IMDb > Skidoo (1968) > IMDb user comments

IMDb user comments for
Skidoo (1968) More at IMDbPro »

Filter: Hide Spoilers:
Page 1 of 6:[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [Next]
Index 54 comments in total 

25 out of 30 people found the following comment useful :-
See This Movie! It Is Beyond Belief!, 5 December 2000
Author: Bruce Elliott (brucebox@aol.com) from Los Angeles

After years of hearing about this, I finally tracked down a pirate cassette of this unbelievable film. Oh My God, any fan of bad movies must see this for the thrill of a lifetime!

This is the film that dares to ask the question, `what happens when a director of bloated epic dramas tries his hand at screwball comedy?' Now ask what happens when he and most Hollywood are desperate to get `with it', and you'll be approaching the bizarre truth of `Skidoo'. If you thought Otto Preminger couldn't get any worse then `Hurry Sundown', this will prove you quite wrong.

I'm tempted to compare this film with late 60's wrecks like `Casino Royale', but it's really in a different league. Its more like a big budget "Love American Style" episode or a middle-aged embarrassment like `The Mother's In-Law'. Perhaps there was once a scenario lurking at the bottom of all this, or someone had a screenplay and it blew away. Either way, the whole thing appears to have been edited with a lawn mower.

But incoherent structure is only part of this remarkable cinematic experience, it also contains the wackiest cast of middle-aged actors ever, all of whom should have known better. Beyond embarrassing for all concerned, which is why it's so great to watch. Everyone on screen just looks confused, as if Otto's only direction to them was `act crazy now'. Burgess Meredith chews at his small part like bubble gum, even out doing himself in `Hurry Sundown' or 'Such Good Friends'. Carol Channing is the real mind blower here! I thought I would die when I saw her groovy striptease, but then I saw the film's climax where she leads a hippie flotilla in a freaked out royal navy uniform as they board Grocho's yacht while Carol sings the ridiculous theme song. Your life as a film fan is incomplete until you've watched this scene and played it back to make sure you really saw it. Jakie Gleason's acid freak out is even better than Vincent Price's in `The Tingler'.

This film had a big budget but from the jailhouse freak out scene, it's pretty clear that no one working on this acid movie had any idea what tripping was like. Imagine Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith and Slim Pickens all acting kooky and pretending to freak out. It all ends with Grocho in his last film getting stoned with Austin Pendlton in his first film as drift away in a lifeboat with a tie-dye sail. Then Otto Preminger announces the film is over as Harry Nelson sings the entire credits!

What could they have been thinking? This has got to be one of the biggest missteps in Hollywood history. The film seems to have barely been released. I've only read one contemporary review of it, and that one describes Carol Channing as `a walking sight gag'. It seems that everyone involved with this film sobered up and decided to quietly bury the evidence. Even today, few bad movie fans know of `Skidoo', since it is not shown on TV and has never been released on video. Reportedly, Preminger's daughter controls the negative and is sitting on it to protect here father's reputation. I found a copy of the film's soundtrack album in a thrift store a few years back, and it too is a dusey. Once you've heard Ms. Channing scream `Skidoo, skidoo, do what ya wanna do' over & over again, you may never been the same. Seek out `Skidoo', it smells like pumpkins!

Was the above comment useful to you?

26 out of 35 people found the following comment useful :-
Whatever it takes, 7 April 2002
1/10
Author: eminges from mission, ks

It took me years to find a copy of this, and I can tell you in all sincerity that it's worth whatever it takes to see it, not once, but as often as you can. If it shows up at a local film festival, make sure you see every showing. If it's shown once, make sure you cajole, bribe, or threaten every friend you've got to come along. Because otherwise you're going to spend the next year in a walking trance, stopping perfect strangers and trying to describe this...THING... you saw, where Groucho Marx and Frankie Avalon and John Philip Law...no, you've GOT to LISTEN to me!

Read all the other comments, read anything you can find on this monstrosity, and you'll still be only half-prepared for what you're going to see. The only two other films I can think of that so exceeded even their own outrageous hype were Blood Freak and Godmonster of Indian Flats. But, hey, those were low-budget obscurities. Skidoo was a HUGE production - and, unfortunately, I can't imagine this is EVER going to be released on DVD, VHS, CD, cassette, or eight-track, because I can't imagine the Preminger estate wanting any trace of Skidoo to surface ever again.

Carol Channing in bra and tights. Groucho Marx on a wood screw. Dancing garbage cans. Sure, sure, sure. You've heard the stories. But, lordie, there's sooooo much more....

Was the above comment useful to you?

17 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
a classic Hollywood/acid combo, 13 May 2001
Author: Matt Moses from Brooklyn, NY

A much-maligned classic, this psychedelic gem came late in the career of director Otto Preminger, possibly at a time during which he was hoping to find a new niche. Clearly, this wasn't it, as the films he went on to do became far slower and subdued. Too bad, really, as there's some great stuff herein. An excellent cast weaves its way through a confusing plot, as follows: Jackie Gleason has retired from the mob and lives happily enough with wife Carol Channing and turtle-faced lackey Arnold Stang, the latter of whom gets iced (and prematurely, I say – let Stang stay in the picture!) when George Romero and Frankie Avalon try to persuade Gleason to pull a hit for the mob leader (`God' – Groucho Marx living in luxury on a boat with skinny Donyale Luna). Gleason finally agrees, and disappears to prison, cellmates with a peace-speaking mad scientist-looking Austin Pendelton. Meanwhile, Channing, pretty teenage daughter Alexandra Hay and her hippie boyfriend John Philip Law (who goes by `Stash') all become close friends when mom lets his hippie commune live in their house. Channing and Fay go (separately) to seduce Avalon to find out to where Gleason has gone. In prison, Gleason accidentally lets on to his hit, potential squealer (and squeal he does) Mickey Rooney (at the time in his sixth decade of filmmaking!), and further blunders when he writes a letter home and licks one of Pendelton's LSD-soaked envelopes. After a mesmerizing yet stupid trip sequence, Gleason decides not to make the hit and goes into conference with Pendelton. It's right around here that things get very manic, with an acid party in jail on the day that warden Burgess Meredith stops by to eat with the prisoners. Gleason and company make their escape while everybody's tripping their ears off (including tower guard Harry Nilsson and switchboard operator Slim Pickens), and the cast assembles for a bizarre conclusion on Marx's boat. No easy whodunit, this. That Paramount would make a production with a cast and crew like this clearly indicates that the rule-less environment of 1968 sent the studios scrambling. Furthermore, the gimmick of presenting some of Hollywood's best known faces feigning acid trips acts as evidence that in the ensuing hubbub, producers showed heart in making vehement attempts to pander to a difficult target audience. Two serious low points may leave people with a rotten taste in their ears: Channing has a musical number near the end of the film that advocates a free-wheeling hippie lifestyle, and Nilsson sings each and every word of the credits, down to the copyright.

Was the above comment useful to you?

13 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
Must be seen to be believed!, 25 March 2001
Author: pljewkes from Boston, MA

Otto Preminger's drug culture meets mobsters movie goes beyond just being merely bad. It's a must-see for fans of "far out" films of the '60s (e.g. Lord Love a Duck, The Loved One, Candy).

It's "plot" centers around a former gangster (Jackie Gleason) forced to return to the Mob by his old boss "GOD" (Groucho Marx) and break into jail to silence a potential government witness (Mickey Rooney).

Much to the horror of his wife (Carol Channing...yes, you read correctly) Gleason vanishes back into the "underworld," takes LSD and escape from jail via a trash can rigged as a balloon. You can imagine how ridiculous this scene is. However, it's nothing compared to the grotesque strip tease done by Channing for the pleasure of mafia underboss Frankie Avalon. The great Harry Nilsson contributes a bunch of faux-psychedelic tunes and Channing croaks out the film's title song during the final freak out aboard Groucho's yacht (actually John Wayne's...borrowed for the filming). In addition to the bizarre ensemble mentioned above, the cast includes: Cesar Romero, Arnold Stang, Peter Lawford, George Raft, John Phillip Law, Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, Fred Clark, and Austin Pendleton.

Was the above comment useful to you?

10 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
quick recap, 30 December 1998
Author: anonymous

In a way this could also be titled "The Day the Mob Dropped Out." Anyway, a good roster of late-60s Hollywood appears at least briefly in this LSD-laced caper gone wrong. Retired hitman Tony Banks (Gleason) is approached by old pal Hechy (Romero) to do one last job--on his one-time best friend "Blue Chips" Packard (Rooney), who's turning state's evidence. Tony refuses, but is "pressured" into going along, and gets sent to a remote prison, where Packard is being held.

In the meantime Tony's wife Flo (Channing) seeks help from Hechy's protegé Angie (Avalon) in contacting crime-kingpin "God" (Marx, in his final film appearance), to persuade him to let Tony out of it. Angie refuses to take Flo to see "God"--but doesn't mind taking their teenaged daughter Darlene (Hay) and her hippie boyfriend Stash (Law) out to "God's" yacht. Flo follows them with a gang of Stash's friends.

Tony, after an accidental acid experience via his cellmate the Professor (Pendleton)'s stationery, plots with him to escape by tripping out all the guards and inmates. This done, they fly out of the compound in a makeshift balloon, which the hallucinating tower guards (Clark and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, who also composed the soundtrack) mistake for a flower. The balloon heads seaward, drifting toward "God's" hideaway. Channing sings the title song during the big finish.

Some good laughs and insights, and social commentary of the day, not to mention tons of cameos. Raises a few points about LSD's former psychiatric uses, and leaves you wondering if it wasn't all just a bad trip. --A late-70s issue of "High Times" claims Groucho 'dropped' as a way of preparing for his role, and had a pleasant experience. Nilsson said later in an interview he had never used LSD at the time of filming, and merely played drunk.

Was the above comment useful to you?

16 out of 23 people found the following comment useful :-
Do you smell something?, 10 November 2004
Author: lustron1 from Midwest

This film is unbelievable... Big stars, a big Hollywood director... and what they came up with is the movie equivalent of a car wreck!

You don't want to look, but you find yourself unable not to.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen this film a dozen times and it still blows my mind how this ever got put on film. You won't believe your eyes or ears!

And Groucho Marx and half of the cast never looked more worse for wear.

By far, this is one of my favorite "bad" films. Watch it... and then blame the dog!

Was the above comment useful to you?

25 out of 41 people found the following comment useful :-
Embarrassing, 10 December 2004
Author: mark-506 from LA, CA

I like a good bad movie. I can go on and on about how wonderful "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" is - and I have. And I don't need those MST3K idiots adding lame improv chatter to make a bad film more enjoyable! So I had been looking forward to "Skidoo" for years. I finally watched it last night, after procuring a copy on eBay (pretty much the only place where you can find this film, currently).

My reaction, in a nutshell: Blah. Yuck. Ho hum.

It's pointless to say more, especially when so many "Skidoo" fans have already weighed in - quite eloquently, I might add - within these comments pages. But I will say this: Usually on the IMDb, when you see so many well-written praises for a famous train wreck of a film, you get the feeling that this is something to see. Don't be snowed as I was! What most of these folks are not telling you is that "Skidoo" is meant to be a wacky comedy. But it's simply a deadening, painful-to-watch document of the twilight of many a great performer's career, where, before either dying or retreating to the safety of TV movies, the cast - some game, some barely even trying (I'm looking at you, Groucho Marx) - flounder in this pathetic attempt by the dinosaurs of 1950's Hollywood to try to stay relevant by making a "hippie movie."

This film is flat, boring, pretentious and hopelessly uncampy. It has the distinctively ugly look of late 60's studio cinema, and like many of those other strident, unfunny all-star comedies of the era ("The Great Race," "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" et al), it's just plain awful.

Was the above comment useful to you?

18 out of 28 people found the following comment useful :-
This is NOT a good movie..., 5 March 2005
2/10
Author: claudenorth from United States

I've always wanted to see this film, and I'm glad I finally had the opportunity. As an example of old Hollywood's inability to grasp the counterculture of the late '60s, it is certainly worth seeing once. However, it is neither a great film nor a lost masterpiece, and I find it depressing that it is being hailed as such by those who are caught up in the smug-hip mindset that values mediocre films like this over truly great cinema. As bizarre as it all sounds, it plays like an extended episode of a bad sitcom and is really rather tame. However, the song performed by Carol Channing at the end is catchy and will remain in your head for days. You have been warned.

Was the above comment useful to you?

13 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
A TOTAL CATASTROPHE- End of Discussion, 23 July 2002
Author: jake j from Atlanta, Georgia

Reading the myriad raves of the users in this forum........trying to legitimize one of the most calamitous disasters in the history of mainstream American cinema......is alternately nauseating and shameful. Preminger's moronic, loud and incoherent stab at late sixties hipness may provide occasional shocks in how desperate he became, but this is squaresville squared. I guess using, and I mean USING every one of Otto's devoted ensemble cast of his "glory" years of the late fifties to about the Cardinal in '63 (Lawford, Meredith,etc.)provided some kind of buffer to what he must have known was a million to one stab at phantasmagoric swill, but he sacrificed them anyway. And, for once, the film was justifiably buried after its premiere and surfaces occasionally to remind any thinking human it needed to remain buried. This makes his racist trash (although not without camp value) Hurry Sundown in '67 and the following smarmy pseudo-liberalism of "Tell me that you love me, Junie Moon" in'70 outstanding by comparison. Take my word for it and understand why it is one of the lowest rating film on this board. I have actually seen it recently and it is worthless and even worse...damaging. I couldn't wait to see this dream cast in a film I would have guaranteed was awaiting rediscovery. Just forget about it and move on with your lives..........

Was the above comment useful to you?

5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Just as bad as you heard, but..., 9 January 2008
5/10
Author: max von meyerling from New York

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

More than just another cheesy exploitation flick, more than just another old man ego trip, more than just another dumb-ass the-kids-will eat-this-crap-up sixties movie, this is the official OTTO PREMINGER take on the times.

Preminger had a massive inferiority complex because he knew he wasn't really a good director. Even he could tell this when he was forced to finish a picture Lubitch had started, THAT LADY IN ERMINE, to resounding jeers. Preminger was no Lubitch. He had no talent and he knew it. He covered this by being an absolutely miserable person.

Lubitch was a smart little Berlin street kid who started as a clown and Preminger was the son of some big Viennese macher who used connections to get in with Max Reinhardt. Lubitch knew how to entertain an audience. Preminger knew how to boss people around. He was a director not because he had any artistic interest but because the director is the boss' job. Very early on he became his own producer. Nobody can boss a boss.

He didn't care so much what a film was about as long as he was making it. In later years (but before the Alzheimer) he couldn't recall making his early films at Fox and watched FALLEN ANGEL (on TV as he was dressing to go out) as if it had been directed by someone else. Later when he produced for his own company he became more selective of the properties he made, choosing sure fire stage hits and best sellers. He made sure he hired good crafts people and top writers.

He covered his artistic illiteracy with aggression, intimidation and bullying. Friend Billy Wilder cast him as the Nazi POW camp commandant in STALAG 17 for a reason. Type casting.

If Preminger was a painter he'd use a brush for house paints. Broad strokes please and nothing too fancy. When he shows a woman "going wrong" she runs off with an oily Flamenco dancer. Preminger is in the direct, bombastic line of C. B. DeMille. Even so, If Preminger had been Philo Farnsworth we'd all be watching potatoes instead of TV today. Preminger has his moments. ANATOMY OF MURDER has a Joseph H. Lewis low budget induced sense of mundane realism. The vinegar of location shooting absorbs the slightly sweet, hammy but underplayed acting. But Otto was just beginning his run of super productions beginning with EXODUS and crashing down with badly botched HURRY SUNDOWN. Premiger resides in the pantheon of an obscure French cineaste cult known as the MacMahonists.

Right after that Preminger let his hair down (figuratively, of course), slapped on the love beads, dropped acid and decided to tell the world. From somewhere he became aware of a script by one Doran William Cannon. What was in the original script would be interesting. Apparently Mr. Cannon's work was mailable enough to become whatever a director wanted it to be. He also wrote BREWSTER MCCLOUD and that is, for better or ill, a Robert Altman film. Maybe Cannon articulated the gestalt but couldn't dramatize or or the other way around or maybe his message was just too subversive for directors working in the system called "the movie industry" who defanged a project by merely adding their egos to the mix. Sort of like symbolic Holocaust Memorials, more representative of a designer's cleverness than what they're supposed to be about.

In this instance we have a parade of moronic of-the times conceits, and also timelessly and ill-timed corny schtick. Jackie Gleason is a retired gangster married the Carol Channing reprising her Lorelei Lee bit from the fifties. They have an impossibly beautiful blond daughter (Alexandra Hay) and straight as she is she's in love with impossibly beautiful movie hippie John Philip Law, who, in real life, was the mover behind a high class celebrity commune in the desert. Gleason is pulled back into the organization because as the organization's leading hit man, he is ordered to break into Alcatraz to "kiss" a big time informant (Mickey Rooney). Its remarkable the number of old pros Preminger recruited for a days work. The head of the organization- GOD is Groucho Marx with an ironically bad die job on his hair and mustache, living on a yacht. I mean, George Raft appears as the yacht captain but why?

Then suddenly, strangely, bursting out of the crap celluloid like the alien spawn emerging from John Hurt, there is a real movie. Gleason is sent to a cell and joined by draft protester Austin Pendleton. The only thing worth watching in Skidoo are the scenes with Pendelton in them.Gleason writes a letter to his wife on Pendelton's stationary which has been impregnated with LSD. Pendelton then acts as a guide for Gleason's trip. If this had been the whole movie Skidoo would now, today, be hailed as a classic of sixties film-making, instead of lame garbage most notable for it difficult availability. It makes me wonder if this trip, or even if the entire prison scenario was the core of Cannon's original concept, sort of a hip rip-off of A NOUS LA LIBERTE.

Kiss is used as the euphemism for kill throughout the picture even on Austin Pendelton's poster which reads "Kiss for Peace". Its the sensitivity to death borne of an acid trip.

There are some strange bits as Gleason and Pendelton escape from prison by spiking everyone's food with LSD. Fred Clark who was sort of the straight man's straight man, not that he was the best, but after George Burns was finished working straight for Gracie, he world work in two with Fred Clark with Clark working straight for him. He does a six minute solo of acid vaudeville silliness.

Whatever is taking place outside of the world of Gleason (who is excellent and note perfect) and Pendelton (a really magnificent performance under the most difficult conditions) is worthless drivel.

Was the above comment useful to you?
Page 1 of 6:[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [Next]

Add another comment

Related Links

Plot summary Ratings Newsgroup reviews
External reviews Plot keywords Main details
Your user comments Your vote history