Review of The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) by David T — 12 Nov 2015

The Beverly Hillbillies is, in a suitable word, messy. Based off an old sitcom that's already not too funny, the film adaptation is full of cliches and dumb hillbilly jokes - it tries way too hard and only achieves the stupidity of it all.

The hickish Clampett family strikes oil while patriarch Jed Clampett is shooting, making billions off of their discovery and moving to the lavish Beverly Hills, trusting a group of money hungry bank owners and sneaky thieves as they adjust slowly to urban life.

The Beverly Hillbillies reminds me a lot of The Brady Bunch Movie - a film based off of a popular 60s and respectively 70s sitcom that pokes fun at its oldness and content rather than pay a modern day big screen homage. The performances are overdone comedically, Jethro and Lily Tomlin got annoying pretty fast, Jim Varney wasn't bad out of any of the main actors but only had one real emotion to test in the film and it wasn't his usual comedic element. The plot is full of classic get rich scheme cliches - see it once, see it forever. The jokes are full of hillbilly lifestyle parodies - from animals running loose to the Clampetts' wide dysfunctional family, the jokes get old fast. The premise really isn't that funny either, for a film that relies on a clever and funny overall premise, it only achieves the clever aspect. The Beverly Hillbillies adds to the long list of TV to film adaptations better left unmentioned.