perfect blend of lost and delirious that the movie needed.
Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with The Couch Trip instead.
After meeting in a New York University study on parapsychology — I think — psychics Nick and Sylvia (Lauper) become engrossed in the seemingly drunk Harry (Peter Falk) and his tall tales of mental riches in South America. But with Nick’s memory of objects and Sylvia’s ghost-whispering, they find out it’s just some get-rich-quick scheme, all the while somehow falling in love. Somehow.
Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with The Great Outdoors instead.
Once Nick and Sylvia, along with Harry, make it to Ecuador, so does a weird, chubby German guy with a real name made out of baby words I will not type here. As he tries various ways to assassinate them, including a strange sexual imposition from seductress Elizabeth Peña, it turns out to be a plot by an NYU professor (Julian Sands).
Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with Caddyshack II instead.
Directed with a heavy hand and a birdbrain toward the weird by Ken Kwapis as his follow-up to Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, this film is most famous as Lauper’s bid for silver-screen stardom crashed and burned; maybe a better film would be how being in such a mediocre movie would trap her on an Trivial Pursuit: Totally 80s card.
Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with My Stepmother Is an Alien instead. —Louis Fowler