Review of Caddyshack II (1988) by Pete J — 18 Dec 2013

Before seeing Caddyshack II I had never seen Caddyshack, and considering how many Golden Raspberry Awards Caddyshack II was nominated for it would clearly have to be poor material. But I figured watching it before Caddyshackwould make it of slightly lesser poor quality.

Caddyshack II doesn't have enough golf for a sports comedy, or enough laughs for a good comedy, so it's a failure as a sports film and as a comedy film. To put it simply, Caddyshack II is a failure and I'm certain it worst quality is that it bears the name Caddyshack in its title when its predecessor is such a critically acclaimed comedy classic.

The concepts in Caddyshack II are clearly unoriginal and dull, and the entire film is laugh free. The script and storyline are uncreative and there is nothing new that it brings to the table like the first Caddyshack did. All it supplies is lame actors at their career low points trying to capture the dying spirit from the comedy classic Caddyshack but failing abysmally most of the time.

And the production team were clearly a bunch of gophers, because whoever they hired as the voice actor for the horses needs to get a different career pattern, because it was so unconvincing, pathetic and unfunny that it just brought down Caddyshack II's already low credibility. If it was Frank Welker then I blame the director, because bad voice acting can never be his fault.

Caddyshack II suffers as a terrible and unfunny flim as well as being a bad sequel that suffers from all the issues that a bad sequel usually does, including the lack of fresh material that its predecessor supplied and a cast which fails to match the ensemble set up by Caddyshack, as well as characters that aren't interesting or worth paying focus to. Alan Arkush's inexperienced direction is no better here than it was in Deathsport, except that this time he is working with talent which he and his terrible movie manages to drag down, and his terrible direction is a serious cause of the blame here. But then again, so is Dan Akroyd's performance.

Dan Akroyd, well, whoever the hell told him to give an abysmal performance like that has suffered serious brain damage. If it was his idea, then clearly Dan Akroyd's comedic spirit must be in spirit prison. His voice itself is more ridiculous than the aforementioned terrible horse voice, and it gets very annoying to listen to very fast. It isn't funny, its Golden Raspberry Award material. Luckily they realised that and awarded him the Worst Supporting Actor award, and hopefully that would help the filmmakers distinguish between good comedy and utter stupidity.

The only real good qualities of Caddyshack II are that the puppetry of the gopher and the silly dynamics that he goes through are both decent, and the presence of Chevy Chase again is genial because he gives a decent performance. Caddyshack II is also shot well on some good locations and features fine cinematography to back it up.

But really, nobody could have thought that Caddyshack II was a good idea, yet it didn't stop the money grubbing producers who must have learned their lesson from this Golden Raspberry Award winning box office bomb.