Making a parody film is difficult when you can’t afford to record live audio. And ever more so when your actors don’t move their mouths to approximate dialogue that could be dubbed later. Nonetheless, Everybody Loves It remains undaunted.
Oh, it’s not successful — just undaunted. Its “solution” to its self-inflicted conundrum? Wall-to-wall narration from a four-leaf clover. As if that weren’t bewildering enough, the trefoil speaks in a Viennese accent, courtesy of cartoon royalty Paul Frees, aka Boris Badenov from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Not that any patron cared, this being a nudie cutie and all. (Frees sure did, wisely going uncredited.)
With a soundtrack heavy on xylophones and foghorns, Everybody Loves It plays loose and lecherous as a paltry spoof of three TV shows and — whoa there, horsey — one whole commercial. Going under the heavily dulled knife first is hospital drama Ben Casey. Dr. Sven Crazy and fellow surgeons remove a heart-shaped candy box from a patient — not to mention clothing from the bosomy bodies of scrub nurses, leaving them in panties resembling placemats.
When the respirator fails, the physicians opt for a bicycle pump. At surgery’s end, the patient is revealed as Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman (via mask less terrifying than what the mag would use in its own movie. Up the Academy). Hell, this one wishes it were one-tenth as good as Mad. It’d even settle for Cracked.
Next, Naked City undergoes a dressing down, as master criminal Louie Linguini plots a heist of redemption stamps from a fur salon. This plan requires his hourglass-shaped moll to pose as a nude mannequin to fool the half-blind security guard. Frees’ near-nonsensical play-by-play includes such gags as, “They have to be as fast as butterflies doing push-ups on a lemon meringue pie.”
Finally — woefully — the hourlong pic finishes by taking aim at Combat! The humor gets not one iota better (“Is that a parachute? Looks like Sonny Liston’s nightshirt!”), but the ladies get barer. Here and elsewhere, they include cheesecake models Althea Currier (Kiss Me Quick!), Penny Bello, Michelle Swain, Paula Angelos (Dr. Sex), Karen Nichols and Cathy Crowfoot (Mondo Keyhole), not that any represents a recommendation. —Rod Lott