Budget and film length. Great sequel, tho
However, Everything Is Food and “I Yam What I Yam” are both pretty good.
Apparently, Nilsson wrote and recorded the music right there in Malta wanting to be close to the scene, lending credence to my assertion he appears to have written lots of it the night before, thanks to the copious cocaine on set. Catch phrase repeated 3-4 times for a chorus and then a variation nearly every verse and chorus verse chorus 5-6 times and there’s your song. Quirky songs that I honestly have an affection for, but he’s no Ashman-Menken. I was relistening to some and Popeye’s opening song Blow Me Down really sounds like Nilsson.
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid isn’t so much “funny” as “clever”. The concept was brilliant and the blending of old clips and new footage was spectacularly well done. Costumes by Edith Head and all that. It is in many ways a masterclass in film design.
And then we were given running “I was just adjusting your breasts” jokes. 
And yet, under the same conditions, The Blues Brothers was a brilliant film, a modern day classic. Who knows?
Oh he doesn’t get off free. There’s a couple shitshows out there with his name on them. Phantom of the Paradise, anyone? Anyone?
I liked it. It was better than I expected, but not a must-see.
And Rigby making his “famous cuppa joe” scene was brilliant.
CLEANING WOMAN!
Hehe, I thoroughly dislike the movie. But I went and read its wiki entry and found that some people think pretty fondly on it. There’s even a festival for it.
Oh well, they obviously didn’t make it for me.
They made it for the likes of me. I love that movie.
Surprised to not see these movies mentioned yet, but the ones that come to my mind when I think cinematic shitshow are:
Nothing but Trouble
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
and
Maximum Overdrive
I like these movies, however
as to the question who greenlit them. I think the answer for Nothing but Trouble was Akroyd is just odd and with Maximum Overdrive I think King wanted other directors to stop adapting his works in ways he didn’t like so he ‘took matters into his own hands’.
It lost $$, but has a cult following. A poor choice to them to greenlight, yes, , but maybe not a full out cinematic Shitshow. I liked parts of it.
Don’t get me wrong I like all 3 of those movies. They are artistically… bizarre, and financial failures which is what I gathered was the criteria for which we are judging.
That is a major criteria, but IMHO a film can make a teeny profit on paper and still be a shitshow. I think what the critics say and what the fans say are also important.
I go back and forth on this one, which I enjoy a lot. But it’s kind of a shambolic shitshow of a plot and unprofitable, and I am bewildered that it was greenlit, so there you go.
King’s reasoning at the time was likely more along the lines of “These Hollywood guys have some great cocaine, and lots of it!” King himself says he was out of his mind on coke during the filming, and crew members recount him showing up for 6 AM roll calls with a beer in his hand.
A year after the film released, King’s family staged an intervention for him, and he finally got sober.
Again: cocaine. Too much cocaine.
https://screenrant.com/stephen-king-maximum-overdrive-directing-reflection/
We can probably blame hard drugs on a lot of bad decisions in Hollywood.
ETA: I swear I didn’t see @Miller 's post right above before I posted this!
I love all 4 of the Steve Martin/Carl Reiner collaborations but this was my least favorite of the 4.
Who can blame him. Wasn’t everyone, during that decade?
No doubt. But I can’t attribute too much to coke for the cinematic shitshow since he was still doing coke and writing novel after novel. He just seems so bent out of shape that his work was being poorly adapted (to him) and he came in with an overconfidence… probably cause of the cocaine.
I was the exact target audience for Buckaroo Banzai - the studio sent a promo team out to our local comic con to hand out Buckaroo Banzai headbands, screen the trailer and generally whip up interest, and they did a great job, at least among my cohort. Then we saw the movie, and it was an action film without any action, a comedy with extremely dry humor, with a science fiction movie sort of superimposed on top of the whole thing. Not really a combination that leads to success, box office or otherwise.
Some people can handle their drugs a lot better…
Oh my ghod, that’s how I got my BB headband at a convention in Seattle! At least it was better than the promo tour for Howard The Duck.
How’s Belushi doing these days?