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Writer's pictureOktay Ege Kozak

Ranking All John Landis Films

Cause of Death: This is a painful one to remember, since I spent two weeks on it, rewatching the films and writing this massive list. Since it was an evergreen article -meaning it wasn't topical since Landis wasn't about to come out with a new movie-, it was understandably put on the back burner by my editor. I was still waiting for it to be published, until Max Landis got accused of sexual assault and my editor killed the list, which makes sense since I doubt many readers would have wanted to click on any article with the name Landis on it for a while. Hence my hatred for little Maxie, whose screenplays and general public demeanor I already can't stand, multiplied tenfold. Anyway, enjoy my ranking of daddy Landis' uneven but impressive career.


Even though Spielberg and Lucas were my ‘80s heroes growing up, I’ll gladly admit that John Landis’ particular mix of cartoonish humor and adult absurdism had almost more to do with my infatuation with American pop-culture than any other filmmaker. Hell, the first words I learned in English were “Take it easy”, that immortal line non-chalantly delivered by Dan Aykroyd after John Belushi’s Jake Blues once again dumps his rightfully murderously obsessed ex (Carrie Fisher) in The Blues Brothers. As for why a 5-year-old would be allowed to repeatedly watch an R-rated comedy about a duo of borderline insane career criminals wreaking unlimited havoc on anyone and anything around them, you have to take that one up with my parents. Trading Places was the first time I began to understand the concept of racist economic policies. It was also the first time I saw boobs in a movie. Coming to America was the first time I was shown a sophisticated and literally regal black character in an American comedy around a time when black actors in such films were mostly stereotypical comic relief side characters. It was also the first time I learned what “dumb fuck” meant.


With his delectably reckless approach to comedy that goes hand-in-hand with his cynical views of “maturity” in America, Landis carved a specific niche for himself in the late ’70s and ‘80s emergence of the blockbuster era. If Spielberg and Lucas were the wholesome uncles giving me important life advice while entertaining me, Landis was the “fun” uncle who secretly showed me nudie mags while telling me not to take this “life shit” too seriously. Landis’ career took a slump in the ‘90s after a series of iconic successes during the ‘70s and ‘80s, and never really recovered. Yet even though he’s not much of a Hollywood power player anymore, and is guilty of donating his DNA to a talentless dickbag like Max Landis, his counter culture contributions to Reagan-era Hollywood shouldn’t be dismissed. So here are all John Landis features, ranked from worst to best. Bear in mind that we’re only doing fictional work, so his adorable tribute to Don Rickles, Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, is not on here. Shorts directed for anthology films are also eliminated, so my apologies to fans of Amazon Women on the Moon and Twilight Zone: The Movie.


17. Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)


Here’s how not to make a sequel to one of the greatest comedies ever made: 1- John Belushi is dead, so just scrap the whole thing before it even begins. 2- Read item 1. 3- Even if you’re crazy enough to attempt this, do not replace Belushi with the antithesis to his anarchic energy by casting someone instantly lovable and cuddly like, say, John Goodman. 4- Do not turn what was once a monument to reckless raunchiness into a kid-friendly live-action Saturday morning cartoon, going as far as inserting an annoying kid who does jack shit. 5- Do not turn the charming musical numbers from the original into hack job music videos. 6- Do not move the location from Chicago to New Orleans, because when you say electric blues, the first state that comes to mind is Louisiana? 7- Do not condense the beyond over the top destruction of police vehicles that dominated the third act in the original into one interminable car crash sequence, while leaving us with cinematic blue balls by cutting to credits before the actual big chase starts. I have a lot more, but to keep things short, just avoid this embarrassment.


16. The Stupids (1996)


Do you love head-slappingly dumb and obvious wordplay mixed with a second-tier family-friendly action-comedy headlined by an eight-tier “comedian” (Tom Arnold) doing a twenty-tier impression of Inspector Clouseau as an everyday schlub? Then you will love The Stupids, Landis’ attempt at mixing Looney Tunes logic with pre-SNL sketch comedy. That pitch on paper sounds fine, especially for those looking for a nostalgic throwback to zany material that Landis himself grew up adoring. But unfortunately Landis is stuck on two repetitive gears for the seemingly interminable runtime: Bad wordplay and puns, as the Stupid family who accidentally find themselves embroiled in an illegal arms sale conspiracy take words literally. For example, after looking at a letter that reads, “Return to sender”, they start looking for a bad guy literally named Sender. Hardy-har-har. The second gear is a series of slapstick sequences where Stanley Stupid (Arnold) is the target of hit men who keep dying through Stanley’s aloof actions. Looks like someone saw The Pink Panther Strikes Again.


15. Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)


After a series of flops, both John Landis and Eddie Murphy were thirsty for a hit. So Murphy decided to resurrect Detective Axel Foley, the character who pretty much turned Murphy into a star, and hired John Landis to helm the third installment of the Beverly Hills Cop franchise. This was a great idea on the surface. Everyone loves Murphy’s Foley, but were turned-off by the grimy violence of Tony Scott’s number two -Pun intended-, so why not dial things back to some goofier comedy by getting the director who championed Murphy’s zanier side with Trading Places and Coming to America. The result is not an unmitigated disaster, but something even worse: It’s unfunny, dull, and far too desperate to extract any chuckles at any cost. Foley’s adventure centered entirely on a corrupt theme park could have resulted in some exciting and funny set pieces, so it’s hard to figure out what went wrong here.


14. Oscar (1991)


You lucky kids never had to live through the nightmare of early ‘90s “comedian” Sylvester Stallone, where the action star with a limited number of expressions in his arsenal suddenly got it in his head that he’s the next funnyman genius. This is what happens when you surround yourself with nothing but yes men. It’s been 26 years since I saw it in a theatre, yet I still occasionally wake up in a pool of sweat, screaming "Stop or My Mom Will Shoot!!” into the dark void of the night. Based on the 1967 comedy of errors of the same name, itself based on a play by Claude Magnier, Oscar saw Stallone as a mob boss trying desperately to find a man for his pregnant daughter (Marisa Tomei) while also attempting to go straight. The main character in the original was a businessman played by France’s comedy genius, Louis de Funes. De Funes is a master at mugging for the camera, and the film’s unapologetically farcical tone fits his sensibilities. In Landis’ version, the setting is moved to 1930s Chicago, where the dazzling cinematography pays appropriate nostalgic homage to old gangster films, and most of the cast, especially Tomei, are game. But the buck stops at Stallone, who only has a single gear as he constantly imitates a log screaming at nothing while shitting gravel. And since he’s in pretty much every scene, this Oscar turns into cinematic torture, despite Landis’ appreciated attempts at capturing the glory days of 1930s wisecracking comedies.


13. Susan’s Plan (1998)


I can imagine even some of the readers in touch with Landis’ career asking, “What the hell is Susan’s Plan?”. My advice is don’t ask and just move on. Landis, who also wrote the script, attempts to put on a modern noir heist with a slightly comedic twist with his story of a woman (Nastassja Kinski) desperate to have his husband killed, but has to take matters into his own hands after a series of incompetent hit men bungle the job. Susan’s Plan is not bad, but it’s also so mediocre and forgettable, that the whole thing is erased from your memory as you watch it. Landis regular Dan Aykroyd has a bit of fun as an especially stupid biker bro hit man, but that’s about it.


12. Burke and Hare (2010)


Landis’s attempt at a comeback, and his latest feature so far, is a morbid and proudly gruesome comedy about the real-life murder case where a duo of nineteenth century Edinburgh rapscallions (Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis) went on a murder spree in order to sell the bodies as cadavers. Landis and screenwriters Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft play fast and loose with the facts of the actual case in order to pull off some Monty Python-level comedy gore. That’s where Burke and Hare shine, but Landis is too off-centered with tone. The performances, except for Jessica Hynes’ appropriately hammy take as a psychotic innkeeper, are lacking in energy for such an off-beat premise. Landis further shoots himself in the foot by awkwardly inserting a self-serious romance between Pegg’s murderer and Isla Fisher’s character, an untalented actress –I like Fisher as a performer, but her detractors can twist this sentence for their own pleasure-.


11. Into The Night (1985)


Into the Night is your standard ‘80s action-comedy where a regular joe somehow finds himself embroiled in an international criminal plot and has to find a way to get out of it. In this case, the regular joe is an insomniac (Jeff Goldblum) who decides to get away on a plane after finding out his wife cheated on him, only to find himself the center of a stolen jewelry plot when a thief-with-heart-of-gold trope (Michelle Pfeiffer) lands on the roof of his car. What follows is the predictable series of car chases and gunfights with frequent close-ups of Goldblum’s character freaking out, interspersed with the obligatory romance burgeoning between the two leads. Goldblum and Pfeiffer share some chemistry. But this was Landis’ first foray into directing after dealing with the legal ramifications of the horrific accident that took place while shooting his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, and it shows. His pacing is too slow, the overall premise is too simple to justify an almost two-hour runtime, and his tone is a bit off: For example, he follows a Three Stooges routine with a trio of Iranian hit men going after the stolen jewels, and follows that up with the same hit men brutally murdering a woman. Still, it’s a halfway decent timewaster, but certainly the least of Landis’ ‘80s output.


10. Schlock (1973)


Landis directly communicated his trademark sense of humor by literally calling his first feature after the overall tone of his career. This giddily stupid send-off to ‘50s cheap human-in-an-ape-costume b-horror flicks finds the missing link (Landis in a young Rick Baker’s decent-for-its-budget monkey suit), unfrozen after spending millions of years in hibernation, wreaking murderous havoc upon a Southern California town filled with dolts. The film’s absurdist parody humor is so similar to the works of the ZAZ team, that not only does it perfectly clarify why Landis was picked to helm ZAZ’s Kentucky Fried Movie, but it’s hard to believe ZAZ themselves didn’t write Schlock. There are a bunch of otherwise typical ZAZ gags here, like a professor being asked by a news station to tell the story from the beginning, prompting him to begin with the big bang. There’s even a Shirley/surely joke, seven years before Airplane was released. Unfortunately, Schlock also transfers the languid pacing of the films it makes fun of, resulting in some off-kilter pacing for such energetic sense of humor.


9. Innocent Blood (1992)


With this mafioso vampire melodrama/comedy, Landis attempts to capture a similar tone as his seminal werewolf half-spoof, half-legit-horror classic, An American Werewolf in London, with slightly diminishing returns. Almost every scene in Innocent Blood shows someone watching an old monster movie on TV in the background: Landis’ distractingly unsubtle attempt at communicating to the audience just what kind of material he’s trying to present here. I just wish stars Anne Parillaud, as a vampire who only kills bad people, and Anthony LaPaglia, as a detective who falls in love with the vampire, were told they were in lighter fare. Their romance is far too self-serious for a movie in which vampires literally make cheetah sounds before tearing out their victims’ throats, and a scene that shows the bad guy calmly monologuing while his entire body is on fire. Robert Loggia, as the mob boss vampire, seems to be the only one who gets what kind of a live action cartoon he’s in, as he chews the scenery like Donald Drumpf at a Big Mac factory.


8. Spies Like Us (1985)


One common type of spy comedy presents regular everyday schlubs finding themselves as unwilling heroes in the middle of world-altering international action and intrigue. This fish-out-of-water formula allows the general audience to imagine how they might act if they were planted in the middle of some high stakes espionage plot, and how they would screw up endlessly, before somehow singlehandedly saving the day, of course. Landis’ Spies Like Us features two bumbling, self-centered low-level government employees (Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd) who cheat their way into what they think are a bunch of cushy, high-paying jobs, but end up as expendable patsies for a nuclear game of tag between USA and the Russians. The film is a consistently entertaining Cold War era benchmark for this sub-genre. The manic comedic chemistry and energy between Chase and Aykroyd is spot on, and gets us through the occasional tired and easy sketch-like setups. The genius, anxiety-ridden sequence where the two morons are tasked with operating on a dying man is alone worth giving this one your hour and forty minutes.


7. Three Amigos (1986)


Seven Samurai is such an influential film, that aside from the straight remakes, it practically gave birth to a sub-genre of spoofs where the innocent villagers being terrorized by bandits seek out heroes to save them, only to find out that those “heroes” were actors pretending to be what the villagers thought were the real thing. Galaxy Quest, A Bug’s Life, Tropic Thunder in some sense, and of course, Three Amigos. Written by comedy legends Steve Martin and Lorne Michaels, and also Randy Newman for some fucking reason, the story follows a trio of out-of-work silent-era swashbuckling action stars (Chevy Chase, Martin Short, Steve Martin) jumping on what they perceive to be a gig in Mexico, only to gradually find out that the villagers confused them for their movie personas and actually expect them to rescue them to destroy a murderous cartel headed by the villainous El Guapo (Alfonso Arau). These films are always more interesting when the actor characters are still under the impression that they’re merely acting; despite the evidence of real violence that surrounds them. Landis lands the comedy as he stretches the cluelessness of his prima donna protagonists beyond its rational point, and doesn’t immediately turn them into badass heroes once they decide to truly help the villagers. Three Amigos endures as a slapstick classic.


6. Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)


“Your popcorn’s been pissed in. Film at 11.” This is the immortal line that not only sprung the ZAZ team to the world comedy stage, but established Landis as a comedy director with his own unique vision and style. What we get here is a series of mostly great skits wrapped around a hilarious spoof of Enter the Dragon. The grimy low-budget aesthetic goes hand in hand with the gloriously tasteless but infinitely clever sense of humor that eventually became the bread and butter of the ZAZ team. Landis’ love of cheesy b-movies and exploitation flicks are also on full display here, with a reference to Schlock as a giant ape destroys a local TV station, and a fake trailer for a sex comedy with at least sixty perfect of the footage dedicated to close-up shots of giant boobs being squeezed. For today’s PC crowd, Kentucky Fried Movie will no doubt seem horrifying, but those in tune with the nostalgia of National Lampoon style humor can still find a lot to like here.


5. Trading Places (1983)


How do you brilliantly skewer Reagan era’s inflammation of institutionalized sociopolitical racism, while also delivering an uproarious comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd at the peak of their careers? Why, you direct Trading Places of course! Timothy Harris and Herschel Wiengrod’s script is about the live-action representation of Statler and Waldorf (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) making a $1 bet to see if they can turn their stuffy and rich employee (Aykroyd) into a bum while turning a bum (Murphy) into their stuffy and rich employee. Landis fully embraces this biting satire and further digs comedy gold as he embellishes on the unique qualities of his stars. Aykroyd is a bit of an intensely smug nerd in real life, but he can also convey a sinister energy, so he’s great as the stuffed shirt who gradually loses his mind as the world around him shatters to pieces. Murphy, on the other hand, is let loose to perform his trademark manic style. The film stumbles a bit as it puts the convoluted plot over comedy –And an indefensible use of blackface by Aykroyd to boot- during the third act, but it’s still a genre powerhouse nevertheless.


4. An American Werewolf in London (1981)


Decades before Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright perfected the tightrope balance between all-out parody of a genre and straight use of its clichés with The Cornetto Trilogy, Landis was hard at work at the same goal with this tragicomical tale of an American tourist (David Naughton) who gets bitten by a werewolf while traveling across the English countryside and has to decide whether of not to kill himself as he turns into a werewolf himself. Griffin Dunne, who plays the ever-decaying ghost of his best friend and seals the funniest performance in the movie with his studious matter-of-factness, urges him to end it all before he kills more innocent people, but the tourist’s new romance with a nurse (Jenny Agutter) complicates things. As opposed to the atonal lush cinematography of Innocent Blood, Landis employs a grounded, drama-like look that anchors the genre-bending insanity of the narrative content. The film’s also known for its then-revolutionary werewolf transformation effects, which got Landis the job of directing Michael Jackson’s iconic music video for Thriller.


3. Animal House (1978)


It was only a matter of time for Landis’ irreverent, silly, risqué, and unabashedly anti-authority humor to coincide with the similar work coming out of the National Lampoon magazine. So when it came time for National Lampoon legends Doug Kenney, Harold Ramis, and Chris Miller to bring their script about a rowdy 1962 frat house happily laying waste to their conservative university, could there be a better choice to direct it? What follows is a game changer, a massive hit that not only propelled cinematic comedy to new highs -or lows, depending on how you look at it-, but practically invented the genre of “slobs vs. snobs” college comedies. So if you’re a big fan of Revenge of the Nerds or Old School, you have Animal House to thank. Not to mention the fact that it solidified John Belushi as a comedy freight train to reckon with. Belushi’s Bluto created the archetype of the dunderheaded, violent, but loyal frat boy who usually steals the show in these movies. Those looking for a timeless masterpiece might be turned off by the film’s episodic structure, and some scenes certainly look terrible in the me too era –a main character deciding whether or not to rape a girl who’s not only passed out, but is underage-, but it’s nevertheless hard to dismiss its contributions to modern comedy.


2. Coming to America (1988)


The funniest movie Eddie Murphy has ever, and probably will ever star in is one of the most quotable and endlessly enjoyable comedies of all time. Before the debacle of Beverly Hills Cop III, Landis knew exactly how to use every different aspect that Murphy had to offer. As much as Murphy is known for his hectic energy, Landis also tapped on his previously unrecognized, more classy and mature persona. As the prince of a fictional African country looking for love in Queens of all places, Murphy’s solid as the straight man who’s baffled by the ridiculousness of late ‘80s urban life taking place around him. In order to deliver on Murphy’s comedy side, Landis puts him in heavy makeup as various kooky characters and lets him loose, resulting in the funniest sequences ever to take place in a barbershop. This approached paved the way for Murphy’s later work where he played multiple characters in the same film. So if you’re looking for someone to beat up for eventually influencing Norbit, you know who to go after.


1. The Blues Brothers (1980)


This cocaine-fueled tribute to cinematic excess is a vibrant piece of over-the-top bug-eyed entertainment that pumps adrenaline and dopamine into the senses from the first frame to the last. It’s the ultimate kitchen sink movie. You want a terrifically toe-tapping Chicago-style electric blues and R&B musical headlined by the greatest names in their field like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles? You got it. Looking for a car chase extravaganza that’s so out there and so excessive that a crazy-ass race thru an entire shopping mall is merely the midpoint appetizer? A no-fucks-given comedy about a duo of psychopathic blues musicians (Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi) trying to raise money to save the orphanage that raised them? A magic car that can somehow perform a triple axel in the air and keep going? Neo-Nazis literally smashing through asphalt after falling from the height of a skyscraper? It’s hard to find any modern comedy with the sheer entertainment value of The Blues Brothers, and it’s futile to even try.

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