Word: chases
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chase plays the father, Clark W. Griswold, who is not content with merely flying to California. He plans the entire trip on his personal computer, and is determined to experience Americana by hopping into the old tank of a station wagon and riding down the highway with sentimental music on the radio...
...Arizona, a stuffy concierge insists that Chase's credit cards are lost and refuses to cash a check because he has no plastic to back it up. Our hero then cleans out the hotel cash register. Soon after, the family discovers that crotchety old Aunt (Imogene Coca) has passed away in the car. In a Pythonesque sick joke, the family straps the body to the roof and deposits it at the widower's doorstep in Phoenix in the midst of a rainstorm...
There are many gags in the movie which work, not because of skilled turns by pratfall-meister Chase, but because of well thought-out and well-timed routines which ring true in the context of the movie...
Even such tired schticks as the magic fingers bed gone haywire, the supermacho highway patrolman sniveling over a small animal, and the kids catching mom and dad making whoopie, bring a laugh because Chase and Beverly D'Angelo (Mrs. Cariswold) do not try to overplay the scenes...
Some of the humor is unnecessary and tasteless, such as when Blacks in a St. Louis ghetto steal the station wagon's hubcaps while Chase asks for directions, or when the teenage daughter of some ridiculously hick relative brags that daddy says she is the best french kisser. These stereotypical characterizations--while occasionally funny in the racist, sexist world of the National Lampoon magazine--are completely gratuitous in a movie of this type...