The 1985 John Candy Vehicle Summer Rental Would Be a Lazy Mediocrity Even if a Lame Boat Race Subplot Didn't Dominate Its Third Act
The intermittently amusing, frequently annoying trifle Summer Rental is the second consecutive John Candy vehicle that I’ve covered for John Candy Month that owes its curious, not entirely necessary existence to John Belushi, who died so that Candy could enjoy a mediocre career as a leading man in his absence.
Armed and Dangerous was written and conceived as a John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd buddy movie by original screenwriter Harold Ramis before it limped onto the screen as a vehicle for Candy and his SCTV pal Eugene Levy. According to gossip columnist Army Archerd’s Variety column, “the inspiration for (Summer Rental) came from an incident in which producer Bernie Brillstein had rented a beach house, and 'returned one night to find the house crawling with uninvited guests-invited by Bernie's client John Belushi, who, in soaking wet and sand-filled trunks, was sleeping in Brillstein's bed.”
Ghostbusters and A.L.F producer Brillstein’s account is more vivid and detailed, as well as offensive. He told the New York Times, "I have five children and I weigh 240 pounds. Being heavy in California is not a terrific thing. Being heavy on the beach is worse. The house on the left was occupied by two elderly sisters, one of whom had a 6-foot-4 inch r—d son who was out of Arsenic and Old Lace. The house on the right was out of Death in Venice, occupied by a chic group of homosexuals who had 28 inch waists and wore peach sweaters.”
Considering the crassness of the inspiration, it’s a minor miracle that director Carl Reiner and star John Candy came away with a surprisingly lewd, profanity and T&A-filled summer family sex comedy that’s only occasionally offensive.
John Candy’s first American studio starring vehicle is essentially John Candy’s Vacation, which is exquisitely redundant, since John Candy had a very memorable cameo in Vacation. The beloved Splash star was unmistakably a small but crucial part of the grand gestalt of Vacation but Summer Rental miscasts him once again in the Clark Griswold role of a lovable, bumbling, typical American everyman with an improbably gorgeous beauty queen wife who goes on vacation with his family and mild shenanigans ensue.
Summer Rental’s slim plot finds burnt out air traffic controller Jack Chester (John Candy), wife Sandy (Karen Austin), sexually precocious teen daughter Sandy (Kerri Green, who at eighteen was only eleven years younger than the actress playing her mother and seventeen years younger than Candy), son Bobby (future teen heartthrob Joey Lawrence) and daughter Laurie (Aubrey Jene) visiting Citrus Grove, Florida in search of a little rest and relaxation.
In Summer Rental, John Candy is a big teddy bear of a man who lumbers about in shorts and a hockey jersey no matter the weather or the occasion, accidentally creating Kevin Smith’s sartorial style in the process. The distractingly young patriarch of the Chester clan is initially overjoyed at the sweet summer rental he’s scored until he discovers to his shock and surprise that it actually belongs to a black family who are none too excited to come home to find the places overrun with vacationing white folk, and that the rental they’ve actually signed on for is a shabby little hovel by a public beach where tacky poor people congregate.
Jack is way too angry about being cordially asked to leave the house he and his family have been occupying illegally due to his own stupidity and mistakes. There’s an endless, laughless slapstick set-piece where Jack bumbles around a crowded beach with a leaky cooler annoying literally everyone on the beach intentionally, yelling loudly that if they’re mad they should send the bill to the black family whose home they recently invaded.
Our bumbling hero gets a really bad sunburn that turns his skin lobster-red, then he goes to a fancy lobster restaurant where his lobsters and his seat are taken by snobby Al Pellet (Richard Crenna), a pompous boob in the Ted Knight mold who has ruled snobbily over Citrus Grove and its big regatta for years and consequently does not take kindly to Jack and his sloppy ways.
Al is a snob. Jack is a slob. They are consequently natural enemies whose differences must be settled the old fashioned way: through an old-fashioned regatta.
A good rule of thumb for lazy, formulaic movies like these is that if a tacky, dumb race is introduced prominently in the first act then there is a roughly one hundred percent chance that the tacky, dumb race in question will take up much of the third act, even if racing has played no role in the action up to that point.
Accordingly, when I saw multiple references to an upcoming Citrus Grove regatta I had a sinking feeling that Summer Rental would inevitably devolve into a movie about a plucky underdog trying to win the big race even if the movie’s core audience of suckers willing to watch anything as long as it is projected onto a movie screen probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a regatta and ricotta.
hubba hubba!
In case you’re wondering, dictionary.com defines a regatta as “a sporting event consisting of a series of boat or yacht races” and it is, shockingly, something our hero becomes absolutely obsessed with and that quickly comes to take over the film to its eternal detriment.
When the great Rip Torn pops up as Scully, a latter-day pirate who looks like he smells like whiskey, weed and great sadness and performs various roles around Citrus Grove, including bartender, restaurant proprietor, boat renter and waiter I was surprised and delighted. That surprise and delight quickly faded once it became apparent that Torn’s role in Summer Rental is to serve as a salty, watery Mr. Miyagi to Candy’s Daniel-San in the many, many boating sequences that fill up the film’s second and third act and send the movie’s always faltering comedy screeching to a halt.
Despite radiating all the potential in the world initially, the character of Scully turns out to be nothing but a Magic Pirate Dream Guru, a one-dimensional male fantasy figure with no agency or needs of his own, who exists solely to get a depressed middle-aged man to believe in himself and his unlikely abilities.
Summer Rental feels less like John Candy’s maiden cinematic vehicle than a glorified pilot for a mediocre John Candy sitcom about a disgruntled air traffic controller, his family and all the exciting, sexy adventures they have against a colorful backdrop.
Even Carl Reiner, far and away the classiest and most prestigious member of Summer Rental’s creative team did his most successful and influential work on television, with Your Show of Shows and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Summer Rental is a television show in movie form that runs out of jokes and inspiration early on and slaps on an insultingly gratuitous regatta subplot that quickly and regrettably becomes the film’s main preoccupation.
Reiner’s slapdash vacation comedy is full of lines that were clearly post-dubbed by actors in recording studios weeks or month after shooting wrapped. Summer Rental really roars out of the gate, for example, with a static shot of a nondescript home and a banal conversation between father and daughter in which the daughter tries to get out of trouble for ditching school. It makes sense that the filmmakers wouldn’t want audiences to see Candy and his facial expressions and body language in his first big starring role in a studio film when they can repeatedly show a long shot of a car or a house or a boat and then have audiences hear what he and other characters are saying instead.
Reiner isn’t concerned with telling a story or making a movie or even laughs so much as he’s intent on running out the clock, in filling 83 minutes of screen time with enough mindless busywork to technically qualify as cinema if you’re feeling very generous and your standards are very low.
The film feels lazily slapped together in the editing room. John Larroquette, for example, has a perplexing role as a confident single father who takes a shine to our hero’s improbably gorgeous, twenty-something bikini babe wife, paying for her tickets when she doesn’t have money at a movie theater, for example.
The supremely lazy script seems to be setting up that the Night Court cad is trying to take advantage of hubby devoting all of his time and energy to winning the regatta rather than satisfying his wife’s sexual needs but there is no payoff. He simply appears in a scene or two or three and then just kind of vanishes in order for Summer Rental to be able to devote more of its skimpy runtime to hot racing action.
During my video store days, I remember looking at the Summer Rental video box and being amazed at how surreally little it promised, beyond the sight of John Candy on the beach in unseasonable attire grinning and carrying a bunch of stuff, including a leaking cooler.
Where most movie titles, posters and video and DVD boxes over-promise, conjuring up vivid cinematic worlds full adventure and excitement, sex and intrigue, hilarity and romance, then delivering the same old hokum, the title and poster for Summer Rental promise that at some point John Candy will fall down and, I dunno, get a sunburn or something?
That’s all about all it delivers. The regatta subplot promises nothing and delivers the same.
Summer Rental is a lazy, half-assed vacation of a movie but I did enjoy letting my mind wander to a happier, more innocent time when I was a boy and enjoyed John Candy movies because they tended to be hack and silly, juvenile and underwhelming, not despite their shortcomings.
I’m enjoying my journey back through the lesser films of Candy and John Candy Month for much the same reasons. I need escape and silliness and stupidity more than ever these days and those are three qualities that Summer Rental possesses in abundance.
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