Hamburger: The Motion Picture

Hamburger: The Motion Picture
January 1986
Busterburger Limited Partnership
Comedy, Sci-Fi
VHS
C+

As you might guess from the title, this movie is sometimes cheesy and often tasteless.  It is funnier than, for instance, Transylvania 6-5000, but it is chockful of politically incorrect stereotypes.  To take the most egregious example, an attractive female freedom-fighter from Guacamole comes into the room of our hero, and she's topless, carrying a machine gun, and demanding sex.  Yes, it's this, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DoubleStandardRapeFemaleOnMale, of course played for comedy.  He gets out of it by pretending to be gay, it having been established in the opening scenes that women always want to have sex with him, but it keeps getting him kicked out of colleges, and he's trying to change his luck, here at Busterburger University, in order to claim an inheritance.

The jokes involving the university, and fast food in general, sometimes work.  Those playing off the stereotypes-- there's also a nerd, a nun, a fat guy, a black singer who's sort of Rick-Jamesian, and the wacky horndog roommate (Buddy Hackett's son Sandy as Fred) of our too sexy hero-- mostly don't.  The movie had only one writer but often seems schizophrenic, as if one person wrote the crude stuff and the other wrote the parody, not that these don't sometimes overlap.  (The movie actually steals the thudding "Mao Tse-Tung" joke from Americathon, but you probably won't notice because it's during the infamous Fred "eats out" scene.)  I'd probably give the movie a C, but I kind of like the various songs, all of which celebrate, yes, hamburgers.

This time Chuck McCann plays the mad Dr. Mole, and Dick Butkus is the villain Drootin.  Charles Tyner, who plays founder Lyman Vunk, was Uncle Victor in Harold and Maude.  (And he's still alive at almost 90!)  Overweight twins Betsy Lynn and Carol Gwynn Thompson were the Siamese Connection in The Gong Show Movie.  Frequent extra Helen Kelly, here a restaurant patron, had recently appeared in Girls Just Want to Have Fun as Woman at the Park.

John William Young, who's Prestopopnick here, would have an uncredited role as a banker in Soul Man.

Another '80s movie that can't live up to its poster.