Director: Lawrence Bassoff
Writer: Lawrence Bassoff
From: Cult Cinema
Four sailors go to LA for a weekend after completing basic training.
It’s Marimark so everything is as expected and perfunctory.
Four sailors—a womanizer, a comic, a black guy, and a nerd (yes, they have names, but that’s as much as they’re defined in the movie and, yes, the black guy’s blackness is the entirety of his character)—leave on the titular weekend pass to go to LA before being deployed. Each has their own goals in the city—the womanizer is meeting his girlfriend, the nerd has a blind date, the comic is going to premiere at a comedy club, and the black guy is… also there. He has less of an itinerary than the other three, but is from LA and runs into his old gang while taking the other three out for soul food and… Yeah. Do you see where I’m going?
The movie is a Marimark comedy so that means it’s not funny and nothing happens for ninety minutes. Rather than try to describe a plot, here are what goes down with each character.
Let’s start with the comedian because he sucks. He’s not funny, and not just because men aren’t funny. This is confusing because we’re talking about a Marimark comedy, which itself isn’t funny. So is he not funny because that’s the joke, or is he not funny because the whole movie’s not funny?
He does his set at the club. The late Phil Hartman makes a cameo as the MC, which gave me a mournful shock. I thought, You’re so much better than this, Mr. Hartman. Then he does an anti-Arab joke and, well, some material you elevate with your presence and some you let drag you down. Anyway, the comedian meets a female comedian, and they hit it off. She bombs, then he bombs, but they’re a couple now so whatever.
The womanizer meets up with his girlfriend who’s become very “LA” and “industry.” They go to a chichi restaurant where she ignores him. Then they go back to her place where she pulls out a vibrator that intimidates him and her general sexual aggressiveness makes him run away. In the end, he meets up with the cousin of the nerd’s blind date and they hit it off.
The nerd’s blind date is also a nerd so I guess that’s his whole arc.
Meanwhile the black guy is the closest this film gets to a character. He’s pursuing a fitness instructor throughout the movie. When the group arrives in LA, he sees her giving a demonstration on the beach. He participates, then goes to her class, then calls her for a date, and she rebuffs him each time until the phone call. She invites him and the other three to a party her gym is throwing and that’s where everyone ultimately hooks up with their partners.
The weekend ends, the sailors say goodbye to their lady friends and then goodbye to each other since they’re all shipping off in different directions. THE END
I laughed at this more than I do at most good comedies because it’s just so bad. I was filled with a strange giddiness while watching the movie because I was just cringing the whole time. This is ninety minutes of being embarrassed for someone else.
And that’s a quality unique to Marimark films, that constant question, “How are you screwing this up so badly?” The movie’s competently shot, no technical flubs, and the actors are fine. They aren’t being asked to do anything major, but they rise to the material given to them. It’s just that there’s nothing here.
Which is a shame because it felt like there could have been something a little sharper. The characters face challenges, have moments of self-reflection, and seemingly change because of them, but nothing feels like it has weight and they’re not real characters so I can’t care. I mean, the nerd and his date look at themselves in a mirror and she asks, “Why do they call us ‘nerds’?” like they’ve been enduring this oppression, this bullying, this pain of being nerds throughout the movie. Only it’s the first and only time it comes up.
The end of the movie is as inevitable as the end of the weekend, but that should operate as a ticking clock, as something adding pressure to this final weekend they all have. Instead, sure as Monday follows Sunday, the movie just ticks along to the end of its ninety minutes.
So it’s not a recommend. I mean, I haven’t even gotten into the casual racism that pops up throughout, and, yeah, I know I’m saying that despite referring to the black character in the movie as “the black guy.” The writer/director of this also did Hunk, a Marimark film I liked, but was just a bit quicker and more willfully silly. Ultimately, Weekend Pass needed to be more camp. Instead it feels like it’s trying to be something sincere, but cannot possibly achieve that goal. Skip it.
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