Going Overboard - (1989)
Directed by Valerie Breiman
Written by Valerie Breiman, Adam Sandler & Scott LaRose
Starring Adam Sandler, Tom Hodges, Burt Young
Scott LaRose & Lisa Collins
is one of those films that famous actors wish didn't exist ala Sylvester Stallone's
The Party at Kitty and Stud's. This time it was stand-up comedian Adam Sandler trying to get a career off the ground in a low budget film that seems mostly improvised, set on a ship the filmmakers seem pleased they have access to, and a bevy of Miss Universe Pageant contestants who happened to be travelling from New Orleans to Cancun. The film was called
The Unsinkable Shecky Moskowitz and lasted only days in
one theater before disappearing unwanted - with good reason. Sandler would go on to improve his resume with smaller roles, but when he hit big with
Billy Madison and
Happy Gilmore the film would come back to haunt him - this time as
Going Overboard.
This is just a terrible movie - it badly needed a screenplay, but all involved seem to have been under the impression that funny things would happen on the voyage, and that ad-libbing it would work. It really doesn't - nobody thought of anything even remotely funny, and the actors simply die onscreen. You can see Sandler racking his brain, and nothing comes - he tries too hard and just seems mostly obnoxious. There are early roles for Billy Zane (who was just about to have his first big success playing the villain in Australian film
Dead Calm with Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill) and Billy Bob Thornton along with an appearance from aged U.S. comedian Milton Berle - which adds some interest to the film, but their involvement is particularly limited, and instead we're stuck with Sandler, Tom Hodges (whose career went nowhere) and Scott LaRose playing the Andrew Dice Clay-inspired Dickie Diamond.
Right from the offset we know we're in trouble, for every time I've watched a movie that starts with a character breaking the fourth wall and admitting the film was done on the cheap, it has not ended well. Compounding matters was Sandler referring to the Miss Universe girls as "clean" - as if we're visiting a particularly filthy brothel in a Spanish back-alley. The film is fairly exploitative with them, but to it's credit doesn't include nudity (who knows if they asked the contestants though - who would have been obliged to say "no".) Admitting it's cheap is meant to disarm us, but the film is so bad that it matters little. For some reason, Sandler is saddled with the part of a somewhat bad comedian who wants to steal the limelight from an obnoxious one. There's not much fun to be found with a formula like this.
Time and time again, when an establishing shot is called for, we return to the same clip of a rustbucket anchored close to shore. The other locales aren't really clearly defined, but one of them includes General Manuel Noriega (played by a "
really slumming it" Burt Young) who dispatches a pair of painfully unfunny "terrorists" to catch up with the ship and murder 'Miss Australia' who has uttered some disparaging remarks about him on air. She says something along the lines of "I bet he smells like a pizza" - which sounds like something desperately thought up at the last minute. Most of the material in this film has that aura of over-pressured improv that's not working, and nowhere near funny. The word "bitch" is bandied about a lot, and many of the men on this ship are slovenly and engage the girls with extended French kisses with visible tongues - which I guess must have felt like it would get a laugh.
When Milton Berle appears to give Shecky some comedic advice, he comes out with the dustiest, most dated and painfully old comedy you could possibly imagine, and instead of engaging the audience with some decent funny moments the film just becomes painfully sad. Lisa Collins, who plays Miss Australia, married Billy Zane the same year this came out - but unfortunately she somehow manages to mess up the words of the Australian national anthem. Not on purpose for comedic effect, but only in a way an Australian would pick up on (perhaps she was surreptitiously pleading with us for help,) and I do believe she was a rare specimen who couldn't even get that right. She was obviously told to accentuate her Australian accent to such a degree that this Australian couldn't believe how Australian she sounded. "Aw bugger me strewth, the bloody vegemite's all over me tucker bag..." Along with Zane, she would snag a very small part in
Dead Calm.
Aside from 'Slap Your Cat', which is an in-movie song performed by "Yellow Teeth" there are some decent tunes on the soundtrack, but by decent I don't mean they were award-worthy by any stretch of the imagination. Sandler himself sings a rendition of 'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet' and 'Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)' - as to whether that was to save money or just personal hubris I know not. The cinematography from Ron Jacobs is wretched, and after only one other film he soon changed career-paths and is credited in many films as working for their "Transportation department". The film was a first ever assignment for editor Randy D. Wiles, and while
Manos : The Hands of Fate shows us what a film would be like with a complete non-professional, you get the sense there were a few more cooks in the kitchen. The film runs for an absolutely
painful 97 minutes. With so much dead weight, that particular fact is just silly.
Adam Sandler has been at the forefront of many bad projects, and has a film which is generally regarded as one of the worst ever made by professionals - but here is a film with just as much ignominy, and he'd be right to feel humiliated by it's release. The director is Valerie Breiman (who also shares a screenwriting credit) - and I don't know what her story is. She seems to have made a similarly bad comedic romp after this, and much later a couple of middling dramas - all around 10 years apart, as if she's the Stanley Kubrick of bad movies. Aside from that there's not much to say except much of the film makes no sense (how about that toilet door being jammed by nothing?) and the many attempts at humour are at times just desperately-pulled funny faces - which aren't really all that funny. It's a desperate and tragic movie, and a perfect example of why a comedy should always at least base itself off some kind of screenplay. Some great stuff can come from ad-libbing - but you can't ad-lib an entire movie.
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