Born To Win. This movie is hilarious and tragic at the same time. It’s a 70’s film so you can assume it will be good. George Segal, Robert De Niro, Karen Black, Paula Prentiss and Hector Elizondo.
Segal (in his best role ever) plays a hair dresser who breaks up w/ his beautiful wife and ends up a down and out loser, heroin addict in the old NY Times Square. The whole movie is like a time capsule today. His wife also becomes an addict and is the main “girlfriend” of many women that a drug dealer prostitutes out so he can pay them w/ heroin.
I know, how could something like that be a comedy? Well, it is because it’s a great movie w/ excellent actors, tight directing and an incredible script. Plenty of dark comedy and off the wall comedy too. The cinematography is nice and gritty. I highly, highly recommend this movie, if only to be amazed that George Segal could actually act. The end is really cool.
Quentin Tarantino has often cited Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein as a film that works both as a comedy and a horror film, partly for a scene in which one of the monsters throws a nurse out a window of the castle, killing her.
Agreed with all the amputation stuff cited above. Body horror is something that freaks me right out, even as a horror film fan, and seeing limbs hacked off is just never funny for me. The most scream-worthy example for me (that’s terrified scream, not scream with laughter) was an episode of Perversions of Science starring Kevin Pollak and William Shatner. Pollak has cheated on Shatner’s daugher with a sexbot, and as punishment…his arms, legs and penis are cut off and what’s left is installed as the sentient navigator of a long-range exploratory spaceship. I’ve rarely seen anything so dark. I’m glad Pollak got to work with his idol in something but sweet Jeebus…
I agree with most of what you said, but I do like the seen on the trading floor of the WTC.
"In this building, it’s either kill or be killed. You make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners. One minute you’re up half a million in soybeans and the next, boom, your kids don’t go to college and they’ve repossessed your Bentley. Are you with me? "
Does “PeeWee’s Big Adventure” qualify as a dark comedy? Its filmmaker, a young TIm Burton, is known for exploring darker themes, but this outing was certainly lighter than some of his other stuff. I was just thinking of Large Marge, who definitely provided that jump-scare moment for me.
The darkness of the Brady Bunch Hawaii episode with the cursed tiki doll?
On Brooklyn 99 Captain Seth Dozerman arrives to take over the precinct and almost immediately has a heart attack and collapses in front of everyone. He comes back and two days later has another heart attack and dies. And it hilarious.
The new movie Somebody I Used to Know starts out like a conventional rom-com: Our heroine is a high-strung career woman who gets fired and retreats to her hometown, where she runs into an old flame who’s about to be married. Of course she plots to get back with him – let the hijinks ensue!
Except her plotting goes into some dark places, and because the ex and his fiance are likeable and three-dimensional, we start to realize our heroine is not someone we should be rooting for. There isn’t a ha-ha laugh for about 45 minutes, but it’s riveting.
IOW, a lot darker and more complex than most rom-coms, but still with plenty of laughs. Worth watching if you get Prime.
The clip from Mitchell and Webb above, and the mention of Blackadder Goes Forth, have reminded me of Upstart Crow, the BBC sitcom created by Ben Elton, starring David Mitchell as William Shakespeare. It’s the life of Shakespeare, overlaid with the sensibilities and running gags of a modern-day situation comedy. There’s a typical David Mitchell-style rant about traffic, for example, as Shakespeare complains about the difficulties of commuting between London and Stratford. It helps to have some knowledge of Shakespeare, but even without it, it’s very funny, and mostly silly, broad-humored fun.
Until you get to the final episode, in which Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son Hamnet dies (an event which really happened), and the family is devastated. Unlike his other problems, Will is not able to brazen his way out of this with some clever wordplay.
Not to mention abandoning Aunt Edna’s corpse on Cousin Normie’s doorstep for him to find.
There’s a similar scene in Little Miss Sunshine, except in that, the family is smuggling a body out of the hospital, and IIRC his body is still in the van at the end of the film.
The movie Colossal has some darkness to it. Anne Hathaway drinks too much, loses her job, and moves back home. She then comes to realize that she is a kaiju in Korea but she’s kind of getting her life back together with the help of some childhood friends until she realizes one of her friends is not a very good guy.
I got one from iCarly.
If you’re not familiar, the very short summary is that it’s about a bunch of kids running a webshow. There’s a recurring character that has his own show and is constantly sabotaging theirs.
If you’re familiar with the show, do you know why Nevel does this? Why he’s constantly tormenting Carly?
It’s because he kissed her, she got angry and told his mom.
In other words, he spends the rest of series, or the handful of episodes he’s in during the run, retaliating against her because she reported his unwanted sexual advances. That’s what all his ‘rue the day’ comments are about.
To make it worse, there’s a few times where he offers to back off in exchange for a kiss from her.
The original “Gremlins” was billed as a “horror comedy,” and IIRC most of it was played for laughs. But the scene where one character tells another one about how her father died on Christmas Eve (he was trying to be Santa and go down the chimney, where he broke his neck, and the family didn’t find him until days later) was pretty damn dark. It kind of traumatized me even though I was an adult when I saw it.
