{"id":14081,"date":"2025-03-02T11:33:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-02T16:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=14081"},"modified":"2025-03-02T11:38:10","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T16:38:10","slug":"weekly-movie-roundup-109","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=14081","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Movie Roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I watched 11 movies\u2014the entire run of The Pink Panther<\/em>, sequels and reboots included.<\/p>\n\n\n
\"The<\/a><\/td>\n\"A<\/a><\/td>\n\"Inspector<\/a><\/td>\n\"The<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\"The<\/a><\/td>\n\"Revenge<\/a><\/td>\n\"Trail<\/a><\/td>\n\"Curse<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\"Son<\/a><\/td>\n\"The<\/a><\/td>\n\"The<\/a><\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

It all started innocently enough, when I thought I’d maybe rewatch The Pink Panther<\/a>, only to discover that I wasn’t at all sure that I’d ever actually seen the movie before. But I enjoyed it well enough, even if it was a little dated and Clouseau-light, so I decided to carry on with the sequel, A Shot in the Dark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That’s maybe where I should have ended things, because the next film in the series, Inspector Clouseau<\/a>, is not good at all. Alan Arkin is clearly trying. What<\/em> he\u2019s trying isn’t always clear, but he definitely is. It’s just that there isn’t a funny moment to be hand in the movie.<\/p>\n

For some reason, though, I pressed on. The next three movies\u2014The Return of the Pink Panther<\/a>, The Pink Panther Strikes Again<\/a>, and Revenge of the Pink Panther<\/a>\u2014are each okay enough. They’re also quite dated, to the point of some very<\/em> unfortunate yellowface, but they’re often also silly and amusing. I think my favorite was probably Strikes Again<\/em> just for how<\/em> silly it gets, with Herbert Lom’s Chief Inspector Dreyfus becoming a full-out Bond villain, but they all have their moments.<\/p>\n

I wish I could say the same for the next two films that followed. Trail of the Pink Panther<\/a> is little better than a clip show, stitched together from deleted scenes and out-takes after Peter Sellers unexpectedly died early in the movie’s production. Some of those deleted scenes are kind of amusing, but most of them look like they were deleted for a reason, and the whole thing just falls apart as a narrative. Sellers’ estate reportedly successfully sued the filmmakers, and the whole thing just feels patched-together and sad. Even sadder is the very real possibility that this is the only one of these movies I had actually seen before. (I can’t say for certain, and it’s a Frankenstein of the whole rest of the series, but released in 1983, it is the first one I could have conceivably been taken to in theaters.)<\/p>\n

Still, as bad Trail<\/em> is, it can’t hold a candle to the absolutely dire Curse of the Pink Panther<\/a>. If Trail<\/em> was a misguided attempt to honor Sellers and the franchise, then Curse<\/em> is a lamentable attempt to extend it with a spin-off nobody wanted, a complete miscalculation of a movie, just fundamentally flawed in its concept and desperately unfunny in execution. I don’t blame Ted Wass for being very confused about how to play this character, but his attempts do reveal the heart of the problem: Inspector Clouseau isn’t a funny character, Peter Sellers made him funny. Every attempt to play this material with someone else, first with Arkin and then with Wass, simply was never going to work.<\/p>\n

Peter Ustinov was reportedly cast in the first film, before it eventually went to Sellers, and that<\/em> I can see. I think Ustinov could have very successfully played the character as written in the first Pink Panther<\/em>, where Clouseau is just one element of many. I don’t think the series would have carried on with that<\/em> character, however. The series’ longevity owes everything to Sellers, and it was a fool’s errand asking anyone else to play the role.<\/p>\n

So of course, that’s what they did for three more movies. Son of the Pink Panther<\/a> is not as bad as Curse<\/em>\u2014and, in all fairness, I think Roberto Benigni is more under-used than miscast\u2014but it’s also never very funny. It doesn’t even particularly feel like a Pink Panther<\/em> movie, more like warmed-over James Bond. It’s a sad place to end the series, on its thirty-year anniversary no less, but it’s stumble of a step up from the movie before it.<\/p>\n

The two Steve Martin remakes are a little better, but that’s not saying a whole lot. I did like the second one more, so it was nice to end this mad exercise on a high(er) note, but neither film was especially funny. We’ve now gone sixteen years without another attempt at the series, so hopefully that’s where things remain.<\/p>\n

Honestly, the whole Pink Panther<\/em> series is pretty checkered, with some fine but not necessarily remarkable entries, and with some utter garbage. I can’t necessarily recommend any of them, and certainly can’t in good conscience recommend running the entire series like I did.<\/p>\n

Oh, but I did also re-watch 1972’s Asylum<\/a>. I don’t think it’s the best of Amicus horror anthology movies, but it has a lot of fun moments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, I watched 11 movies\u2014the entire run of The Pink Panther, sequels and reboots included. It all started innocently enough, when I thought I’d maybe rewatch The Pink Panther, only to discover that I wasn’t at all sure that I’d ever actually seen the movie before. But I enjoyed it well enough, even if … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14081"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14081"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14089,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14081\/revisions\/14089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}