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| Images courtesy of MVD Rewind Collection |
Future Bachelor Party and Surf Ninjas director
Neal Israel who also wrote the first Police Academy film and Real Genius
first got his start having co-directed with Brad Swirnoff the anthological
television broadcast parody film Tunnel Vision in 1976 amid a sea of
like-minded Saturday Night Live spoofs lampooning the variety television
format. Obviously one of many and far
from the last including but not limited to The Groove Tube also
featuring Chevy Chase in a cameo appearance, The Kentucky Fried Movie, Cracking
Up, The Ratings Game, Stay Tuned and eventually UHF, Tunnel
Vision was more or less a regional indie that showcased a lot of early
screen talents including Ron Silver’s screen debut. Also sporting John Candy, Al Franken, Howard
Hesseman and Lynne Marie Stewart, this 1976 progenitor of the television parody
film sounds star studded and should be an enjoyable dose of 70s irreverence, in
theory…
The actual “movie”, running just over an hour and largely
comprised of tape sources transferred to film, scanned in 4K for this new MVD
Rewind Collection rerelease, is more than a little insufferable and soporific. Like a lot of regional comedies of the day, a
lot of the comedy leans so heavily into off color or being outdated it
functions almost like a time capsule of a bygone era you’d have trouble
recreating today. To try to make sense
of this thing, it is set in the near-distant future of 1985 and a congressional
investigation is underway over a television channel dubbed Tunnel Vision
which is an anything goes censorship free sky’s the limit kind of network ala
David Cronenberg’s still brilliant Videodrome. During the hearing, the court (rather we) are
subjugated to a standard nightly broadcast from the network which includes
their own subsets of television commercials, news specials, programs and
movies.
Nowhere near the comedic as well as artistic heights reached
by Hal Ashby’s impeccable Being There, Tunnel Vision aims low
despite a recurring image of an eyeball coming out of a mouth Nicolas Winding
Refn surely cribbed. Despite the
all-star cast of characters who make fleeting blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos
and a brand of ‘off-color’ humor often found in regional comedies that mistake
outright offensive slurs for clever jokes, Tunnel Vision with its grimy videotape
footage still looks and feels like Hell even with a 4K sheen. At the time the novelty of seeing R rated
videotaped comedy sketches was part in parcel to the film’s appeal, as was the
case with The Groove Tube made two years prior. Seen today, the appeal can be for seeing old
sketches that looked poor then blown up to 4K looking every bit as bad now as
it did then.
MVD Rewind Collection as always goes the extra mile on a lot
of their recently rather grimy offerings with The Bikini Car Wash Company two
film set among them, and here they’ve included a reversible sleeve, a slipcover
and a collectible mini poster. For fans,
there’s two different versions of the film included, one framed at 1.66:1 as it
would’ve been in the theater and a native 1.33:1 version for those who prefer
to reexperience it as they did on tape. Those
who get a kick out of lo-fi outdated “comedies” that are so bad they’re kind of
torturous will find a lot to enjoy here including seeing eventual great big
screen comics so young and in their creative infancies. As for myself and most other critics trapped
with sitting through and then trying to actually write about this nonsense,
this was a form of penance for all the sins of my previous life. A hard unforgiving pass.
--Andrew Kotwicki
