As the slightly sweet, slightly menacing bed of “chugga-chugga” piano music wildly encapsulates Tim Burton’s feature debut, you know something magical is going to take place from the first minute — no, scratch that — the first second of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.

Usually, when I review movies, they’re either new (or newish) or something I haven’t seen in eons and want to revisit. But in this case, I’ve watched Big Adventure an average of two or three times a year for the past 40. Safe to say, it attached itself to and in me. I still love this film and, even more, I want the generations after mine to enjoy this film. It’s a fantastic, wondrous and completely absurdist joyride on the vintage handlebars of Pee-wee’s treasured bicycle.

That bike starts the plot rolling, as one day, Pee-wee’s bike is stolen outside a shopping center. Everyone is a comical suspect until a fake psychic tells him his bike is currently in the basement of the Alamo in Texas. With this information, Pee-wee (Paul Reubens) sets out on a road trip with hardened criminals, lovelorn waitresses, a ghosty trucker and, of course, the Satan’s Helpers motorcycle gang. When he eventually finds his bike, Big Adventure becomes a madcap chase through a movie studio with Godzilla, Twister Sister’s Dee Snider and two handfuls of snakes.

I’d say it all makes sense, but you’ve seen this before, right? Instead, I implore all you well-read, mostly subversive, somewhat alternative culturists who grew up on Pee-wee Herman to dust off that VHS tape, bargain buy DVD or the gorgeous Criterion Blu-ray, and share it with the next generation of smart alecks, obnoxiously conceited and, really, the only people I want to be around in the future.

With its kitschy color scheme and surreal set design, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is a true love letter to all the weird kids, informing them of their life options as they go out into the world and make their own art, hopefully with an oddball bike and original persona to match. —Louis Fowler

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In contrast to the words of Ray Parker Jr., Sherman Hemsley is totally ’fraid of ghosts in Ghost Fever. And, apparently, laughs. If Hemsley was attempting to move on up to a movie career after 11 seasons of TV’s The Jeffersons, he went in the wrong direction. It’s the rare Alan Smithee film so wretched, Alan Smithee might rethink his pseudonymous credit of disownment.

Plainclothes policemen Buford (Hemsley) and Benny (Luis Avalos, TV’s The Electric Company) are ordered to evict any remaining residents of Magnolia House, a former plantation home supposedly haunted by the spirits of its slaves and their evil owner. And it is! An odd concept for a PG family comedy, but let’s go with it, because Ghost Fever gives us no other choice.

Minutes after entering the mansion, Buford’s buried his nose deep in a book about groins. Two of the place’s transparent specters, Jethro (also Hemsley), and the slaveholder’s nonbigoted son (Myron Healey, 1977’s Claws), set about shooting animated lightning from their palms to put Buford through the ringer. Thus, Hemsley engages in the lowest-order form of slapstick shenanigans, including:
• running on a treadmill to avoid a wall of spikes
• dodging swinging pendulums
• sliding up doors and twirling ’round like a pinwheel as if he were controlled by magnets
• being tickled by ghosts while scaling a bedsheet rope
• tap dancing against a breakdancing mummy
• and, in the coup de grâce, shimmying left and right to protect his testicles from being sledgehammered into flapjacks, all while nearly having his rectum perforated by a whirling metal drill

And what of Benny? He gets to play pool against a phantom he can’t see, which leads to a swordfight with cue sticks. For another fight, Smithee Lee Madden (Angel Unchained) also cuts to a boxing match where Benny spars with pro pugilist Joe Frazier.

No one in Ghost Fever contracts ghost fever, but both men risk ghost chlamydia by falling in lust with two blonde sorta-babe spirits (Diana Brookes and Just Before Dawn’s Deborah Benson) who can’t leave Magnolia or they’ll turn old and ugly. At the movie’s close, as Buford and Benny drive away sad and mutter they’re better off dead, Jethro zaps their car to crash, killing both men instantly so they can bone their way through the afterlife. Kids gotta learn sometime, right?

The film is startlingly out of touch with how comedies operate. Not even the combined might of three writers cracked that code; their script exhibits the rhythm of jokes without the reasoning to select proper words that would make a joke. For example: “If that’s a French accent, I’m speakin’ Italian!”

Funny? Fuggedaboutit. —Rod Lott

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Kicked out of college for running a casino party and crashing a sleep study on nocturnal penile tumescence, eighth-year seniors Auggie (Clark Brandon, My Tutor) and Drew (Randal Patrick, Weekend Warriors) are forced to devise a full-time scam. Their answer: Turn Drew’s family’s gas station into a gas station-themed burger eatery. That it looks like a set from kidcom Saved by the Bell is of less concern than hiring Michael J. Pollard (Tango & Cash) to man the grill.

Col. Sanders had his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices; Auggie lucks upon a formula that unlocks the brain’s repression of sexual urges. He tests it by mass-Mickeying their catering gig for a sorority cotillion. It works so well, the hired band vocalist tells the crowd, “Wait a minute, I feel a little different! Let’s rock and roll!”

Because Auggie already radiates rapey vibes (“Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women” is his pickup line) and no scruples, he slathers it on the restaurant’s patties. I don’t understand that business plan, but lo and behold, neither does Fast Food. This Zapped!-inspired setup doesn’t really take hold until the final third, and even then, nudity is as absent as healthy menu items. Otherwise, this thing contains all the ingredients for your (below-)average 1980s teen comedy: wet T-shirt contest, record scratch on the soundtrack, fast-speed montage, guy playing broom guitar, timely W.C. Fields impressions.

If history remembers Fast Food, it’s only for being former porn star Traci Lords’ first movie with an MPAA rating tamer than an R. She’s stunt-cast as a spy for competing burger franchise mogul Wrangler Bob Bundy (Jim Varney, who’s basically doing Ernest P. Worrell in different headwear). Under the spell of the sex sauce, she strips to a PG-13-friendly bra and panties.

Director Michael A. Simpson ports over several members of his Sleepaway Camp II and III cast, including Pamela Springsteen (sister of Bruce) and Tracy Griffith (half-sister of Melanie). The latter gets the movie’s single laugh, asking Auggie, “Don’t you have somewhere else to be? Like in custody?”

Brandon and co-star Lanny Horn (Homework) wrote the screenplay. Their collaboration is so artless, Hamburger: The Motion Picture looks like the Dardenne brothers by comparison. —Rod Lott

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For a few years — or thousands, if you choose to look at it that way — besties Ruth and Megan have stocked their London thrift store with antiques and antiquities purloined with the help of a time machine. It looks like a pimped-out bumper car. They didn’t invent the gizmo; they found it outside discarded near the trash bins. 

What they don’t know — but soon learn — is time travel is dangerous. (It’s even the name of the movie, look: Time Travel Is Dangerous! See?) In actuality, they don’t know much. “We’re not scientifically minded,” says Ruth (Ruth Syratt), attempting to explain their find and how it works. “I’d say it’s a wormhole, but I don’t know what a wormhole is.”

Shot handheld, The Office-style, as a mockumentary, Chris Reading’s film resists doing the expected to forge its own whacked path. Any other comedy with this premise would follow Ruth and Megan (Megan Stevenson) on their unusual shopping trips through an entire history book’s worth of countries and eras, but Reading relegates that to a montage or two. The real story is how their ruse is discovered by its gobsmacked inventor (Brian Bovell of Robert Zemeckis’ The Witches), how they manage to function when banned from using the machine (they don’t) and the consequences of breaking their promise. 

In British comedy tradition, humor is sandpaper-dry and droll in a manner so confident in itself, it verges on cozy. These things usually do not click with me — see (or don’t, really) 2005’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, also narrated by Stephen Fry, incidentally — yet I was bought-in by the first scene. That’s all due to the winning duo of Stevenson and Syratt.

In real life, they actually run the ChaChaCha vintage store serving as Time Travel’s home base. Neither woman appears to be an actress, yet both are funny and indelibly deadpan, with a chemistry so potent, it can’t be manufactured. Reading really struck gold with this pair, so naturally, when the third act separates the characters, the movie’s juice starts to sour. I’d watch a TV series of them just hanging out in their shop, no sci-fi (or any type of fi) necessary. —Rod Lott

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Happy birthday, Bunny! To celebrate, your boo, Bobbie, has bought you a threesome and some Molly. But that’s a package you don’t have time to open, what with the one you’re trying to keep closed around the cops: that suitcase packed with a bad guy’s folded corpse.

Played by a heretofore unknown Mo Stark, Bunny is a hustler in New York’s East Village. And Bunny is a shaggy comedy of errors that captures 12 hot and hectic hours in a melting-pot microcosm of a tenement. The film is a streetwise farce of slamming doors and unforgiving stairwells among potheads and sex workers, like if Sean Baker adapted Noises Off.

In his directorial debut, the person actually behind the camera is in front of it, too: Ben Jacobson (Blink Twice), who plays Bunny’s fast-talking best bud — so close, they sport matching promotional Basketball Diaries jerseys. Plus, this is the first feature screenplay for Jacobson, Stark and Stefan Marolachakis, making it all the more remarkable the film is able to sustain a relentless pace and impeccable comic timing.

Their jokes aren’t setup/punchline — just so sharp and knowing, they take you by surprise. For example, to an ultra-orthodox room renter (scene stealer Genevieve Hudson-Price, HBO’s The Deuce), Bunny assures her of his Jewish bona fides: “Yeah, my mother was, Bobbie’s father [is], I love Albert Brooks …” Several other lines seem destined for immortality due to their quotability, none more launch-ready than “I do love a good Smashburger!” (Trust me: It works wonders in context.)

None of Bunny would work if the characters weren’t believably authentic. Essentially, Jacobson and Stark have made a Real Movie with all their friends, and it shows. Not in the usual way of, “Well, at least it looks like they had fun” — although that, too, is true — but in they understood how to use nearly everyone in just the right part, at just the right moments, for just the right dose. (It all feels so genuine, I didn’t even recognize Mission: Impossible’s Henry Czerny in his brief role as a rabbi making house calls.) I’d say Jacobson and Stark delight in moving the many characters around a chessboard, but it’s evident they prefer to mischievously tip said chessboard to watch all the pieces slide and struggle and smooth-talk their way back into good graces.

So their ending is a bit too quick, too pat, too easily resolved. To echo a character’s statement in those closing moments, haven’t they earned it? —Rod Lott

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