On Top of Spaghetti

Last night I gave my brain a vacation and watched Meatballs 4. I have no real excuse other than the fact I happen to enjoy summer camp movies, probably because camp always looked like fun and I never got to go as a kid. This movie, however, was as removed from other summer camp movies as possible. In fact, the camp is actually a ski resort camp, not a traditional summer camp. All of this is made moot by the incredibly bad acting, wretched dialog, and extremely tired plot. Here is an example of the dialog: Woman clearly not a teenager but playing a teenager asks the old man running the camp - "Are you checking IDs?" Old man probably 3 times her age responds while gazing at her breasts - "No." Woman clearly not a teenager but playing a teenager replies - "Good, because all I brought was my IUD." I'm pretty sure Quentin Tarantino wrote that witty piece of dialog.

Now I will fully admit that I don't mind female nudity in a movie, no matter how gratuitous. That teenage boy in me has never quite completely gone away. Yet when that is all your movie has going for it, you're in trouble, unless of course you are making porn. There are numerous scenes where flimsy excuses require several of the female campers to be topless, and without these scenes, the movie is probably 35 minutes long, tops. If this were a sitcom, there would be no laugh track, because there are no discernible funny cues in the entire movie.

Corey Feldman is the "star" of the movie, and many would say that should be the first clue to the craptasticness of the film. While I certainly do not think he is a great actor, I did really enjoy him in The Goonies, Gremlins, and The burbs. Not so much in this movie. I don't know what was worse, watching him dance to a terrible instrumental version of Michael Jackson's Black or White, or trying to emote. Here is an example of the latter.



I could go on, but I will leave it to you to discover the other subtle nuances of Meatballs 4. If you do watch, try explaining to me why Feldman's character is in love with the ugliest girl at camp, or why the villain of the movie would accept a wager to pay off the debt of the camp when all she had to do was wait a few more days and buy the camp when it foreclosed. Surely we can get some stimulus money for a commission to explain these things. As a side note, Feldman breaks the fourth wall at the end of the movie, mentioning that he was in The Goonies. That's more self-awareness than this movie can handle.

Transmission out.