As I was painfully reliving the experience of watching National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Not because I remembered seeing it back when I was a wee child of the ’80s, but because it kept reminding me of another movie that really sucked.

“Hey,” I heard myself shout in my brain when the connection was finally made, “this is just like Slaughter High!”

A quick overview of the plots of the two films makes this clear as both are about a group of assholes whose class reunion at their closed-down high school is interrupted by a disgruntled former student whose life was ruined via a tasteless class prank. Space prevents me from listing the other ways the two films coincide, but at a certain point, I stopped keeping count.

The main difference between them is that Class Reunion was marketed as a straight comedy, which it constantly (and depressingly) attempts to be, while Slaughter High was marketed as a straight horror film, despite the fact that a combination of the filmmaker’s incompetence and contempt for the audience makes it play far more like an unsuccessful spoof than a typical slasher movie.

Made by what can charitably be described as the then-Lampoon’s B-company, the John Hughes-penned Class Reunion helps prove my two long-held beliefs that there is nothing worse than a bad slasher movie parody and that there is no such thing as a good slasher movie parody. Still, this is better than any National Lampoon movie that’s been made in the last decade. —Allan Mott

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Yes, Yankee Doodle in Berlin is silent, but don’t go away. Let me tell you about it. It’s different. Really.

The picture stars Bothwell Browne, who was Danish and a female impersonator. (Note that you don’t have to be Scandinavian to be a female impersonator, but it helps. Just look at Garbo.) Anyway, Browne is Capt. Bob White of the American Army who accepts the job of infiltrating the German high command during WWI in the guise of a sexy woman. He will then vamp the Kaiser (Ford Sterling) and his son, the Crown Prince (Mal St. Clair), and seduce from them all their military secrets. Think of him as Mata Harry.

The comedy comes from shameless slapstick and the conceit that the Kaiser is nothing but a henpecked husband who is constantly under the thumb of his frau (Eva Thatcher). Add that to the propagandistic notion that Germany was being ruled by numbnuts and idiots (played by silent comedy stalwarts Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin, Bert Roach and others) and you have a fast-paced 58 minutes of funhouse slapstick that makes Mel Brooks look like Alan Rickman.

The picture was directed by F. Richard Jones and is pure Mack Sennett, loaded with pratfalls, mistaken identities, domineering women, seltzer bottles, sexual innuendo, collapsing beds and more goofy facial hair than a barber shop full of adolescent werewolves. Settle back to laugh, kick off your shoes, lower your brow, and pop the cap off a beer. Keystone, of course. —Doug Bentin

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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