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Ladybugs
Blu-ray A - America - Lions Gate Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (8th October 2010). |
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The Film
 If there’s anything to praise Rodney Dangerfield it’s his consistency. He makes the same types of jokes in similar kinds of movies and is casually misogynistic the whole way. But that’s about what you’re getting in for with anything Rodney Dangerfield gets involved in. Seeing his name as the headliner for a PG-13 movie about a girls soccer team is more than a little disorienting. But still it’s the same old Dangerfield with a tired bunch of jokes. In order to marry his girlfriend that he’s been seeing for some time, Chester Lee (Rodney Dangerfield) has been aching to get a promotion from his boss. One day Chester goes in trying to suck up and casually lies about his past as a soccer player after seeing some trophies, somehow then getting roped into coaching the company’s girls soccer team. In order to get his promotion Chester has to pull a winning season out of a team with a championship past in a rebuilding year. Since he really knows nothing about Soccer, Chester tries to pull his nephew Matthew (Jonathan Brandis) in to help out with the team and winds up turning Matthew into Martha via drag in order to get some real talent on the field. With a face like Dangerfield’s he’s the first one to say that he shouldn’t be allowed around kids, but for some reason he’s the coach figure in a 90’s kids’ sports movie. But don’t get distracted, Dangerfield’s usual antics of rattling off a string of insults for no reason, making fun of women, feeling women off and staring up skirts is all still there. Same old jokes from Dangerfield that he made his career off of, so he doesn’t see any point in altering the formula and neither does the movie. There’s also the addition of Jackée Harry as his assistant and assistant coach Julie Benson who adds a few typical Jackée lines though really doesn’t do much more. Still has an overall creepy feel to it, especially with the odd subplot of Chester trying to lend confidence to one of the girls on the team one day after practice by telling her to let her hair down and take off her glasses and just winds up coming off like a pedophile. It could be that no one in the movie really has a joke or character written for them they just sort of take up space in the film revolving around some Rodney Dangerfield gags. It’s just incredibly creepy seeing him surrounded by a bunch of little kids when his movies usually involve scantily clad younger women. And it’s all really no suprises from the film that doesn’t have any jokes to make you laugh or anything to really push the poor imagination of writer Curtis Burch or the skills of director Sidney J. Furie who never really did anything of note afterwards. It’s probably for the best since the movie is such a colossal waste of time, with hefty amounts of creepy perversion and no real sense of comedy to be found in the movie. And then it all ends out of nowhere with Dangerfield turning to camera and saying “I guess I finally got some Respect,” then freezing on Dangerfield’s face for a minute or so in a minute of surreal meta humor that doesn’t quite grasp how horrible the movie is, instead it just sort of throws a thumbs up, as if to say it’s Rodney Dangerfield, what did you expect?
Video
Presented in 1.85:1 widescreen in 1080p 24/fps AVC MPEG-4 encoding, the video quality isn’t as bad as the movie’s content. It looks about as you would expect for a 1992 movie and surprisingly well preserved, but that could just be that nobody ever saw the film in theatres. Toned just like an early 90’s lower budget movie, it still has the colors and contrast that are slightly muted but it still has a surprisingly clean look, though still lacking a bit in the quality end.
Audio
The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track at 48kHz/24-bit sounds fairly clean, if a little bare especially with the background music. With ridiculous 90’s sounds that feature two tracks, the orchestral goofy running around music and some bizarre synthesized song whose only lyrics are “s-s-s-s-s-soccer girl” it’s nothing worth listening to. Dialogue comes through the front channel alright, but the volume levels don’t quite match up all the time. There’s not any other audio tracks, but there are three subtitle tracks in English, English for the hearing impaired and Spanish.
Extras
There’s a bonus trailer for “Lionsgate Blu-Ray” which runs for 1 minute and 1 second. But that’s all.
Overall
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