nickyjohnp
Caddyshack started out as a National Lampoon's Animal House-like movie. Caddyshack has so many classic scenes like the pool scenes, the "hey everybody we're all gonna get laid" scene, and the gopher.Harold Ramis made his directorial debut also co-writing the film with Brian Doyle-Murray (Bill Murray's older brother) and with Douglas Kenney. Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney both were writers for National Lampoon's Animal House. They had based the character of Danny Noonan and his family on the famous Murray family, and when creating the character Ty Webb, they had one person in mind for the job and they also semi-based it off him Chevy Chase. The movie at the time was the movie with the most crude humor, but that humor is now part of cinematic history along with Cindy Morgan who played "the hot chick" That every guy wants. Caddyshack established Rodney Dangerfield's acting career as before he did some stand-up comedy. But over the years people still remember his quote, "Oh, this is the worst-looking hat I ever saw. What, when you buy a hat like this I bet you get a free bowl of soup, huh?" As he played Al Czervik whose the obnoxious but lovable newcomer to the club. Bill Murray also largely contributed to the movie as the infamous Carl Spuckler, who in the sub-plot of the movie, is ordered by his Scottish boss to kill all the gopher's on the golf course. Bill Murray's character will make you start laughing from the beginning. Michael O'Keefe star's as the young Danny Noonan who is a teenager planing to go to college but can't afford it and is a caddie at the country club.
Blueghost
The 1980s saw some okay music, the advent of computers into the home was really taking off, and the science fiction genre (riding off the coat tails of Star Wars) was really making a comeback in feature films.But not everything from the 80s is golden, as I mentioned in some previous reviews. And Caddyshack is one of them.Simply put I don't get this film. I really don't. Bill Murry has a kind of Ahab-like obsession with a rodent chewing up his workplace home turf, and there's some thing about a gold contest and an examination of snobbery. Bill Murry acting like a drugged out gardener is not funny. It simply is not funny. I don't know why people (mostly men) heap praises on it, but it is not funny in the least. Or, rather it could be but you would have had to have shaved off several IQ points from your personal intelligence quotient.And I can't make it any plainer than that.This is one of those few rare occasions where the sequel is funnier, and given that this film is worthy of a smirk or two at best, that's not high praise.If you like idiotic humor, then maybe check out this film, but don't say I didn't warn you.Watch at your peril.
inspectors71
Just a few lines about a great, funny, sunny movie that makes me laugh every single time I see it. I think Harold Ramis' Caddyshack works like a big, joyous block party. You can't help but like every single character, every moment of crude and lewd, right down to Brian Doyle-Murray telling a caddie to "Pick up that blood!"I think Caddyshack's peer, John Landis' Animal House is a funnier movie because of the chances it takes spearing sacred cows, but Caddyshack may be the smoother-frothier?-film because it avoids lagging at the start of the third reel, something that Landis throws in to build up steam for his big, obnoxious cherry-bomb-in-the- toilet ending. Caddyshack just ambles along, all big-heart and Lacy Underalls. Animal House is, at its core, something serious. There's an edge to the humor and to the end-of-Camelot story. I wrote a long review of AH some years ago. The boys and girls at Faber College ("Knowledge is Good!") are about to smacked upside the head by the hideous specter of Vietnam. It's their last moments of freedom before the history arrives unannounced.Both have that feel of reading something hysterically funny in National Lampoon, and danged if it doesn't feel as if everyone is working his or her butt off to come up with a really good, really funny work of renegade art. What I've noticed about Caddyshack is that the power of Bill Murray ad-libbing his way through his duties as an assistant groundskeeper has, for the better part of forty years, provided inspiration for Caddyshackers to twist their mouths into a Joe Walsh mumble and utter the victorious cry, "It's in the hole!"It's what cultures are built on . . . I think.
Leofwine_draca
I find the po-faced seriousness with which golfers take their sport to be rather funny, so this lampoon of the whole golf industry is a delight to watch. It's a bit of a madcap character piece with lots of offbeat stars interacting and getting involved with one another, and at some moments it's similar to the surreal highlights of AIRPLANE, although it also has that 'frat house party' style atmosphere popular from the early '80s.What I particularly enjoy about CADDYSHACK is that there's no single star. Chevy Chase pops up here and there to deliver some delightful non-sequiters, and Bill Murray steals every scene he's in playing the slow-witted groundsman. My favourite star of all, though, is Rodner Dangerfield, who ably mixes stand-up humour with acting and zings off the screen for all of his five or six moments.CADDYSHACK isn't an entirely successful production, and some elements are rather silly; that stupid gopher, for example, which looks like it belongs in a kid's film. But it's affectionate, it has plenty going on, and Harold Ramis does a very good job of holding it all together as director. The JAWS spoof is a definite highlight.
AD
