I was disappointed by "Where Does It Hurt?" For years I heard about this travesty of a movie, starring Peter Sellers in the midst of the worst dry patch of his career. I expected something memorably awful.
What I saw instead was a lame but eager satire about a big city hospital, bad jokes flying fast and loose across an assortment of ill- defined characters, all culminating in a drunken orgy featuring a circumcision and a mariachi band. It's not a good movie, but it's got enough energy and curiosity value to make it mildly dynamic and entertaining to someone with low expectations.
Sellers plays the memorably named Albert T. Hopfnagel, administrator of Vista Vue Hospital in California. Hopfnagel is the sort of guy so corrupt he orders a nurse to leave a dead guy in his hospital room for an extra hour so they can charge his family for another day. His mentality permeates to the staff, so that when laid-off worker Lester Hammond (Rick Lenz) walks in for a chest exam, he is pegged as a target for an unnecessary appendix removal.
"What's supposed to be wrong with me?" Hammond asks a nurse.
"That's between you and your doctor," she replies.
Director Rod Amateau, who co-wrote both the script and the source novel, uses a cut-screen effect to show how Hammond's bill is constantly being added to with spurious charges. The point of this satire, that doctors are greedy and unethical and administrators even worse, is established in the first five minutes and beaten to death for the rest of the movie. Shot in a rather flat and stiff manner by the aptly-named cinematographer Brick Marquard, "Where Does It Hurt" has a slapdash quality about it in every respect.
The jokes are pretty weak in the main, with a lot of ethnic japery more lazy than mean. Pat Morita as a lab technician tells a sexy administrator played by JoAnn Pflug that she makes his eyes round, while a doctor proposes a circumcision thusly: "Someday he might want to marry Barbra Streisand!"
I actually miss the days when bad jokes like that weren't hanging offenses. The thing about "Where Does It Hurt?" is that the bad jokes, like the persistent but enjoyable country-rock score by minor castmember Keith Ellison, land with a kind of zeal that makes the film easier to take. The movie has a unique 1970s gonzo quality, like Rip Taylor cutting up on the Gong Show. Sometimes the jokes are even funny, especially those at the expense of Harold Gould as an incompetent surgeon who okayed Hammond's operation and now worries about being caught.
"What should I do?" he asks another doctor (Paul Lambert) who happens to be his brother-in-law.
"Why don't you go into air-conditioning?"
That doesn't read funny, but the dead-pan actors sell it. This goes for Sellers, too, whose offbeat characterization of the hyperefficient Hopfnagel keeps you on your toes. He's not in a quality film, but he manages to make something fun out of the experience of watching him. Maybe it's just those cool sunglasses, or the way he smugly looks at a framed portrait of Vista Vue and mutters: "Tomorrow the world!"
I can't recommend "Where Does It Hurt?" but I can't really pan it, either. Maybe it's just because I saw it for free on YouTube, but whatever the reason, whether it was a fierce commitment to their craft or free cocaine on the set, its players work too hard in their misdirected way to warrant its terrible rep. It just doesn't gel into anything memorable, for better or worse.
What I saw instead was a lame but eager satire about a big city hospital, bad jokes flying fast and loose across an assortment of ill- defined characters, all culminating in a drunken orgy featuring a circumcision and a mariachi band. It's not a good movie, but it's got enough energy and curiosity value to make it mildly dynamic and entertaining to someone with low expectations.
Sellers plays the memorably named Albert T. Hopfnagel, administrator of Vista Vue Hospital in California. Hopfnagel is the sort of guy so corrupt he orders a nurse to leave a dead guy in his hospital room for an extra hour so they can charge his family for another day. His mentality permeates to the staff, so that when laid-off worker Lester Hammond (Rick Lenz) walks in for a chest exam, he is pegged as a target for an unnecessary appendix removal.
"What's supposed to be wrong with me?" Hammond asks a nurse.
"That's between you and your doctor," she replies.
Director Rod Amateau, who co-wrote both the script and the source novel, uses a cut-screen effect to show how Hammond's bill is constantly being added to with spurious charges. The point of this satire, that doctors are greedy and unethical and administrators even worse, is established in the first five minutes and beaten to death for the rest of the movie. Shot in a rather flat and stiff manner by the aptly-named cinematographer Brick Marquard, "Where Does It Hurt" has a slapdash quality about it in every respect.
The jokes are pretty weak in the main, with a lot of ethnic japery more lazy than mean. Pat Morita as a lab technician tells a sexy administrator played by JoAnn Pflug that she makes his eyes round, while a doctor proposes a circumcision thusly: "Someday he might want to marry Barbra Streisand!"
I actually miss the days when bad jokes like that weren't hanging offenses. The thing about "Where Does It Hurt?" is that the bad jokes, like the persistent but enjoyable country-rock score by minor castmember Keith Ellison, land with a kind of zeal that makes the film easier to take. The movie has a unique 1970s gonzo quality, like Rip Taylor cutting up on the Gong Show. Sometimes the jokes are even funny, especially those at the expense of Harold Gould as an incompetent surgeon who okayed Hammond's operation and now worries about being caught.
"What should I do?" he asks another doctor (Paul Lambert) who happens to be his brother-in-law.
"Why don't you go into air-conditioning?"
That doesn't read funny, but the dead-pan actors sell it. This goes for Sellers, too, whose offbeat characterization of the hyperefficient Hopfnagel keeps you on your toes. He's not in a quality film, but he manages to make something fun out of the experience of watching him. Maybe it's just those cool sunglasses, or the way he smugly looks at a framed portrait of Vista Vue and mutters: "Tomorrow the world!"
I can't recommend "Where Does It Hurt?" but I can't really pan it, either. Maybe it's just because I saw it for free on YouTube, but whatever the reason, whether it was a fierce commitment to their craft or free cocaine on the set, its players work too hard in their misdirected way to warrant its terrible rep. It just doesn't gel into anything memorable, for better or worse.