Cloris Leachman has specialized in playing grotesques and weird old ladies for so long, it’s easy to forget that she originally came to Hollywood as just another blond beauty queen. For those of us who knew her first as Young Frankenstein’s Frau Blücher, it’s hard to reconcile her as the same actress who just five years earlier played the cute hooker in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Which is what makes watching her in the flawed comedy Crazy Mama — her first starring feature — such a strange experience, since it finds her right at the crossroads of what she once was and what she would eventually become. Playing a ’50s-era evicted beauty salon owner who decides to fund her return to her Arkansas hometown by committing a series of robberies along the way, she plays the role far too shrill and eccentrically to ever earn our sympathies, but remains compelling enough to keep you watching nonetheless.

Most of the film’s problems with volume and tone can be blamed on a young Jonathan Demme, who at this point in his career hadn’t developed the sure hand at comedy he would later show with Handle with Care, Melvin and Howard and Married to the Mob. Crazy Mama often feels like an early prototype of those films — the one he had to fuck up in order to know what not to do in the future.

Still, there are some definite bright spots in this low-budget New World production. Linda Purl (Visiting Hours) is about as cute as human beings come in the role of Leachman’s pregnant daughter, and she has great chemistry with her co-star, Happy Days’ Donny Most. And, like all of Demme’s comedies, the film has a tragic undercurrent lingering beneath its laughs, which gives it enough resonance to make sitting through the weaker moments worth the effort. —Allan Mott

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Twins John and Roy Boulting were the Coen Brothers of postwar British movies. They wrote, produced and directed their films, swapping credits so that sometimes Roy was listed as director and John as producer, and vice versa. Sometimes they worked with other writers, sometimes not.

In 1956, they burlesqued the British Army in Private’s Progress. That film starred Ian Carmichael (later Lord Peter Wimsey on TV) as Stanley Windrush, minor nobility and major boob, who learns what he needs to know to survive in uniform: the scams, tricks for time-wasting, disrespect for authority, etc. Three years later, Stanley returned in I’m All Right Jack, to learn the same lessons in postwar British industry.

He gets a job as an efficiency expert working for his uncle whose company has landed a contract to build missiles for a Middle Eastern principality. Problem is, Uncle Bertie (Dennis Price) wants to lose the contract, which he underbid, so it will go to his nefarious pal Sidney De Vere Cox (Richard Attenborough), whose company will make a fortune to be split between the schemers.

Bertie knows Stanley well, and he’s honest, good-hearted, incredibly inept and certain to piss off the workers so thoroughly they’ll go out on strike. Since the union leader is played by Peter Sellers with a brilliant Hitler mustache, and the human resources officer is Terry-Thomas at his smarmiest, it’s a done deal.

The Boultings didn’t like Sellers much — Roy once said, “As a man, he was probably his own worst enemy, although there was plenty of competition” — but he was such a terrific comic character actor before he became a movie star, they had to use him. You don’t need to know anything about working conditions in Britain in the 1950s to appreciate Terry-Thomas explaining, “We’ve got chaps here who could break out in a muck sweat merely by standing still.”

Gotta go. It’s break time. —Doug Bentin

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Producer Herman Cohen is perhaps best known for the 1957 one-two punch of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Teenage Frankenstein, so he continued to ride the wave of teen-oriented horror as far as it would take him, which is about 15 minutes into The Headless Ghost.

The British pic focuses on three collegians — two debate team-looking dweebs and one meh Swedish girl whose boobs are so pointy, it wouldn’t surprise me if the brand of her bra were Isosceles — touring a supposed haunted castle. And it is, which they discover when they hide ever-so-sneakily past closing.

Then and only then do the spirits of the royalty leap from their paintings and converse with them. One of the ghosts is — and, oh, I do so hope the title of the film didn’t spoil this for you! — without a head. In order to bust an ancient curse wide open, he sure could use that noggin. The payoff scene finds the headless body running around like a loon as his melon hovers overhead.

The whole thing is over in an hour, yet you won’t remember much past the cartoon credits and a hot bit o’ belly dancin’. Harmless but hopeless, it’s one of those things that sets out to “wacky” and makes corny jokes. You half expect it to be laden with on-screen sound effects like ye olde Batman TV show. Actually, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. —Rod Lott

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Thanks to its status as a perennial late-night movie during the ’80s and early ’90s, I’ve probably seen Sean Cunningham’s Spring Break at least six or seven times during the course of my life. But despite the number of times I’ve seen it, I’m still hard-pressed to tell you what it’s actually about.

Here’s what I can remember: There are two dorks (David Knell and Perry Lang) and two non-dorks (Paul Land and Steve Bassett). The two dorks have a room at a hotel that’s fully booked, and the non-dorks don’t, so they convince the dorks to let them stay in their room in exchange for letting them hang out with them and enjoy their non-dorky adventures.

One of the dorks has an important father, so there’s some concern that he shouldn’t be spring breaking and possibly ruin his father’s image, and one of the non-dorks falls in love with the really hot singer (Corrine Alphen) of an all-girl rock band (whose presence in the film is the only reason I’ve watched this movie as many times as I have).

Cunningham’s refusal to abide such narrative conventions as character and plot would be forgivable if he presented us with an entertaining representation of the event his film was made to celebrate, but even here, he holds back, giving us a lame spring break most of us would bitch miserably about if we had lived through it ourselves.

Subdued and tame when it should be wild and raucous, there is — as I’ve already mentioned — only one reason to party during this Spring Break and I’ve thoughtfully compiled the following video to save you the time and effort of having to experience the rest. —Allan Mott

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Remember in the days after 9/11 when media reports and overly sensitive people asked/moaned, “Will we ever be able to laugh again?” Well, of course, you dumb shits. And not to downplay the horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, but with nearly a decade past, not only are we still laughing, but we’ve grown to the point of having an actual terrorist comedy, in the uproarious Four Lions.

The title refers to a group of young, fresh-outta-training Jihadists who plot an act of terrorism on British soil. There’s nothing funny about that, except that they are stunningly incompetent. From failed disguises to accidental explosions, they prove practically incapable of executing the simplest move. And it’s all done with a script — seemingly improvised, but more likely just that sharp — loaded with smart, impeccable timing.

Director/co-writer Chris Morris’ film has the feel of a documentary, and reminds one of last year’s similarly scoped and structured In the Loop, except all around stronger, funnier and better. This is not poking fun at the Muslim religion, but its minute fraction of extremists (akin to Christianity’s abortion-doc bombers/shooters) who embrace misinterpretation on their road to martyrdom.

However rollicking, Four Lions has an unexpected heart to it, and a bittersweet end that’s not out of character for the piece. Bonus points: It might actually make you feel more at ease about the world around you. Fear not that you may not recognize anyone in the cast — save maybe Sherlock‘s Benedict Cumberbatch — because its laughs are so well-placed, so powerful, they emerge as the true star. —Rod Lott

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