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STUDIO: Lionsgate
MSRP: $19.98
RATED: NOT RATED
RUNNING TIME: 182 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Bones bare as the emaciated spine of Jessie Spano
The Pitch
“Relive your young adulthood, hopefully without that mix of agonizing self-loathing and sexual frustration from that age.”
The Humans
Mark Paul (Saved by the Bell) Gosselaar, Dustin (Saved by the Bell) Diamond, Tiffani-Amber (Saved by the Bell) Thiessen, Mario (Saved by the Bell) Lopez, Lark (Saved by the Bell) Voohries, Elizabeth (Saved by the Bell) Berkeley, Dennis (Max Keeble’s Big Move) Haskins
The unspeakable bond of two women who have eaten dog food.
The Nutshell
In Hawiian Style, the SBTB kids go to Hawaii on summer vacation to visit Kelly’s grandfather’s beach resort only to find out that the evil money-grubbing corporate resort on the Island is trying to buy him out to expand their empire. Also, Screech is worshipped as a native tribe’s God, and Zack falls in love so hard with a local girl. Wedding in Las Vegas features our Zack and Kelly all grown up and about to be married, before a series of wacky mix-ups (Southern policemen! Mobsters! Car failure! Parental disapproval!) throws the existence of their nuptials into question.
The unspeakable bond of men who have shared ejaculate from a sea shell with one another.
The Lowdown
A touchstone of the mid-nineties for a whole generation of kids, Saved by the Bell was one of those shows everybody in their age bracket watched, but I don’t know if anyone actually ever took any genuine enjoyment away from it. The show was never particularly funny, dramatic, or romantic. The characters and situations are completely stock, the acting is low-grade at best, and the hairstyles are Mechagodzilla to my face’s Tokyo. So what exactly was the appeal? It’s hard for me to say, and after getting reacquainted with the series through these two feature-length movies, the verdict is still out. I guess it was helped by being the show that almost all kids woke up to every morning before school, and I distinctly recall there already being a kitsch factor (and it being put on Adult Swim sort of validated this) to the SBTB episodes by the time grade school was ending and middle school was looming (Jessie’s addiction to pills episode seemed to bronze itself immediately after airing, in fact*), so one can assume this was one of the early examples of the bizarre trend through these ‘ought years of people enjoying something solely for it having existed in our childhood, regardless of its quality.
The rare film that inducts you into The Nation’s Punched.
There’s something really off about Hawiian Style, beyond the fact that their idea of making a movie is to insert a montage between every scene, creating this really bizarre sense of pacing where you can count on there to be a montage every five minutes. Also worth mentioning is that this doesn’t include the standard SBTB laugh track, making for a surrealistic experience. It’s like a David Lynch fever dream watching these actors strain for comedy only to be met with complete silence (I always liked that almost every line on the show was accompanied by some sort of canned reaction by the audience, taking it away leaves this void that you have to confront or else the experience will drive you insane).
My thoughts exactly.
Wedding In Las Vegas ups the production value and even boasts a sense of completeness to the SBTB saga, as Zack and Kelly are finally set to tie the knot after years upon years of sexual tension (I always figured Zack and Slater would run off together, personally) that was never consummated. Still, it’s a piece of shit. Although, to its credit, it’s more of a DTV comedy piece of shit than a SBTB-standard piece of shit, with it’s usage of Gilbert Gottfried and an expanded scope (there’s actually a car chase staged, for heaven’s sake). And like I stated earlier, they actually more or less finish out the show with a sense of completeness that is laudable, but it’s still trying to mine emotion out of something completely soulless, so the effort seems useless. However, there are people who are going to want this double feature, and nothing I could say would deter them from it, but it’s seriously not good. There’s a slight morbid enjoyment in watching a concussive parade of montages take place, but not enough to ever recommend you actually seeking out this disc.
"I swear officer, she cooed that she was 18."
The Package
The cover is what it is, as it goes for the standard issue of showcasing the cast of thespians on display for Hawiian Style while doing a hilarious inversion of audience expectations of a wedding picture (waitaminute, a woman dipping the guy, this is out there!) for Wedding In Las Vegas. The menu allows you to select which flick you want to view (Hawiian Style was shot using their standard sitcom cameras, and as such looks like shit whereas Wedding looks infinitely better while still not good) and allows you to hop back to a rechoose, which was a handy feature. The only extras on display were trailers for other Lionsgate releases (including the recently CHUD-approved Surf School), and thank Christ for that. I needed no more time in this house of horrors posing as memory lane than I already had.
3.8 out of 10
Even the combined efforts of pitching coach Mike Maddux and John Oates weren’t enough starpower to lift the show’s ratings.
*Youtube linked above for that clip and here too (http://youtube.com/watch?v=KKp4Ep2GD7c). The only other episodes that register in my memory are the one that chronicles the rise and fall of the Zack Attack (http://youtube.com/watch?v=0O7Nc6aUOhg), and the one where Zack protests the drilling for oil on Bayside’s campus (couldn’t find a clip, sorry). Oh, and the epic Slater versus Zack fight (http://youtube.com/watch?v=9n3g2JKQxJ8). This doesn’t bode well for the show being a cultural landmark of batshit craziness, when it doesn’t even stick in my mind. However, when looking through this footage on Youtube, it’s all coming back to me now like a ‘Nam flashback and this show did have its share of complete mental retardation.