Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 28, 1992 TAG: 9203280254
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But director Sidney J. Furie and writer Curtis Burch fill this story of a hapless girl's soccer team with double entendres and leering jokes, mostly delivered by Rodney Dangerfield as if he's doing a stand-up routine in Vegas.
How appropriate are pedophile gags in a movie about barely adolescent girls?
Dangerfield, with a strange dye job and a pool lizard's tan, plays Chester, a salesman and shameless toady. He cracks lewd jokes at every woman he encounters and they all are just tickled silly by his attentions.
Chester badly needs a promotion because he doesn't feel that he and his fiance (Ilene Graff) can go ahead with their marriage if he doesn't have a better job.
While groveling in front of his boss, Chester learns that the firm sponsors a girl's soccer team and drops a few lies about a soccer career he never had.
Chester is immediately drafted as the team's coach and he inherits a bunch of inexperienced players including the boss's daughter.
Chester and his secretary (Jackee) set out to whip the team into shape but have no knowledge themselves of the skills required. So Chester persuades his fiancee's son to put on a wig and play for the team.
Not only is the movie witless and tasteless, it has more than its share of twisted values. It esteems winning at any cost, though it attempts to disguise the message by making the victory-obsessed boss the villain. Still, if Chester doesn't win, he doesn't get the job or the wife. Sportsmanship, fair play and the pure joy of the game are incidental. Cheating is defined as initiative and is rewarded.
Dangerfield reprises the kind of Sad Sack that's become his trademark character, but his leering double entendres and one-liners are glaringly out of place here.
One can only wonder what the filmmakers were thinking about when they took what should have been a standard family movie and turned it into a vehicle for Dangerfield's off-color humor.
"Ladybugs" A Paramount picture at Valley View Mall 6 (32-8219). Rated R; 100 minutes.
by CNB