Rating: C-
Dir: Mel Brooks.
Star: John Candy, Rick Moranis, Bill Pullman, Daphne Zuniga.
Judging by the IMDb ratings, this is the last great Brooks movie, and it’s all downhill from here. As we progress through his filmography, I can’t yet speak to the latter. But I can say, I didn’t find this to be all that amusing. It may be a problem that I’m not particularly a Star Wars fan. I am not prepared to swear I’ve even seen the entire original trilogy, and swore off the new stuff after the zombiefication of Peter Cushing. Disney really does turn everything to shit, doesn’t it? In theory, you might think this would make me amenable to a spoof.
But this seems stuck in an unfortunate dead zone. Ten years after Star Wars, yet it basically ignores the sequels. It’s 12 years before The Phantom Menace, when the merchandising mocked here became the main purpose of the franchise. The scene where the wise Yogurt opens up the wall (top) to reveal Spaceballs: The Lunchbox, Colouring Book and Flamethrower, now comes over as prophetic, and a little sad. Too many of the other jokes here are just too damn obvious. A demand to “comb the desert” is followed by a giant comb being dragged across sand-dunes. It’s the kind of crap I might have come up with at the age of eight. This wasn’t a critical or commercial hit at the time – it won the Stinkers Bad Movie Award for Worst Picture of 1987 – but revisionists now proclaim it, “One of the greatest comedies of all time.”
I strongly disagree. Here, in addition to Yoda. you have fairly basic parodies of Han Solo, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia. These are Lone Starr (Pullman), Dark Helmet (Moranis), Barf (Candy) and Princess Vespa (Zuniga), plus a slew of minor characters. Dark Helmet has a very large helmet. Weirdly, there’s no equivalent to Luke Skywalker. The plot has Dark Helmet trying to suck up the air from Princess Vespa’s planet, Druidia, using Vespa as leverage. The name of the planet is mostly so we can get “Druish princess” jokes. She is rescued by Lone Star and Barf, but they then crash into a desert planet, where they meet Yoghurt (Brooks).
The funniest moment might be a parody inspired by Alien, not least because it includes John Hurt, reprising his famous demise. I was also fairly amused by the sequence where they acquire a tape of Spaceballs, and watch it up to the point where their own action are immediately replicated on the screen. Or the action sequence which ends in Helmet’s men capturing their not very convincing stunt doubles. That’s the kind of comedic invention I was expecting. Instead, we get characters called “Asshole”. It all ends in Yogurt saying, “God willing, we’ll all meet again in Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.” It took a while – forty years – but that sequel is now in production, for release next year. Never mind Brooks: Pullman will be seventy-three years old, and Zuniga sixty-four…