Big Top Pee-Wee (1988)

Director: Randal Kleiser

Cast: Pee-wee Herman, Kris Kristofferson, Susan Tyrrell, Valeria Golino

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, my, yes. It was certainly on a less frequent rotation than Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and I think my copy was actually recorded off of HBO, but only started several minutes into the movie. I have very little memory of the film before the storm comes to blow the circus folk into town.

Did I Like It: I think we all (including the filmmakers, one would imagine) remember this as the inferior Pee-Wee movie. In all honesty I may have never felt the temptation to watch it again if it weren’t for the fact that I just got of a months-long binge of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and needed a fix to wind me down.

I’m happy to report that it isn’t terrible. There’s a goodly amount of whimsy on display, more than a few funny moments, and a concerted display of the ethos which made Pee-Wee so special in the first place:  The idea that weirdos are heroic despite themselves.

And yet, it is inferior, not only to Big Adventure, but also to my memory of the more recent Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (2016). Why? First, I think the whimsy and heroic weirdo quotient is turned strangely down. I’m willing to largely write that off to Tim Burton (he had <ghosts-with-the-most> and <batmen> to keep him busy) opting out of the proceedings in favor of Kleiser, a journeyman director if ever there was one. But it goes deeper than that. Pee-Wee is kind of a horndog in this one, where he’s usually written as something of an asexual imp. Even in the original The Pee-Wee Herman Show, he was only horny in as much as he was being a rascal. It was more performative because it was on HBO than anything else.

A brief return to horny Pee-Wee might have been okay if the story was a little tighter. The perfect MacGuffin of the best bike in the whole world is nowhere to be found. Instead, the circus comes to town and, wait for it, put on a circus. That might have worked for a quick segment on Playhouse, but it feels too slight for its own good taken to an hour and a half. I’d say that Reubens might have needed a little bit of a break from his most famous creation, but I think he probably would have agreed with me.

Angel (1984)

Director: Robert Vincent O’Neil

Cast: Cliff Gorman, Susan Tyrell, Dick Shawn, Donna Wilkes

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Before the all-night filmfest that had this as second batter (behind MaXXXine (2024)), I had never even heard of the film. Not to knock the lineup of that night, but I had the hardest time remembering the movies that were on the list, which really couldn’t be a great sign. Long story short, I had a hard time admitting I had heard of the film right up until the moment it actually started.

Did I Like It: God help me I enjoyed this film a whole lot. I enjoyed it certainly more than I might have thought I would have enjoyed a film about a straight-A teenager who moonlights as a prostitute in order to afford the private school that will get her off of Hollywood Boulevard.

This is an exploitation movie through and through. A scene involving the killer (John Diehl) and a raw egg goes on for long enough that you’re laughing uncontrollably at the end, but I’m also wondering if Stallone suffers from a lack of ambition when he was playing Rocky Balboa.

The film rises above its trappings by making us care about the characters immensely. We have wall-to-wall eclectic characters including a Chaplin-esque Yo-Yo performer (Steven M. Porter), a drag performer with an acid tongue and a heart of gold (Dick Shawn, stealing every scene), and a man who might be senile, but might actually be a cowboy movie star long past his prime (Rory Calhoun). No spoilers, but: When one character eventually dies at the hands of the killer, it is impossible not to feel sad. The crowd I saw it with voiced their objection. When another character nearly dies but survives at least long enough to bring the killer to his appropriate fate, we all cheered. That’s all you need out of a movie whether or not there’s a child prostitute in it.

You want to know how much I enjoyed the movie? The distributor of the remastered blu-ray had a shop set up in the lobby of Circle, and I immediately bought a copy. There are two more films in the series? I’ll probably end up watching those, too.

That was not how I thought the evening would end.