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6 out of 7 people found the following review useful: Forever Funny, 23 October 2000 Author: (bostonred) from las vegas nv
How can a movie that features the singing of Curtis Mayfield be bad? It can't! The Groove Tube is a series of scatological black-out sketches that makes fun of anything from 2001 to the olympics. The highs, (Koko the clown, the easy lube recipe) outnumber the lows (an all too long "The Dealers"), but even the lows are funny. Best of all is Ken Shapiro's manic dance down a busy Manhattan sidewalk.(That is Shapiro, not Nat King Cole singing Just You, Just Me). Definitely dated now, but at the time The Groove Tube was irreverent, bold, shameless and hysterically funny. Ken Shapiro made this minor cult hit, then 7 years later made the Christmas day opening bomb, Modern Problems (though I enjoyed it} and since then, unfortunately, nothing.(He could possibly be playing drums in a jazz group) The Groove Tube remains to me an unending burst of positive energy, a movie that 26 years after my initial viewing, still brings me real joy!
7 out of 10 people found the following review useful: The Groove Tube is 'groovy'.., 10 March 2005 Author: zohar818 from United States
You know what they say about the 70's..if you can remember them you weren't there. One of the few things I do remember about the 70's was the very first hippie and hip social satire as seen from a totally 'underground'or counter-culture perspective..The Groove Tube. If the humor seems faded or witless now to some viewers it can only be because a lot has happened in the last 30 years and the comedy isn't 'fresh' anymore..but hey! When this movie came out it was a first..and some of these skits were being done for the very first time...at a time when Nixon was in office, the Vietnam war was raging, the sexual revolution was in full swing..and J.Edgar Hoover was still in charge of the FBI. This is a film made before Watergate broke and as such it was one of the first to take a big swipe at the establishment..to make fun of it and the hippies at the same time. And frankly, some skits are still dead funny. If you liked Cheech and Chong's "Up In Smoke"..you will LOVE this film.If you want to know what the 70's were really like..check out the Groove Tube.. if you liked the Oscar winning "Network" from about the same year and thought it was right on the mark in its savage look at TV, you will dig the Groove Tube..which picks up on the theme but plays from the angle of the viewers...the young viewers who were turning off the TV in favor of other entertainments.... We had been raised on Ozzie & Harriet "Leave It to Beaver", Father Knows Best, My Three Sons..Happy Days...so imagine our glee when those of us who were experimenting with the new life-styles got to see a send up of the box as seen from our perspective! The commercials by the Uranus corporation alone are priceless.."Good things come from Uranus"....and the sudden break from straight film into Fritz the Cat-style animation when the hippies eat the weed is still one of the best segues in and out of sanity i have ever seen on film.If you liked the Kentucky Fried Movie, you will LOVE this film. And if you ever wondered why your weird uncle Harold still gets a wicked gleam in his eye when thinking back to his college days..this would be the perfect film to watch.Take it for what it is..a memento of the times...and a sassy little film that will help all of us who did forget the 70's to remember them anew.
3 out of 3 people found the following review useful: Midnight Madness, 5 January 2000 Author: SanDiego from California
Back in college "midnight movies" at the local theater primarily showed "Barbarella," "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," or "The Groove Tube." "The Groove Tube" was the best of that era's skit movies that included "Dynamite Chicken," "The Boob Tube," and even lesser known attempts at showcasing underground comedy troupes like Second City and The Groundlings. The original version was rated X and featured full frontal male and female nudity. I understand that later versions were edited for an R-rating but perhaps with time the film is back together. At the time it seemed raunchy, dirty, gross, underground, and subversive, but with twenty years of Saturday Night Live, Howard Stern, and films ranging from "Porky's" to "Something About Mary," it's more like 'Saturday Night Live, the Movie' (some skits are funny, most are not, nothing we haven't seen elsewhere.) The funniest and most original skit has to do with a children's show that features a man's private parts dressed up to resemble a puppet. I remember real children's show hosts standing on their head and putting a doll's outfit around their upside down mouth. I always thought that was sick. At the time I couldn't believe that "The Groove Tube" got an actor to do a routine with his exposed penis (this was 1975 after all) and it was pretty shocking...and hilarious. It is no longer shocking, but it is still pretty funny. I hope that they didn't edit that out of the recent showings of the movie. I also always wondered who's penis it was. I think it would have been more provocative if they would have had a female host ala Sheri Lewis or Fran of "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie" talk to the penis but like I said it was only 1975.
2 out of 2 people found the following review useful: Great TV!, 24 April 2007 Author: Lee Eisenberg (eisenberg.lee@gmail.com) from Portland, Oregon, USA
"The Groove Tube" was one of only two Ken Shapiro movies, the other one being the equally zany "Modern Problems". This one is just a full-scale parody of TV. Aside from Shapiro - who apparently didn't do anything after "Modern Problems" - the movie also stars Chevy Chase and Henry Winkler's cousin Richard Belzer. The three cast members (plus some other people in smaller roles) appear in various skits. One of the funniest ones features Chase in a Geritol-spoofing commercial, in which he's describing the medicine as his wife strips, and it ends with her humping him. There's also a pornographic news program, an irritating cooking show, and the epic tale of some drug dealers.Anyway, the whole thing's just a real hoot. In my opinion, the three best TV-spoofing movies are this one, plus "Tunnelvision" and "Kentucky Fried Movie" (although I might also include "The Truman Show"). Really funny.I wonder what ever did become of Ken Shapiro.
2 out of 2 people found the following review useful: Dated? Yes... But, worth a look., 7 February 2004 Author: jety2k from Chicago USA
When you view this movie you should keep in mind that it was written and filmed in the early 1970s. Pretty dated but real damn funny for it's time.I saw it when I was 14 with some friends at a double feature that included the 1930s classic "Reefer Madness". We were stoned of course. For those of you that are in your early twenties, it should give some of you an idea of what your parents thought was funny and in your face back then.Most people didn't have cable tv and those that did didn't have 100 stations to choose from and it was 7 years before Mtv was invented. Most of us were relegated to watching 3 channels if you watched tv at all.This is also why anyone over 40 will tell you the first 5 years of SNL are better than all of the others combined.The best segments are the Cooking Show, Brown 25 and KOKO the Clown.In any case you may find humor in some of the segments or not. It is still worth watching from a nostalgic or historical perspective.
2 out of 2 people found the following review useful: Groundbreaking humor, 12 January 2002 Author: bbrebozo from Washington, D.C.
This film may seem dated today, but remember that it was made in 1974 -- before Saturday Night Live, before Howard Stern, back when George Carlin was just getting beyond the Hippie Dippie Weatherman and into heavy satiric humor. This film is the granddaddy of them all. Enjoy it for its historical significance, as well as for its strong entertainment value.
2 out of 2 people found the following review useful: The 'Great Grandaddy" of them all, 12 April 1999 Author: Zack-23 from Ladson, SC
If you liked "Kentucky Fried Movie" (predecessor to the Zucker's "Airplane") you need to see the original 'skit' movie. The 'Groove Tube' is the GREAT GRANDADDY of the skit movies'. Nothing but one comedy skit after another. Many are very funny, some are a little dated. But hey, if you don't like one, the next is sure to get you. I saw the thing when it first came out, and 25 years later, when we are working in the kitchen, I STILL tell my wife to "Take the cherry pits... and put them in the olives... and garnish with a small American Flag!" Crazy.
3 out of 4 people found the following review useful: Time Capsule Humor, 3 April 2003 Author: drosse67 from Virginia
An R-rated "Yellow Pages--let your fingers do the walking" ad. A bizarre kitchen cook show. "The Dealers." "Mumble" jazz music over the Watergate hearings. Koko the Clown. Dated stuff, but occasionally funny stuff, and arguably stranger than either Kentucky Fried Movie or Tunnel Vision. I was surprised to hear that this movie was originally rated X, when it contains less nudity and sex than Kentucky Fried Movie. Perhaps the full frontal nudity of both the hitchhiker and the girl nailed the rating. Of the skits, The Dealers contains some inspired moments and leads up to a great punchline. Koko the Clown is hilarious. However, the 2001 spoof at the beginning drags on too long, and like Kentucky Fried Movie, the movie is a bit too obsessed with the act of sex. Writer/director/star Ken Shapiro pretty much dropped off the face of the Earth after this movie, unless of course if you count Modern Problems, more "family friendly" than Groove Tube but weird in its own right.
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful: Predicted today's television?, 22 October 2009 Author: rokcomx (rokcomx@aol.com) from San Diego CA
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Tho 35 years old, Groove Tube looks a lot like actual TV today! Specialty niche networks (nude sports), a TV show about stoner drug dealers called the Dealers (ala Weeds, and even predating 1978's Cheech & Chong Up In Smoke), weird beer commercials (Butz Beer, no less bizarre than Bud Bowls), dirty-minded kid's clown Koko (shades of Pee Wee Herman), even Chevy Chase doing slapstick humor (a violent barbershop vocal duo) a year before his 1975 debut on Saturday Night Live. And thanks to the infamous opening sequence that earned Groove Tube an initial X-rating, I still can't hear Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up" without thinking of naked dancing hitchhiking hippies ---- For similar sketch-style movies, see TunnelVision, Kentucky Fried Movie, Amazon Women on the Mood, Monty Python's Beyond the Fringe, Dynamite Chicken, and the Firesign Theatre's Everything You Know is Wrong.
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful: The Groove Tube is still entertaining despite some dated '70s moments, 14 July 2007 Author: tavm from Baton Rouge, La.
Just finished watching The Groove Tube which I first saw about 23 years ago when I was a teenager staying up way past my bedtime watching HBO with my brother and his best friend. We had also watched Animal House just before that so we saw two movies that starred an SNL alumna and had some naked breasts. Good thing our parents were asleep the whole time! Anyway, there were lots of weird and funny things in this movie that were eye-openers like the Brown 25 sequence of the Uranus Industries commercial ("with the taste of beef stew" says the announcer as what is apparently human excrement comes out of a white tube. Ewww!) or the face of the puppet talking about VD (a scrotum with a small penis with eyes glued on). Chevy Chase and Richard Belzer made their feature film debuts here. Chase is hilarious whether doing a Geritan spot with a woman stripping, having his hands have sex in a "Let Fingers Do It" commercial, or singing "Four Leaf Clover" with co-writer/director Ken Shapiro drumming his hands on his head. Belzer teams with Shapiro in "The Dealers" movie, and on "Channel One Evening News" with one wild bit having Belzer as a black prostitute trying tricks on reporter Ken who plays Lionel here. "Lionel, that sounds like a train that I'm going to ride like a Choo-Choo!" Other outrageous bits include "The Koko Show" with Shipiro as a kid clown show host who, after ordering the "people over ten" to leave the room, reads requests of his viewers like passages of "Fanny Hill"! Or how about the Olympics segment with a German couple making love being announced by two men (one of them Spanish) as they get explicit while "Please Stand By" keeps interrupting on the screen! Or the animated segment on "The Dealers" which depicts dancing toilets after Shapiro ingested some marijuana! Not everything's so dirty. Besides the "Four Leaf Clover" skit, at the end there's a highly amusing music segment with Ken lip-syncing his own recording of "Just You, Just Me" while dancing with suit and briefcase around the city with occasionally a cop (co-writer Lane Sarasohn) joining in. So, in summation this is one weirdly, funny movie that seemed to influence other like films (Tunnelvision, Kentucky Fried Movie) and possibly Saturday Night Live (which made Chevy that show's first star) and, despite some dated elements, can still amuse today. P.S. While I liked hearing Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up" during the gorillas dancing/hitchhiking beginning sequence, I did wonder what the point was with the sequence of the hitchhiker and the woman who picked him up, having them running from the car, stripping on the run, and then having the naked man get caught by the cop who stopped on the road. Guess it's one of those '70s streaking things...
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