What A Long, Bad Trip It Is

THE COUCH Trip is one of those movies that should never have been conceived, never should have been written, never should have been produced. directed, filmed, marketed, or viewed. Everyone involved with this product should change their names.

The Couch Trip.

Based on a novel by Ken Kolb

Directed by Michael Ritchie

At the USA/Cheri

In other words, don't see it.

If you insist on reading this review, bent perhaps like some insane TF exam grader on extracting and assessing information from a piece of writing that, by rights, should not exist, I will go on. I will demonstrate, point by point, exactly why The Couch Trip blows.

First of all, there are the stars: Dan Aykroyd and Walter Matthau. Even in the good old days of Saturday Night Live Aykroyd never deserved more praise than, say, Laraine Newman: now that he's bloated, old, and pompous, one wonders why they bothered to drag him out of retirement. And Matthau should never have left the 70s.

The supporting cast, like their leaders, are mainly washed up has-beens with too much pride to sink to do Hollywood Squares but not enough talent to make it onto The Love Boat. There's Mary Gross, for example, Donna Dixon and Charles Grodin. Grodin, actually, pulls off what seems like a stellar performance in comparison, but it's lost amidst the stale jokes and valium-inspired acting perpetrated by his cohorts and the rest of the cast, unknown actors who are destined to remain so.

The plot, an amalgamation of stupidity and social irresponsibility, concerns an escaped mental patient, John Burns (Aykroyd), who assumes the identity of his psychiatrist and becomes a highly successful LA radio personality. Along the way he befriends a wacky homeless guy (Walter Matthau) and together they connive to outwit the sharpies a couple of G's.

DIRECTOR Michael Ritchie '60, in a recent interview in Boston, said when he read the part of Burns he "thought immediately of Dan Aykroyd--the smooth-talking conniver who can BS his way out of anything." Those of us who tend to think of Aykroyd more in terms of an unfunny fat man may have trouble discerning Ritchie's meaning. At any rate, the portrayal of a mental patient as a shyster who fakes mental illness to avoid responsibility is highly offensive to anyone who has had contact with the disease.

And anybody who has stepped outside of a Harvard dorm will know that the homeless are not a very attractive lot--it would not be unfair to describe them as generally unclean, incomprehensible, and generally out of touch with reality. Why else would they be living on the street? But Matthau's oddball derelict is merely an eccentric with matted hair--and a keen eye for blackmail. Utterly ridiculous; utterly stupid.

To be frank, what this movie really needed was something to perk up the interest level without taxing the already overstrained imaginations of the people making it--namely, sex. A few steamy grope scenes with some buxom female mental patients and a lesbian nurse, perhaps, or maybe an on-air radio orgy, would add a level of interest to the film without really impinging at all on the level of asininity, which is already red-lined anyway. Plus, a triple-X rating would prevent most people from accidentally walking in, thus saving them the agony of having to sit through part of it.

Perhaps, you may be saying that I have taken the wrong viewpoint: the question to ask is, what is the best thing about this movie? Well, there are some features of this film that are less lame than the generally acrid level of badness that pervades the filmic vomit that is The Couch Trip. For example, Walter Matthau's hair is, at one point in the film, realistically disheveled: congrats to the hairdresser. Also, there is a brief scene in which the camera lingers on a TV screen featuring Chevy Chase in a hilarious cameo, selling condoms in a commercial.

But on the whole--no, I won't even say that; pervasively, this film sucks. Avoid.