The 1990 Kirstie Alley/John Larroquette Vehicle Madhouse Hates Itself and Humanity But That's not Ultimately Not Enough
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The surprisingly bleak 1990 dark comedy Madhouse belongs to an undistinguished sub-genre I like to think of as Movies as Television.
These cynical hybrids have modest budgets and even more modest ambitions. They have premises equally, if not more, at home on the small screen and they frequently star television superstars in lead roles.
Madhouse star John Larroquette even filmed Night Court and Madhouse simultaneously, experiences that I imagine were quite similar.
For the female lead of a beautiful, together yuppie whose shiny, shimmering life of wealth and accomplishment is destroyed by a series of hateful houseguests the filmmakers cast another big television star in Kirstie Alley.
Alley was never the most likable or sympathetic actress. And that was before she became a Trump super-fan and Super-Scientologist who says dumb things on Twitter first and an increasingly irrelevant actress second.
I believe in giving credit where credit is due, even if that involves someone who has blocked you on Twitter because they can’t handle your truth bombs.
Alley is a talented physical comedienne with crackerjack timing and the role of ambitious news personality Jessie Bannister, who begins the film with no problem bigger than not being able to find time for sex with the hubby, suits her
Thankfully Jessie and her hubby aren’t supposed to be particularly likable. Nobody in Madhouse is. It’s less a matter of likable and unlikable characters so much as loathsome parasites and moderately less unbearable protagonists.
One of Alley’s great strengths as a comic actress is a winning lack of vanity. In her prime, she was a glamorous old school beauty who delighted in looking miserable, exhausted and overwhelmed. She was unafraid to be sloppy and dispirited, a sobbing, utterly undignified mess.
That gift is deftly utilized here. She begins the film on top of the world and reaches a place where she’s so destroyed by life that she’s willing to literally burn everything down and start over just to get away from a fate worse than death.
Alley has strong chemistry with Larroquette, who is lazily typecast as a scheming yuppie out to make his fortune in a hurry.
Problems begin when these proud members of the upper class find their expensive and huge new home invaded by the first of a series of guests who individually and collectively illustrate the truth of the old maxim about fish and guests stinking after three days.
First the Los Angeles yuppies are visited by Fred (John Diehl), an old friend of Mark’s who used to be a popular lady’s man but seems to have lost his will to live somewhere alone the line, possibly due to being married to the worst person in the world. Bernice (Jessica Lundy) is a chooser as well as a beggar, a big-mouthed vulgarian from the Garden State who can’t stop insulting her harried hosts and committing an endless series of faux pas.
The vulgar cartoon of proletariat bad taste is ostensibly pregnant but when she slips leaving the house, she manages to guilt our apoplectic protagonists into letting her stay there indefinitely, torturing them every step of the way.
In an unexpectedly affecting sequence, Mark tries to rouse Fred from his extended funk and reconnect him to the winner he used to be by dancing exuberantly to a Motown song they adored as kids.
For a few magical moments at least the depressed loser is able to cast off the sour, small sadness of his pointless little life and be a carefree kid again. It works too well, alas, in that it leads Mark to abandon his wife and seek out the person that he used to be.
Many, many terrible adults, children and animals fill the hole Mark leaves, including a scraggly nightmare of a cat who, in the darkest running joke in a bracingly bitter and mean-spirited comedy, is constantly seemingly dying, being buried and then roaring back to life unexpectedly.
The unwanted houseguests include Jessie’s sister Claudia (Alison La Place of Open House), an unapologetic gold digger who has just broken up with a wealthy Arab businessman, leading her to use extensive anti-Arab slurs.
Madhouse was marketed as a light-hearted big screen sitcom but it is an impressively nasty piece of work, and not just due to its unusual amount of hateful slurs.
It isn’t long until the overmatched yuppies are semi-seriously considering desperate measures like murder and beatings in order to rid themselves of their seemingly unfixable problem.
Madhouse operates on the principle of comic escalation. It reminded me of the Jewish folk tale about a husband in the old country who is going crazy because of all the noise and crowding in his modest little home.
He seeks advice from the town rabbi, who tells him to buy a chicken to keep in the house. He does what the rabbi says and of course his home only gets noisier and more crowded.
Dennis Miller’s screen debut!
The Rabbi keeps getting him to add more people and animals to his household, to his bewilderment and dissatisfaction before the Rabbi ultimately tells him to get rid of all the things he specifically told him to add to his home.
The man is dazzled by how quiet and peaceful a house that once felt like a circle of hell now seems. Madhouse is kind of like that except that no life lessons are learned and no spiritual growth occurs.
Things just keep spiraling further and further out of control in ways that threaten the power couple’s sanity and livelihoods.
Madhouse is ultimately cynical about everything. It seems intent on out-doing Vacation and Christmas Vacation for curdled classism. It’s powerfully misanthropic, a dark comedy that seems to hate everyone and everything, but of course has a soft spot for the wealthy, attractive straight white people who are its heroes, and I use that phrase very lightly.
Inside this compromised PG-13 comedy lies a much harder, more profane hard R comedy that would be perfect for stars like Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands and a director like Elaine May or Michael Ritchie rather than Tom Ropelewski, the screenwriter of such abominations as Loverboy, Look Who’s Talking Now and The Next Best Thing. Unsurprisingly, the writer-director has done his share of television as well.
In Madhouse, hell is other people but it also lives inside each of us. The misanthropic romp nearly gets by on meanness alone but ultimately commits the ultimate crime for a lowbrow scatological comedy: not being funny.
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