God Help Me, I Love Nothing But Trouble Now
Movies that flop spectacularly upon their release with critics and audiences sometimes find glorious second lives/redemption as cult classics revered by generations of weirdoes and iconoclasts for the same reasons they were violently rejected by the masses upon their initial release.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is perhaps the most famous example of that phenomenon. Dan Aykroyd’s much-maligned, spectacularly unsuccessful 1991 directorial debut Nothing But Trouble, which he also wrote and plays multiple roles in under layers of make-up as unsettling and horrifying as anything in David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, was a massive critical and commercial flop upon its release.
In the ensuing decades cult movie freaks and bad movie aficionados have been attracted to Nothing But Trouble not because they think it was misunderstood and under-rated upon its release or because they think it falls under the category of “so bad it’s good” or “good-bad.” Instead, the flop has been a source of intense, morbid fascination because even people who love bad movies still can’t believe a movie as bizarre and utterly, intentionally repellent as Nothing But Trouble exists and was made and distributed by Warner Brothers, a major studio ostensibly run by sane human beings looking for a return on their forty million dollar investment and not, say, a wealthy madman who flipped a coin to determine whether he’d set tens of millions of dollars on fire as a dadaist stunt or invest that money in a movie so defiantly non-commercial that funding it is tantamount to setting cash ablaze.
I have not stopped thinking about Nothing But Trouble since I saw it on video after its initial release and then wrote it up as the twenty-ninth entry in My Year of Flops back in 2007, a little under sixteen years ago. So I figured now would be the perfect time to revisit it with an eye towards either making a sincere, non-contrarian case for it or purging it from my system once and for all.
Blame it on quarantine madness or Stockholm syndrome but I thoroughly enjoyed watching Nothing But Trouble this time around. I am as surprised as you are, if not more so but all it took was three or four viewings, twenty-nine years and forty-three years of living to finally understand the audacity and warped genius of Aykroyd’s unique vision.
I learned to stop hating and love this notorious bomb once I stopped looking at it as a raucous gothic comedy in that distinctive, utterly imitable Saturday Night Live tradition rather than a nightmare-inducing, viscerally unsettling horror movie and meditation of the malevolent cult of Chevy Chase, formerly funny actor, sketch performer and famously terrible human being.
This time around I saw Chris Thorne, the smarmy, sarcastic yuppie Chevy Chase plays not as a hopelessly glib, deeply unlikable, fundamentally unsympathetic protagonist and hero but rather as the movie’s villain. He’s an amoral New York slickster who goes through life acting as if the rules do not apply to him because, as a handsome, wealthy straight white man in a position of power and authority, they do not, until he finds himself in a surrealistic hellscape where he’s not only asked to pay for his own sins but for the sins of mankind.
Before Nothing But Trouble, lots of Saturday Night Live cast members, writers and producers, along with other SNL-adjacent creators, wrote roles for Chevy Chase. But only Dan Aykroyd was gutsy and honest enough to cast Chase in the role he was born to play and had been consciously or unconsciously rehearsing for his entire life: a horrible, smarmy, condescending asshole who behaves abhorrently and is abused and punished in a series of humiliating tableaus.
Chris Thorne works in financial publishing, just like Mike Bloomberg. Who wouldn’t want to see Mike Bloomberg humiliated and abused and forced to pay for his sins and his moneyed arrogance?
Over the course of the film, Chase’s loathsome, hiss-worthy villain is afforded repeated opportunities to do the right thing and pay attention to the signs and warnings around him, literal and otherwise. Yet he chooses to ignore them all the same, either out of ignorance or arrogance.
For example, after a party in his luxurious penthouse leaves him hungover, Chris decides not to make the journey from Manhattan to Atlantic City but once he sees how good lawyer Diane Lightson (Demi Moore) looks in a tight-fitting, low-cut, not terribly practical dress, he lets his libido override his good sense and decides to make the trek.
Chris and Diane pick up two more passengers in the form of Fausto and Renalda Squiriniszu, “Brazillionaires” from South America who are even richer and consequently even more obnoxious and entitled than the bad guy in the driver’s seat.
The New Yorkers take a tragically misguided detour and end up being pursued by traffic cop Dennis (John Candy) in Valkenvania, a small town so violently removed from their privileged world in New York city that it might as well exist on another planet or as a portal to hell or even hell itself.
When he’s encouraging Chris to hit the gas and outrun the cops rather than pull over, Fausto implores insistently, “You have a BMW. Act like it.” It’s a throwaway, possibly improvised line with a fascinating double meaning. In the most literal sense, this figure of international decadence and wealth is telling Chris that if his expensive sports car can comfortably go one hundred and thirty miles an hour, then this would be the perfect time to take advantage of its speed and handling.
On a more metaphorical level, this Brazillionaire is telling his friend and neighbor that if he’s going to be the kind of cocky asshole who buys an expensive sports car to show off and impress women then it would be entirely in character to use that lightning fast luxury automobile to outrun a rube lawman way below him on the socioeconomic ladder.
Chris brings misfortune onto himself by trying to outrun the police but he ends up getting caught all the same and brought before the town’s magistrate and demented overlord Judge Alvin 'J.P' Valkenheiser (Aykroyd), a rage-filled ghoul who appears to be several hundred years old and only vaguely human.
The hanging judge’s most distinctive feature is a nose that looks unmistakable like a diseased penis. The penis nose that launched a million nightmares has been discussed at length but nobody talks about how it’s actually a fake nose designed to disguise the Judge’s Crypt-Keeper appearance. That means that Aykroyd, as an auteur, a creator and a mad genius, decided that the judge, in his madness chose to have a nose that looks like a penis. That, friends, is a STRONG choice.
Nothing But Trouble is full of STRONG choices. It’s nothing but STRONG choices. But did critics appreciate the uncompromising boldness of Aykroyd’s vision? No, they just complained that everything about it made them want to projectile vomit, as if that is not also the film’s clear aim. If Nothing But Trouble is disgusting, repugnant and ugly that is entirely by design but there is a warped beauty in the ugliness of Valkenvania and its ghoulish residents, as realized by production designer William Sandell (Robocop, Total Recall) and ace cinematographer Dean Cundey (Halloween, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit).
The giant, dilapidated haunted house of horrors where much of the action takes place is filled with clutter and detritus, bizarre folk art and the garbage of a clear-cut hoarder who seemingly can’t get rid of anything, including the skeletons of the many people who met violent, horrible ends in this Murder Mansion, including Jimmy Hoffa.
The house where our villain very nearly meets a horrible and richly deserved end is like a cross between the similarly trap door and booby trap-laden mansion in the heart of the ghetto where the action in People Under the Stairs (released the same year) goes down and Paradise Garden, the home and showplace of Howard Finster, an outsider artist and evangelist best known for painting the covers of the Talking Heads’ Little Creatures and R.E.M’s Reckoning, which he created with Michael Stipe.
Finster created Paradise Gardens as a Garden of Eden, a gift to the Lord and all his children, a little slice of heaven in rural Georgia. It’s full of clutter and detritus and junk that becomes oddly beautiful in this strange, sublime context. Walking through it with my family about a year back I felt like I was wandering through the mind of Howard Finster, a wonderful and mysterious and unknowable place.
In a similar fashion, the house of horrors where the Judge sentences outsiders to invariably cruel and unusual punishments feels like an external expression of the Judge’s rampaging madness. If Paradise Gardens is a glimpse into Finster’s conception of heaven, then Valkenvania is a circle of Hell ruled over by an undead ghoul fighting a one-sided war against the “bankers” he holds responsible for his family and town’s misfortune.
The Judge sees Chris as a “banker” because he’s involved in finance and from New York. To him, anyone involved in business is a banker, and consequently someone who must be punished. New York+money=banker for a certain subsection of folks also inclined to believe that New York+money=Jew as well.
The Judge gives Chris the option of dying a horrible death in “Mister Bonestripper”, a combination roller coaster and murder machine, or marrying his mute granddaughter Eldona (Candy in a dual role).
We’re supposed to be grossed out by the prospect of a slick, confident womanizer like Chris being forced to consummate his marriage to a woman who looks like John Candy in drag because she’s played by Candy in women’s clothing. The gender-bending is supposed to be shocking and horrifying but Candy looks great as a woman.
Candy was a very attractive man. He makes for an equally attractive woman in one of two shockingly understated performances in a movie infamous for being unrelentingly grotesque and over-the-top. Aykroyd might have sucked up all the attention, and consequently all the spittle-flecked derision, but Candy delivers a surprisingly nuanced, multi-dimensional portrayal of a lawman torn between his sense of duty, his sense of morality and his obligations to a family that takes everything and gives nothing.
Candy’s lawman is all over-ingratiating politeness and hyper-professionalism but there’s a fascinating ambivalence behind the corny jokes and dedication to his job and his community of ghouls. He’s the closest thing the movie has to a hero, a man who manages to hold onto his humanity despite coming from a family of monsters.
The Valkenvania speed trap also snares the rap group Digital Underground, including a hungry young rapper named Tupac Shakur who made his improbable movie debut here. The Digital Underground earn their freedom and win the judge’s favor with a spirited rendition of “Same Song” with the Judge on organ.
Digital Underground are also responsible for perhaps the two laugh out loud funniest moments in the film. The first occurs when a member of the crew looks around the skeleton-laden house of horrors they find themselves in and observes, "Man, will you look at this place? It’s extremely Draculated!”
In the second, Chase’s terrified businessman yells for the members of Digital Underground to save him from certain death, yelling out the word, “HUMPTY!!!” with a life-or-death urgency and seriousness that is absolutely hilarious. Sorry, Chevy. Humpty doesn’t hear your anguished cries for help and deliverance. Neither does a half-mad and half-deaf God either.
His name is HUMPTY, pronounced with an UMPTY. Not sure who the other guy is.
With an R rating, more gore and a score that aimed for atmosphere, suspense and horror rather than zaniness Nothing But Trouble could have received a much different, much warmer reception but it was hated then and it continues to be hated now despite being one of the weirdest, darkest and just plain most insane comedies ever to be released by a major studio.
Paradise Garden is a magical, beatific place of pure imagination fascinating for a seemingly infinite number of reasons, perhaps most of all for the incredible insight it provides into Howard Finster’s divine madness.
Valkenvania, which functions as a nightmare flip side of Paradise Garden’s bewitching dream world, is similarly endlessly, deliriously captivating primarily for the window it similarly provides into the insanity of the lunatics who created it and the monster who keep it going in violent defiance of God’s will.
On a similar note Nothing But Trouble is utterly riveting to me at least for the insight it provides into the glorious eccentricity of its writer, director, star and guiding creative spirit.
Check out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 3: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!
I’ve also written multiple versions of my many books about “Weird Al” Yankovic that you can buy here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace