This is just a really, really funny film. Some beautiful bits of background business too - the hippie in the background of the 2001 scene, just ignoring the portentous foreground action while eating his frozen custard is worth a look. Set-pieces - like the 2001 parody, the bar scene where the monster 'Schlock' observes a Jose Feliciano-like blind musician playing a piano boogie and ends up joining in, and a very funny scene where the allegedly fearful Schlock goes into a cinema to see a horror movie, and is terrified - all come off perfectly. What sets this one apart is its sustained comic atmosphere, which is goofy, laconic and giddy. (Others like this were sketch comedy flicks like Landis's "Kentucky Fried Movie" plus the Mel Brooks and Woody Allen movies of around the same time). "Schlock" falls in neatly with other 'progressive' US comedy movies of the early 70s, which kicked around genre conventions and added a new frankness in language and toilet humour to US film comedy vocabulary. Landis provides his own fascinating and entertaining insights into the world of moviemaking, while conducting in-depth 'conversations' with leading monster makers, including David Cronenberg, Christopher Lee, John Carpenter, and Sam Raimi to discuss some of the most petrifying monsters ever seen. John Landis's first movie may be as good as anything he made.
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