Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time we’re going on The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, nominee for six Razzies, winner of three including Worst Picture, and such a memorable experience that it didn’t even manage to kill off any careers.
I sure do get to take some fun trips down Cultural Memory Lane with the Razzies. We’ve gone back to the heydays of Tom Green, Jenny McCarthy, Demi Moore, Bennifer Round One and American Idol. We’ve revisited some old questionably beloved friends, and we’ve discovered some whose friendships we had missed, and we’ve followed them all off the edge of cinematic cliffs. Today, we take another trip down Ill-Advised Celebrity Stunt Project Lane, back to the glory days of Mr. Andrew Dice Clay.
And clock radios!
Mr. Dice Clay (the “Dice,” I am told, is an essential part of his moniker) is a budget Elvis impersonator who also moonlights as a John Travolta impersonator – no, sorry, I’m being informed that Mr. Dice Clay is a comedian, and an in-demand one at that. I’m glad someone told me. In the 1970s, he developed a character called “Diceman,” based on an impression of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor, which by the peak of his popularity in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s had become a tough-talking leather-clad Brooklyn pottymouth with no filter and no sense of propriety or decency. His fans call him a “rock star comedian,” a “punk comic,” or a “blue comic,” whose humor is based on pushing the boundaries of “acceptable” laughter and flinging linguistic feces at conventional social and sexual mores. His detractors claim he’s a giant jerk whose humor is based on being a jerk.
What he definitely was, was insanely popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 1990 looked to be a great year to be Andrew Dice Clay. It was the year he broke records by selling out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row. It was the year that he hosted Saturday Night Live and practically caused a riot in the studio. It was the year he got his first HBO special. And it was the year that hotshot producer Joel Silver and up-and-coming director Renny Harlin got the brilliant idea to turn him into a wisecracking action star.
“Wayne Newton. Yes, Wayne Newton” made me giggle. That’s all I’ll say for now.
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane began its life as a weekly serial by Rex Weiner that covered the exploits of a detective working in the punk rock scenes of New York and Los Angeles. Daniel Waters, recent penner of Heathers (and future penner of Hudson Hawk) and fan of the original stories, came in to write the script, with eventual assistance from James Cappe and David Arnott. The film was originally scheduled for release in May of 1990, but Silver and 20th Century Fox pushed its released date back to July in order to (according to Waters) “promote Dice awareness.”
Pushing the release date back for Dice awareness turned out to be a big mistake for two reasons. The first is that, had Ford Fairlane been released in May, its big competition would have been Cadillac Man and Bird on the Wire, moderately successful but unmemorable films. Pushing it back to July meant releasing it one week after Die Hard 2, a phenomenal box office smash directed by…Renny Harlin, who had no interest in promoting two films at once. The second problem was Dice Clay himself. Remember that SNL episode he hosted? Cast member Nora Dunn and musical guest Sinead O’Connor were so offended by the content of his stand-up comedy that they refused to appear in the episode, and he managed to get some of his Diciest content into his monologue despite NBC putting the episode on a 5-second time delay. When the general SNL-watching public became aware of Andrew Dice Clay, they did not necessarily like what they saw.
How could they resist such a charmer?
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane was a financial disappointment, pulling in only $21 million globally against a budget of $20 million. Critics and audiences alike dismissed it for being noisy and amateurish, and its hero for being wildly unlikeable. Andrew Dice Clay moved on largely unscathed from the film, and the rest of the world went back to thinking whatever they had previously thought about the man.
Except me. I have long been the most neutral party possible on the matter of the Diceman, because I didn’t know who he was. I knew I’d seen him in a couple movies, Blue Jasmine and A Star is Born, and that was about it. When I mentioned to other people that I was about to watch a movie that had been conceived as a cash-in on his act, I got two reactions: “who?” and “ugh.” The people who had the latter reaction explained to me that Mr. Dice Clay’s comedy is essentially schoolyard bullying that people pay to see, saying nasty things about targets, like women and gay people, so that his audience would feel like they also had permission to be nasty to women and gay people. (George Carlin said as much in an interview with Larry King back in 1990.) So, lover of trash fires that I am, I looked forward to seeing just how angry good ol’ Andrew could make me. I hoped for a movie that, one way or another, would give me strong feelings. Would I love or hate The Adventures of Ford Fairlane?
THE STORY
Well, I’m sure disgusted, but not with Andrew Dice Clay. No, I’m disgusted with you people on the Internet, who made me think I was about to watch something interesting. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is many things – childish, dull, nonsensical – but I am struggling to imagine anyone but the prissiest college kid or the most prudish pastor’s wife actually being offended by this movie.
Unless you’re Lauren Holly, filming this scene.
So, the story, to the extent there is one. The first line of dialogue of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is “They call me Ford Fairlane.” This line is delivered in a parody of a New York accent that is near-transcendental. The best I can do to approximate is “Dey coo-aww me Foo-wud Fayuh-lane.” Perhaps this is Mr. Dice Clay’s usual speaking voice. If so, he speaks in a parody of a New York accent that is near-transcendental. It will be the last near-transcendental thing we see in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. Foo-wud Fayuh-lane spends his days sucking on a cigarette like it’s a lollipop, picking up women with large hair in nightclubs, and driving a Ford Fairlane. The opening credits are in the same font used on the Ford Fairlane automobile, because that’s the sort of clever movie we’re watching. He is a private detective who works in the rock and roll industry, and his clients tend to pay him in gold watches, groupies, or in the case of INXS, a koala.
Foo-wud sits on a beach narrating the movie in his Noo Yawk accent, and takes us back in time to a concert in Colorado by heavy metal glam rock sensation the Black Plague (Mötley Crüe). During the concert, Black Plague frontman Bobby Black (Vince Neil) begins gagging in the middle of a song, and dies shortly thereafter. His fans suspect foul play.
So do I, but on the part of the costume designer.
Foo-wud is brought onto the Bobby Black case by his old friend, shock jock DJ Johnny Crunch (Gilbert Gottfried). Johnny hires him to locate a teenage groupie named Zuzu Petals (Maddie Corman), who may or may not be his daughter, and whom he believes may be connected to Black’s death. Almost immediately after hiring Fairlane, Johnny Crunch is electrocuted while performing on-air. Foul play is once again suspected, and Fairlane begins the search for Zuzu.
That’ll teach you to run circuits through your arms, Gilbert.
This was the first time I fell asleep.
I woke up and dutifully rewound the movie as Fairlane was chatting up a wealthy heiress named Colleen Sutton (Priscilla Presley) who claims that Zuzu is her sister. Elsewhere, he is alienating police Lieutenant Amos (Ed O’Neill) by calling him “Anus” and insulting his taste in disco. Chinatown references are made. With the help of his sexy secretarial sidekick Jazz (Lauren Holly), Fairlane eventually tracks the Zuzu conspiracy to Julian Grendale (Wayne Newton), a record label executive with an evil plan to fill the music industry with corruption that I guess is not already present in the music industry? The plot grows utterly incoherent. I fall asleep several more times. At some point blessedly near the end of all this, Fairlane realizes that he is unsatisfied by his life of one-night stands and decides to settle down as a happy family with Jazz, some annoying kid (Brandon Call), and his pet koala.
By the end of the movie, I find myself screaming “where is the misogyny!? I DEMAND MORE MISOGYNY.”
THE BAD
Perhaps more than any other movie so far covered in this column, the flaws of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane can be summed up as “it’s incredibly boring.” To the point where I’m really not sure what to say about most of it. After an hour and forty minutes of watching an especially smug goldfish swim in circles around a bowl full of plastic breasts, I also won’t have much to say, and that’s basically the experience of this movie.
There’s much more to say about what the movie is not than about what it is. It’s not outrageously offensive; the vaunted misogyny is boilerplate women-as-empty-headed-objects-of-male-amusement frippery shocking mostly in how wimpy and juvenile it is. 1990 was a different time, sure, but nothing here is more offensive than a ten-year-old boy running up to his teacher to tell her the joke he heard from his uncle about why Helen Keller couldn’t drive. (It’s because she was a woman. You may now gasp and faint.) Clay will occasionally utter a line that someone thought would get a rise out of the girlfriends his fans had dragged to see it (“What’s the definition of a vagina? The box a penis comes in!”), but, dare I say it, Clay always seems a bit embarrassed by this dialogue. It’s like he knows this is not going to land without the spontaneity of the stage, and he thinks that by delivering these lines in a bashful, mumbly monotone, he can avoid the damage they might do to his reputation as an outrage generator.
When you really need to generate outrage, you can always hang a koala. (It’s okay, though. This movie is far too gutless to actually kill off a cute animal.)
It’s also not, for all of Fairlane’s vaunted career as a “rock and roll detective,” an especially musical movie. The half-minute we get of Vince Neil and Company is agreeably head-bangy, and Sheila E. gets an all-too-brief cameo as a nightclub singer, but there’s almost no other live music. The centerpiece song, Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love,” is fairly low-key Billy Idol, and I don’t think it did much to keep me awake while it was playing. There’s a lot of talking about the music industry as the drowsy, bloopy score by an outfit called “Yello” drones away in the background, but a few more songs would have done the movie a world of good.
It’s also not a good demonstration of anyone’s talent. Renny Harlin’s direction is noisy and frantic; characters snarl or splutter their lines rather than speaking them while the camera zips around them like a coked-out Pomeranian looking for a treat. Perhaps he is trying to avoid focusing on any one actor for too long; this would be quite understandable, since The Adventures of Ford Fairlane contains some of the very worst acting I have seen outside of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies. The closest things to standouts in a mostly uninspiring cast are Robert Englund as the hitman Smiley, mostly coasting on his Freddy Krueger bug-eyes, and David Patrick Kelly as Sam the Sleazebag, playing a poorer, dirtier version of his Twin Peaks character Jerry Horne. Wayne Newton as a much-too-charming bad guy is horribly miscast; seriously, who thought casting Wayne Newton and his jovial, guileless Wayne Newton smile as a cackling villain was a good idea? Lauren Holly is visibly exasperated with her role, and the women who surround Fairlane are a chorus of shrill, shouting misfits who have been left to flail and drown by their director. I imagine Maddie Corman to be a sweet woman, but her screen presence here evokes squealing car brakes. Every time Zuzu Petals is onscreen, I want her to disappear, but every time she is offscreen, I want her to come back, because not having her to listen to means I have to try to understand the story.
When you ask an AI image generator to cross Taylor Swift, Nancy Spungen, and a grouper, or when you let a rogue hair and makeup team run wild on an innocent victim.
Because this is also not a good demonstration of the talents, whatever they may be, of the writing team. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is the only feature film credit to James Cappe’s name; David Arnott’s other major credits are Last Action Hero and The Last Man, so we’re not talking about a team with an extraordinary reputation to uphold. Even given that, the script of Ford Fairlane is simply a disaster. Dice Clay wanders from scene to barely-related scene like he’s heading through the world’s most surreal haunted house, and these scenes have been slapped haphazardly together by editor Michael Tronick. You begin to wonder if some of the people working on this crew were secretly hoping to sabotage Andrew Dice Clay.
THE GOOD
Speaking of Andrew Dice Clay: you may have noticed that I have avoided mentioning him much up to this point. So how did the Diceman do in his showcase feature film?
Not too bad, I suppose? Clay does have a certain magnetic watchability, a naturalism in front of the camera that would serve him well later when he made his Serious Film Debut in Blue Jasmine. Unfortunately, in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, he is chained to his stage persona, and his stage persona simply doesn’t do very much onscreen. He’s committed, but at about an eight out of ten, and I suspect a ten out of ten might have generated more protests than Joel Silver and co-producer Steve Perry were prepared to deal with it. I think they should have let him Dice it up as much as he wanted to. Would it have made for a remarkably unpleasant film? Probably. But it would have made for a much more honest film. I hated Freddy Got Fingered a lot, but Tom Green was uncompromising in his vision for that vile platter of curdled elephant semen. Andrew Dice Clay tamed for the screen is hardly worth hating.
Instead, we get an animatronic koala wearing a neck brace.
Sorry, I was supposed to be talking about the good stuff here. So let’s talk about Gilbert Gottfried.
That right there is the face of a man cooking up a grand Aristocrats joke.
Gottfried, unlike Clay, was given free reign to entirely be himself for the five minutes that he appears in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, and he is easily the best thing in the movie. Sporting sweaty boyish curls that make him look much younger than thirty-five, Gottfried crazy-rants in his trademark squawk, sporting an enormous grin the entire time to let us know he’s in on the joke. Clay is very lucky that they only let Gottfried have a few minutes, because Gottfried would have stolen the entire show if he’d been a much bigger character. He exudes the confidence of a truly effortless comedian, someone who knows he can be funny and doesn’t have to try too hard to get an audience to laugh when he says filthy, outlandish things.
And that, I think, is the key problem with Andrew Dice Clay and his in-no-way-unique brand of edgy comedy: it’s just trying too hard. Everything about The Adventures of Ford Fairlane reeks of trying too hard, except for the parts that reek of not trying hard enough. For research purposes, I watched a little bit of Clay’s standup routine – the dirty nursery rhymes that earned him a ban from MTV – and in the Year of Our Lord Twenty Twenty-four, I find him almost a quaint relic of a previous age of pre-Internet nose-tweaking. Had I been one of his regular targets, perhaps I would also have found him unbearable, but I frankly don’t find him interesting enough to earn such opprobrium. In that, Ford Fairlane turns out to be a perfect demonstration of his capabilities. This particular trip down Culture Memory Lane has blessed me with no lasting memories, good, bad, or otherwise. I hope you’re all pleased with yourselves, especially Andrew Dice Clay.
Quality of Movie: 2 / 5. There are no outlandish assaults on filmcraft, but nor is there much to recommend.
Quality of Experience: 1.5 / 5. Make sure the couch you watch it from isn’t too comfortable.
Did the Razzies Get it Right? Difficult to say. Ford Fairlane was the 1991 co-winner alongside Ghosts Can’t Do It, the greatest movie ever made. Also up that year were The Bonfire of the Vanities, a drudgy heavy-handed satire nominated for behind-the-scenes controversies; Graffiti Bridge, Prince’s second attempt at directing a movie after Under the Cherry Moon was unfairly maligned; and Rocky V, which was, well, Rocky V. Nothing else released in theaters 1990 came close to the universe-breaking incompetence of Ghosts Can’t Do It, but for lousy craftsmanship plus an unmemorable experience, either Ford Fairlane or Rocky V would have been the correct choice.
Want to pick more Raspberries? Check out the rest of the columns in this series!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.