User Reviews

"The Choirboys" is essentially made of two different movies: the first half (and more) is a plotless, "Police Academy" -type (even if it was made several years earlier) comedy, and a fairly consistently UNfunny one, too. It's not that the gags aim mostly at a juvenile level (which they do); it's that they are simply not funny 90% of the time. In its second hour, the movie takes a sharp left turn toward drama, and surprisingly this part works better. But beware! There is a truly immoral finale that will annoy you if you take it seriously. (**)

Once again I am forced to defend a decent movie. I saw this movie when it came out, I was in college. I thought it was very funny and was a blend of comedy and drama that was above most of the other fair at that time. I saw it again recently and while it had perhaps lost a little of its luster I thought it was still pretty funny. Of course, if you don't like anyone saying politically incorrect things (even if that person is presented as a total moron) then you might be too "delicate" to appreciate the humor.

Tim McIntyre was hilarious as Roscoe Rules and there was a young Randy Quaid, and James Woods as well. Charles Durning is effective in this film and far from hating the ending, I thought it was not "Upbeat" but rather merely stopped the movie from being a total downer.

This is a movie searching for an audience. Best bet would be the "National Lampoon" crowd. Essentially "The Choirboys" has no plot, and really is nothing more than a series of mostly tasteless skits strung together with the very thin thread of policemen pulling numerous pranks. Nevertheless, some of the nonsense is very funny. You also have a terrific cast pulling off this stuff. To say that the film is different than the usual buddy cop movies would be a real understatement. Think "Animal House" without the fraternity, but with cops behaving badly. Definitely not an endorsement for political correctness, but a throwback to a time when one didn't have to weigh every word for fear of offending someone. - MERK

I like to think that The Choirboys is Joseph Wambaugh's way of showing the police at play. His novel The New Centurions showed police at work. In both cases they work hard they play hard as well and sometimes combine both.

For those who grew up as I did with Dragnet as the way we thought of police The Choirboys couldn't be father from Jack Webb's straight laced view of cops than Mercury is to Pluto. This film follows a group of cops who can't share a bond with any other than themselves.

It's a fraternity no doubt and these guys carry on like frat boys. Oddly enough if you remember Goodfellas Lorraine Bracco observed that the Henry Hills never hung out with anyone other than other criminals and their significant others.

So much so that the group of them all hang out with Tim McIntire who none of them can stand. He's a pretty loathsome character, a racist redneck and a bully, still he's one of the guys.

Two of them come to a bad end for differing reasons, all of them are in a jackpot where Chief Robert Webber is looking to nail The Choirboys to the wall. The oldest of them saves them, but you'll have to see how.

The oldest of them is Charles Durning who at 53 is still on street patrol. He's basically a non-conforming guy who more than likely screwed up big time when he was young and now just doesn't give a crap. He'd like to just coast out for his 20 years and he's months away.

The Choirboys is something I'm surprised a police officer as Joseph Wambaugh was would write. I look at like Jim Bouton's book Ball Four and that less than reverent book of the New York Yankees in his stay there. This is kind of the stuff you definitely leave in the clubhouse.

This review is dedicated to my nephew Colin James Kogan who is a member of the NYPD going now on his third year. I told him that whatever it takes get off the street as soon as you can and never be Charles Durning when he reaches middle age.

Joseph Wambaugh disowned this film-adaptation of his bestseller about department low-lifes within the Los Angeles police force, but the experience probably shamed him anyway--and anyone who gets through the picture will feel shame for him. Half-assed mixture of smut-minded hijinks and 'sobering' cop drama is so sloppily constructed I am amazed director Robert Aldrich didn't remove his name as well. Aldrich, once a filmmaker of merit, seems to have nothing on his agenda here except earning a paycheck (ditto cinematographer Joseph Biroc, who does some of the gloppiest, ugliest work I have ever seen in a major movie). The mostly-male cast members continually smirk and leer throughout (it's difficult to distinguish the characters' loutish behavior from the actual actors themselves--everyone comes off looking pathetic). The low-point of the movie comes when snarling cop Tim McIntire (in a career-ending turn) is hand-cuffed to a tree without his pants and is spotted by a mincing homosexual. McIntire threatens to tear out the guy's liver and break his spleen if he comes near him. Everyone on screen is doubled over with laughter, but the viewer is the butt of the joke. * from ****

I first saw this film over a decade ago and recalling from what I saw of it to be an abysmally lame and foul film. I then decided to have a second look a couple of years ago to see whether my initial reaction was correct and, if anything, I was too kind to it.

This is as bad a film as I've ever seen. It's not just because the film has gutter-level humour and is relentlessly crude. It's not just because it's technically inept and cheap, with 'outside' scenes obviously filmed on interior sets. And it's not just because a good cast and director is wasted on such a filthy, demeaning film.

Above all, what makes this film so wretched is the inherent dishonesty of this film, that it's an 'anti-establishment' film in the style of MASH. The notion is totally absurd when the subject of the film is one of the central pillars of the establishment in society - the police force. This is why their 'rebellious' behaviour is mainly targeted at the oppressed like homosexuals.

Genuinely 'anti-establishment' films of this era had the heroes attack the privileged, elitist echelons of the college scene (Animal House) or the armed forces (MASH). 'The Choirboys' is the direct opposite and a completely repellent 'establishment' film.

I was a cop with about 10 years on the street when I read Wambaugh's book, and figured the movie would be terrible. I thought Altman and his crew caught both the flavor of the book and of life on the mean streets of LA dead on.

Maybe you had to have been there. I was a great Hill Street fan (still am), but it was sanitized for TV, and much less like the real thing because of needing to maintain a plot line. Life ain't like that, and neither was The Choir Boys.

Cop humor is hard to fathom for outsiders. Cops are, in fact, a minority group anthropologically, meeting all the same criteria. Life out there doesn't go from A to B to C. It's chaotic. So was the movie, a little. Good job of catching the feeling.

(Slight Spoilers) Running neck and neck with the ridicules "Exorcist II: the Hieratic" as the worst movie of 1977 "The Chiorboys" is about the most off-the-wall cop movie ever made that was so bad that even the book's author Joseph Wambaugh,that the movie is based on, disowned it never wanting to be mentioned in the same breath with the film.

Having a bunch of beer and booze guzzling as well as mentally unstable LA police officers make complete fools of themselves is not very funny as the movie want's it's audience to think. These yo-yo's end up causing more trouble to the community as well as themselves then any gang of street thugs could possibly do and were supposed to like them? There are a number of cops who have very serious mental hang-ups that leads to suicide and in the case of police officer Sam Lyles, Don Stroud, involuntary manslaughter but what that shows is how lax the LAPD is in allowing men with serious mental problems into it ranks.

The cops in the movie "The Chiorboys" screw up almost ever assignment that their put on but what get's them in trouble is when Lyles, drunk and locked up in a police paddy wagon, goes wacko and blows away a park hustler when he tried to help him. Were shown at the beginning of the movie that Lyles has been suffering from a sever case of claustrophobia since he was in Vietnam but yet he managed to get into the LAPD where, being assigned a deadly weapon, he may very well be put in tight places where his phobia would take over his common sense.

There's also the sad case of officer Baxter Slate, Perry King, who's suffering from very dark sexual hangups dealing with S&M that leads him to get involved with a dominatrix. When discovered getting his rocks off by his fellow cops Baxter begs them for help, all Baxter wanted was for them to talk to him, but is ignored which leads to him, feeling ashamed and abundant, shooting himself.

With these two cases of police driven to he edge and beyond it's very hard to find anything funny in the movie that's supposed to be a police comedy/drama about the inner workings of the LAPD. Remarkably the most touching and understanding scene in the movie has to do with the uncouth and scuzzy head of the vice squad Sgt. Scuzzi, Burt Young. Talking to a young man picked up for soliciting in the park Sgt. Scuzzi takes the time to talk to him and treats the frightened 18 year-old with kindness and understanding like a father not a hardened cop on the beat. It turned out that Scuzzi letting the boy off without being booked didn't end his problems with him getting shot and killed later in the movie.

Very uneven at best and mindless and offensive, to every race color and creed, at worse "The Chiorboys" totally misses the mark that it, and author Joseph Wambaugh in his book, tried to make about the pressures of being a policeman in a major US city. We get a bunch of stories of cops who are so unstable and unprofessional that they come across worse then any of the criminals in the movie and end up getting the worse of it when their ever called upon to arrest or restrain them. There's even a very disturbing scene when two of the cops Rules & Proust, Tim Mcintire & Randy Quaid, are on a roof trying to stop a woman from jumping to her death. Rules encourages instead of trying to talk her out of it where she ends up jumping to her death.

The very contrive ending with officer Whalen, Charles Durning, confronting his boss Chief Deputy Riggs, Robert Webber, about him suspending some half-dozen officers, involved in the cover-up of the Lyles shooting was about as corny and unconvincing as it could get. That was supposed to be the high point in the movie that would make you forget just how silly and hare-brained it was up until then. Instead of making the movie "The Chiorboys" better it made it even worse if that at all was possible.

On paper this should have been excellent . We have Robert Aldrich who made some very intelligent , cynical movies like ATTACK , THE DIRTY DOZEN , TOO LATE THE HERO and ULZANA'S RAID directing a novel by acclaimed author Joseph Wambaugh and featuring amongst others notable actors like Louis Gosset Jnr and James Woods before they became well known . But since it was made on celluloid and not on paper that doesn't appear to count for very much

THE CHOIRBOYS is a mess . There's little plot to speak off and is so cluttered up with characters that it's impossible to understand where the screenplay is going and of the characters themselves they're very unlikable . Since the characters are amoral policeman I thought perhaps someone had the idea of making this as a precursor to HILL STREET BLUES and I guess somewhere along the line that's what the intention was , of an off beat black comedy but the writing , directing and acting is so heavy handed it's like watching a very bad adult version of POLICE ACADEMY with only the sequence of a man taking his pink poodle in the park coming close to raising a smile

Did I start this review by asking what went wrong ? After seeing the movie in its entirety I feel I now have to ask did anything go right ?

SPOILER ALERT!

Atrocious! THE CHOIRBOYS features a lot of violence that just TOO violent and a lot of really unfunny stuff that does nothing to offset it. Director Robert Aldrich really missteps with this garbage. It's a rambling, offensive, woman hating, gay hating, people hating movie. The cast, largely made up of character actors who've done great work in the past, is truly wasted. Charles Durning is OK as "Sperm Whale," but the rest of the actors, particularly Tim McIntire and Perry King, are extremely annoying; mugging it up, trying to be cool-funny. King has a particularly regrettable scene with sexy dominatrix Phyllis Davis and then kills himself! You know something is off when the only real sane person around is played by James Woods! With Randy Quaid, Robert Webber and Charles Haid.

It's all a senseless waste of a lot of talent.

...that truly excellent novels shouldn't be made into movies. Actually, Joseph Wambaugh (the author of _The Choirboys_ had several bad experiences with Hollywood directors mangling his work (The New Centurion, The Blue Knight), to the extent that he blasted the film biz in his scathing _Glitter Dome_.

In defense of director Robert Aldrich, Wambaugh's humor must be nearly impossible to convey through acting, but by the same token, it doesn't even appear that a good effort was made in this film, which seems to attempt to capitalize on a few lurid episodes of the novel that, when woven into the overall story, do much to characterize rarely-seen sides of police life, but when portrayed sheerly for shock value, kick this film squarely into "B" movie territory. It's a shame, since some decent acting performances (such as Louis Gossett Jr's) are evident, but they founder in this effort.

Overall: instead of renting the movie, buy the paperback. Infinitely more entertaining.

Justly forgotten black "comedy" of a bunch of immature alcoholic policeman and their disgusting behavior in and out of uniform.

The plot is vague (to say the least) and the humor is either unfunny or just revolting. The film is chockful of offensive humor--there's racism, sexism (all the female characters I saw were hookers) and extreme homophobia (the gay guy with the pink poodle was just horrendous). Full of unpleasant characters.

I watched this on cable. 30 minutes in I was horrified--I was going to turn it off but I kept it on because this DOES have a cast of well-known actors. But (after another lousy half hour) I turned it off. It's really hard to believe such a talented director with such a good cast would make THIS! Also the author of the book this is based on disowned this. That should tell u something. When not offensive this is just dull. You don't see any of the actors in this gloating about doing this. Avoid.

It seems like we're supposed to hate this one but I loved it, I'm sorry but there you go.

Maybe it was because it came out at the time when punk had just happened. To me the book & the movie were such a break from the usual stereotypical pro-authority nonsense we were being regularly served up at the time (and sadly we seem to have gotten back to these days).

Naturally the book was, by far, the better experience (a genuine 'laugh out loud' read to be highly recommended) but nevertheless I found both hilarious and a long overdue reality check on the forelock tugging blind belief in benevolent and always virtuous 'authority' (something which applies well outsides of the confines of any Police unit too).

I think it's a real pity we seem to have lost that very healthy irreverence & scepticism and are today saddled with way too much haughty hard-faced tedium and an expectation that we blindly trust authority figures.

This was a lame attempt at adapting a great book about a group of cops and the toll their work takes on their humanity. The true humor, pathos and irony that was in the book is missing on the screen. We see the antics described by Wambaugh in the book on the screen, but we don't know why these celluloid cops act the way they do. It could have been a simple matter of a narrator or voice overs by the characters to give some insight into the psyche of these characters. Instead, we are left with the juvenile antics of a group of drunken cops prone to sexual deviance and a disregard for the public, without the public knowing why. Watched it once, I won't waste my time to watch it again.

I wish they still made movies like this. By that I mean one that has some sympathy for the adult male of the species.

This group of cops is varied in their attitudes , some bigoted, some liberal, some in the middle; just like civilians and real cops. The first part of the movie shows a lot of vice work and dated but funny comic routines, at a time when a single mother and a baby were not always inserted into every story. These cops go about arresting gays and prostitutes before laws and attitudes had changed.

The film was made in 1977, and for those too young to have lived it I am sure there are many cringe inducing scenes. One important and anachronistic episode shows an S&M hooker being caught physically abusing one of the police officer friends. The cops friend handles the hooker roughly , mad that she hurt his friend, and warns her to get lost.

If this film were made today, the hooker would be a single mother with a heart of gold, and the cop would be sneered at for being in this position to begin with. It was refreshing to see a movie with some sympathy for an adult male character, before the Hollywood mantra became "women can do whatever they want, men don't matter." Later in the film one of the cops with PTSD gets himself in trouble when he over reacts, and his friends try to cover for him. I have seen some younger viewers write that they were offended by the blue code of silence. I wonder if they would have been as offended if the perpetrator were a single mother and the victim was a man. I doubt it.

OK, I had to buy this one for $8 Canadian from Chapters, as I'm a huge fan of Wambaugh's book. This film is so bad it's almost good. A reasonably talented cast completely wasted, in its' own way it's worse than the film adaptation of "Catch 22". The supposedly funny scenes are ruined by poor direction, the sets are incredibly cheap and the "uproarious" ending is a travesty.

There's a saying that the best comedy comes from true life and there certainly is true life on display here but the problem is Altman. Just as the TV show MASH was superior to the movie, in this case the black comedy is there-and there are a few laughs but not nearly enough-because Altman doesn't know how to handle this material. What does capture is the dark humor that the cops use to survive end it captures some of the nature of what cops experience. The problem is I think it takes to too far. There's an incredible cast here though with some familiar faces who weren't notice the time but became quite famous later. For that alone it's interesting especially coming three years before Hill Street Blues a much better realistic portrayal of cops. I don't think this movie deserves all the ire of the reviews but I do think there are better adaptations Wambaugh.

Being a lifelong Joseph Wambaugh fan (I have read almost every book he's written), I was anxious to buy a DVD of the ' Choirboys', one of my favorite books ... I have read that Wambaugh hated the movie so much, he sued to have his name removed from it's credits ... I understand perfectly ... This is, without a doubt, the WORST film ever made ... it easily stands up to the very worst of cinema history ... forget 'Attack of the Giant Tomatoes', or 'Plan 9 from Outer Space', etc., they are masterpieces compared to this turd ! ... Total waste of time and money ... a decent cast, wasted on a pathetic mess ... the acting is beyond amateurish ... Randy Quaid, a joke of an actor anyway, portrayed the WORST drunk scene ever attempted ... even the sound is terrible, with many portions sounding like they were dubbed in during a bad hangover ... check out the 'laughing fit' scene of Burt Young's scene, it sounds as though a cackling old bag-lady was hired to do the scene ... btw, Young gave the only a decent performance, evidence of his skill as an actor ... I'm finished, this mess has already gotten more attention than it deserves ...

I just wrote a review for Videodrome. The subject of a conversation I had earlier today was; what are the worst movies I have seen that had a decent-sized budget? The worst movie I have seen, in my opinion, was Videodrome. Second on the list is this piece of crap, The Choirboys. Wow, is this one lousy movie. Videodrome actually had a higher rating than did The Choirboys, and maybe it deserves it, but both movies are chunks of garbage, they down right stink. Do yourself a favor; skip The Choirboys. Go bowling or play some miniature golf. I got it; take a bath, do anything but wasting your time on this movie. Take it from me; The Choirboys is a total waste of time.

This is not a bad adaptation of Wambaughs book until the end. For some reason someone decided the movie needed an up-beat ending and blew the black ending of the book.