About half-way through the 2010 Euro action thriller From Paris With Love, a bald-headed John Travolta is sitting on a park bench with sidekick Jonathan Rhys Myers, extolling his love of the titular city. His favourite thing about Paris? “The Royale with Cheese!” he exclaims with a shit-eating grin as he presents the burger and wallows in his Pulp Fiction-referencing crapulence.
It’s the worst kind of movie in-joke: obvious, pleased-with-itself and playing to the back row. In this week’s blog I’m gonna mention some of my favourite movie in-jokes, which I would define as something intentional that takes on a greater meaning outside the context of the film. The ones I’ve listed here tend to lean to the more obscure end of the spectrum, so much so that they may not even be intentional.
The following is my favourite piece of film trivia ephemera ever, and it seems to be relatively unknown. When the makers of 1986’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (those scallywags at Cannon Films) came to produce the poster for their exploitative follow-up to the exploitation classic, they decided to stage an exact re-creation of the poster for John Hughes’ released the-previous-year The Breakfast Club, except with inbred cannibals instead of angsty teens.
It’s obvious right? From Leatherface’s Judd Nelson fist-pump to that dude in the front’s Molly Wingwald-style come-hither pose. I used to consistently blow minds pointing this out to customers when I worked at Video Ezy Ponsonby during my university years, so if your grey matter is now splayed on the wall, I apologise.
The increasing presence of VHS recorders in New Zealand family homes in the late ‘80s briefly overlapped with the now long-extinct practice of there being no ads on Sunday television. So film lovers of a certain age were able to record films off Sunday night TV and re-watch them without any intrusive ads. Over and over and over again. In my household, the three most watched tapes of this variety were The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Clue and Grease.
My sister and I must’ve watched Grease over 500 times. I can still recite the entire film by heart. The dialogue that is. Not the songs. (Best line: “Pinks you punk! Pink slips ownership papeeeeersssss!”). It was this intense watching and re-watching that lead us to discover what has to be a gag on the part of the film’s editor or something. At the 1.03.30 mark, when the sultry Marty (Dinah Manoff) is talking to sleazy TV host Vince Fontaine (Edd Byrnes), the naked eye can perceive a small flash of motion leading into the cut. Upon playing this scene in slow-motion and pausing at the right time, you can see that Marty’s dress actually begins to falls off and she pulls her purse up to cover her exposed sideboob. Then it suddenly cuts back to the other angle as if nothing just occurred. It happens so quickly you could miss it, but it’s unmistakable when slowed down:
Has anyone else ever encountered this before? Is this the most pointless thing anyone has ever bothered point out to other people? The slip has to be intentional, as it would’ve been highly evident in the editing process. I like to think this was some sort of early anticipation of the anarchy-induced projectionist penis-splicing detailed in Fight Club. Or maybe I just watched Grease too many times.
This next one is probably more of a weird coincidence than an in-joke, but I’m still not prepared to rule it out as unintentional. In the 1984 Zucker/Abrahams comedy classic Top Secret!, an actor named Billy J. Mitchell plays Martin, manager to Val Kilmer’s Nick Rivers. In one of the film’s cruder jokes, Rivers consoles Martin’s inability to bring his wife to orgasm by gifting him a marital device named the…Anal Intruder. Ahem.
Later, a stern German informs Nick that Martin failed to realise the difference in voltage between American and German power sockets, and died off screen during a sex act while utilising the Anal Intruder.
“It took them six hours just to get the smile off his face” he informs Nick.
More than ten years later, in Pierce Brosnan’s debuting Bond film Goldeneye, Billy J. Mitchell turns up again, this time playing an Admiral who becomes the target of villain Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen). Onatopp’s trademark weapon is her own body, which she uses to seduce men and then, uh, sex them to death.
Which is a fate that befalls Michell’s Admiral, and his body is found having died during the sex act…with a huge smile on his face.
Am I reading too much into this? Is it weird that I noticed this? Probably. But it amused me greatly when I saw Goldeneye, and I’m not willing to completely let go of the possibility it was on purpose. Maybe I should wait and see if Billy J. Mitchell dies in flagrante delecto and ends up permanently en-smiled in a third movie before listing this as an official in-joke.
Director John Landis is the patron saint of movie in-jokes – his films are peppered with ‘em. The most famous of these is the recurrence of the movie title “See You Next Wednesday” in most of his movies. It usually pops up on a marquee somewhere, or on a movie poster, or is mentioned by a character.
It first appeared in Landis’ debut film Schlock, and it shows up in a billboard in The Blues Brothers (seen at the top of this article) and in a movie poster in Trading Places, but my favourite instance is its place in An American Werewolf In London as the name of the movie playing in the porno theatre where David (David Naughton) converses with the decomposing ghost of his pal Jack (Griffin Dunne). According to Landis, the title is taking from a line of dialogue in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nutty.
Another one of my favourite Landis in-jokes occurs in 1988’s Coming To America, when Eddie Murphy’s character gifts a package full of money to a couple of bums on the street played by Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche. “We’re back Mortimer!” says Bellamy. They are clearly both playing their characters from Landis’ 1982 film Trading Places, which ends with the pair in financial ruin at the hands of a plot masterminded by a character played by…Eddie Murphy.
This isn’t exactly an obscure or unsubtle gag, but I still love it.
What are you favourite movie in-jokes? Do any annoy you because they’re too wink-wink, nudge-nudge? Chime in!
