Customer Reviews

National Lampoons:Gold Diggers

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In my experience, seeing the words "National Lampoon" in any film title is a bad omen, indicating tastelessness and a dearth of actual comedy up ahead. National Lampoon's Gold Diggers manages to take the series to an all-time low - which, sadly, is no mean feat. Will Friedle and Chris Owen act as if they are auditioning for a future installment of Dumb and Dumber, and the plot suffers from a definite "ick" factor - and, sadly, those are actually the movie's strengths.

Calvin (Friedle) and Leonard (Owen) grew up together in an orphanage and are now trying to make their mark on the world as young adults. They certainly don't want to have to work for a living, so they take up a life of petty crime. They are pitiful failures at this and wind up in jail. Then, two old ladies they accosted on the street bail them out and invite them for a visit in their impressive home. The guys (by which I mean Calvin, as he's the only one really capable of actual human thought) think their hosts are rich, and so it is that they devise a plan to marry them, wait for their imminent deaths, and then live large on their inheritances. Doris (Louise Lasser) and Betty Mundt (Renee Taylor) may be heirs to the Mundt prophylactics fortune, but they are in fact cash poor (thanks to their insane uncle, who is in charge of the Mundt estate). They make their own plans to marry the two young men, purchase sizable insurance policies on them, and then kill them. The double wedding takes place, the marriages are consummated (do I hear a Yuck!?), and about a month passes. Calvin finds that married life with buxom, not-dead-yet Doris is driving him insane, so he and Leonard begin setting "accidental" traps for their wives; naturally, the women are finalizing their own murder plans at the same time. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, this ain't - but that goes without saying.

I won't lie and say I didn't laugh or smile a time or two because I did, but National Lampoon's Gold Diggers aims low - really low - and cannot begin to escape the black hole of stupidity upon which it is built. And I think I speak for the vast majority of human beings when I say that we just don't want to see senior citizen women prancing around onscreen like Victoria's Secret models. There's crude and then there's National Lampoon's crude, and Gold Diggers is as crude as it gets. This film should by all rights be a career killer for anyone involved with it - although Nikki Ziering may emerge relatively unscathed given the fact that her screen time is severely limited.