Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Note to aspiring filmmakers: if the success of your movie is dependent on the audience perceiving a character played by Corey Feldman as “the cool guy,” you have already failed.

There’s a sort of reverse Darwinism at work in the Meatballs series when it comes to the cool guy; the original 1979 Meatballs may not be a comedy classic for the ages, but it does feature Bill Murray as the cool guy, and I think we can all accept that. I’ve never seen 1984’s Meatballs, Part II, but as far as I can tell, its cool guy is John Mengatti as Armand “Flash” Carducci. Mengatti also played Salami’s cousin Nick Vitaglia on The White Shadow. I don’t remember the character or the actor, but for the sake of argument, let’s say John Mengatti is slightly less cool than Bill Murray. Next up is Meatballs III: Summer Job, also unseen by me, which doesn’t seem to have a cool guy at all. It does have Patrick Dempsey, and I know today he’s TV’s heartthrob McDreamy, but believe me, in 1986 no one on this planet thought he was cool.

This brings us to Meatballs 4 and the aforementioned Feldman, who plays Ricky Wade, the super cool activities director for the Lakeside Water Ski Camp. Ricky has recently been lured from Twin Oaks, the rival camp across the lake, by Lakeside owner Neil Peterson (Jack Nance, the poor bastard). Lakeside is facing bankruptcy, which is hard for me to understand, since most of its enrolled campers are apparently vacationing Hooters waitresses with clothing allergies. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t think camps like this actually exist. If they do, please send me a brochure.

Anyway, it’s up to Rick to whip all the campers into shape – including the shy fat guy – for the big waterskiing showdown with Twin Oaks. Feldman brings not only a smarmy low-grade sarcasm to the role (it would not surprise me to learn that he rewrote much of his own part, tailoring it to his perceived strengths), but also his faux-Michael Jackson dance moves. I didn’t think much of the supporting cast’s acting chops until I saw them successfully pretending to be impressed by this crap.

There’s not much more to say about Meatballs 4 itself, so let me tell you a couple of behind-the-scenes stories. You may have read the first one, which concerns poor Jack Nance, in the late, occasionally lamented Premiere magazine. Nance, best known as Eraserhead himself and Pete “She’s wrapped in plastic!” Martell from Twin Peaks, was married to Kelly Jean Van Dyke, daughter of Jerry “Coach” Van Dyke at the time of the Meatballs 4 shoot. Kelly Jean had a severe substance abuse problem and had begun working in porn and Nance was beginning to think the marriage was probably not going to work out. He explained this to her over the phone, she freaked out and said she’d kill herself if he hung up on her, and at that moment “the storm that had been raging outside killed the phone line.” And Kelly Jean did, in fact, kill herself. It was all downhill for Nance from there, and he died under mysterious circumstances in 1996. I’m not saying Meatballs 4 is entirely to blame, but facts is facts.

On a somewhat lighter note: When I first moved to Los Angeles in 1990, my first job in the movie biz was working an unpaid production assistant on a straight-to-cable Debbie Harry thriller called Intimate Stranger. Making her feature debut was an attractive young actress named Paige French. As the on-set scuttlebutt went, Ms. French was hired for the role with the understanding that nudity would be required at some point during the production. However, when the time of the nudity arrived, there was a prolonged delay as a result of a heated dispute over the veracity of this required nudity clause. At some point a compromise was reached involving sexy lingerie, but Ms. French’s wares remained under wraps.

Why am I telling you this? Only because now, 18 years later, I have finally seen Paige French’s boobies. She wouldn’t do it for a piece of crap like Intimate Stranger, but Meatballs 4…now that’s a whole other story! All kidding aside, it’s a bit depressing to see that Meatballs 4 was effectively the end of her brief movie career (though she did have a role on the short-lived George Carlin Show). She’s one of the few people in the movie to actually bear some resemblance to a genuine human being. And yet the Feldman persists.



Previously on Unwatchable:
55. A*P*E
56. Araf
57. Phat Girlz
58. Ed
59. Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!