Highs & Lows: Bob Clark

by Patrick Bromley

A man who directed multiple classics and a bunch more movies.
American (not Canadian, despite often being remembered as such) director Bob Clark had a fascinating and uneven career. He started out making inexpensive horror films and had a lasting impact on the genre. He then switched to comedies, where he found great financial success and made such a name for himself that he's much more famous for being a comedy director than a horror one. Though he had his string of failures in the second half of his career, Clark was a jovial and gregarious filmmaker whose work was idiosyncratic in the best way. Here are some of the high and low points of his eclectic career.

High: Black Christmas (1974)

After making his mark with a few horror movies, Bob Clark really put himself on the map with this, the OG slasher movie and one of the best holiday horror movies of all time. It's a really well-made movie from a director whose output through most of the '80s and '90s served to undermine the great work he was doing in the '70s for much of the critical community. I know this isn't exactly the first of its kind and that there are movies predating this one that technically paved the way for slashers; perhaps Clark's greatest achievement in Black Christmas is synthesizing those elements that came before into something that most closely resembles the slasher as we would come to know it. I don't think that's it, though. I truly think Bob Clark was on to something, and the popularity of the genre he had such a large hand in shaping over the next 15 years bears that out. Even if he had never made another film, Black Christmas is so good that we would all still know the name Bob Clark.

Low: Loose Cannons (1990)

I know I shouldn't like this movie because it is objectively bad and even the stars disowned it, but a buddy cop comedy starring Gene Hackman, Dan Aykroyd, and Nancy Travis as a Mossad agent is hard for me to resist. Hackman and Aykroyd, who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder -- a bit that's played for broad laughs and never once approaches being funny -- are teamed up to track down a Hitler sex tape or something. Clark is never a subtle filmmaker and this is not a subtle or sly movie. It's cable staple trash in which Hackman seems openly annoyed and Aykroyd mugs without a ballast. I have to acknowledge that this is a "low" in Clark's filmography despite the fact that I can watch it pretty much any time. Many of his lows are like that for me.

High: A Christmas Story (1983)

Not content to have only one Christmas classic to his name, Clark turned to author Jean Shepherd's book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash for this warm and deeply nostalgic look a boy (Peter Billingsley) growing up around Christmastime in 1940s America. Perfectly cast and beautifully realized, the movie is so good at mixing what Billy Wilder called the Sour with the Sweet, always tempering its haze of fond memories with something dark or funny or bitterly weird, like the department store Santa pushing terrified kids down the slide. If directing is, as the Coen Brothers (and Adam Riske) are fond of saying, "tone management," Bob Clark directs this one perfectly. A modest hit upon release, A Christmas Story became the  classic it's known today for being thanks to VHS and cable networks, one of which eventually began running the movie for 24 hours straight as a holiday tradition.

Low: Porky's (1982)

I know it's considered a classic of the Sex Comedy genre -- hell, it more or less helped invent it outright -- but Porky's sucks. The story of some obnoxious and horny teenagers trying to get laid in 1954 Florida, the movie was an absolutely staggering success -- one of the highest-grossing movies of 1982 -- despite being repetitive, juvenile, and consistently unfunny. As someone who likes a lot of juvenile movies (many of them sex comedies attempting to replicate the success of Porky's), I only really have a problem with the last descriptor. The characters are mostly interchangeable assholes save for Pee-Wee (Dan Monahan), the biggest asshole of the bunch, and most of the film's humor comes at the expense of its female characters. Only Kim Cattrall makes it out unscathed despite Clark's attempts to humiliate her with an embarrassing sex scene; she's radiant enough to overcome the bad writing. It's wild to me that Clark could make something as funny and sweet and reverentially nostalgic as A Christmas Story when he had already failed to make Porky's any of those things just a year earlier. Bob Clark gets above the title billing in the opening credits like he's John Carpenter or some shit. 

High: Deathdream (1974)

It's strange to think that a filmmaker so associated with comedy in the 1980s got his start making really dark and fucked up horror movies in the 1970s, but Clark made at least two classics of the genre (three if you count Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, which I'm not sure I do) before hitting it really big with Porky's in the next decade. Deathdream --  aka Dead of Night -- is a brilliant post-Vietnam horror written by regular Clark collaborator Alan Ormsby about a thought-dead soldier who returns home from the war as something not quite human. Not only is the movie incredibly creepy and disturbing, but also a heartbreaking meditation on grief and a bolt of righteous anger over how so many young men came back from Vietnam irrevocably changed. It's a horror movie that's still a little slept on outside of the most devoted circles, which is too bad because it should be a total classic.

Low: Rhinestone (1984)

Like Loose Cannons, there is virtually no defending my affection for Rhinestone, in which country singer Dolly Parton makes a weird rape bet with Tim Thomerson that she can turn anyone into a country star, including New York cabbie Sylvester Stallone. What started out as a project from writer/director Phil Alden Robinson got a complete overhaul once Stallone came aboard, first as director and then as star given the opportunity to rewrite the entire thing and make it shittier because that's his special way. When he ran roughshod over the movie and original director Don Zimmerman quit, Bob Clark was brought in to get the movie under control and bring it in on time and on budget. He does his very best, but the movie still has a real Stallone problem. It doesn't work as a comedy, as a romance, or as a musical. I still like it.

High: Turk 182! (1985)

This probably doesn't belong in the "high" column for most audiences, especially considering Siskel & Ebert named it among their worst movies of 1985. I have tremendous affection for Turk 182!, in which Timothy Hutton plays the bratty younger brother of a New York firefighter (Robert Urich) who is denied health coverage after an accident, so Hutton takes it upon himself to begin publicly shaming the city and its politicians in order to make a change. My goodwill towards the movie might have something to do with seeing it in the last few years when its messaging feels more relevant than it did even in the '80s, but I also just love how Bob Clark comedies look -- he shoots in anamorphic widescreen at a time when not a lot of comedies were doing that, collaborating with regular DP Reginald Morris to bring NYC to life in a really cool way. I wish this movie was easier to come by these days. The DVD is OOP and there's no Blu-ray. It helps to be friends with Brian Saur.

Low: Baby Geniuses (1999)

One of the worst movies of its or any year, Baby Geniuses is proof of Quentin Tarantino's theory that eventually a lot of great filmmakers lose whatever made them special and are relegated to helming embarrassment after embarrassment (I know Billy Wilder is the director QT always cites, but Buddy Buddy has not nothing on Baby Geniuses.)  I would recap the plot but I haven't seen this since its theatrical release in 1999 and I refuse to watch it again for the purposes of this article. This is guaranteed to be the lowest "Low" I ever have to cover in this series, and the only thing more depressing than the fact that Bob Clark directed it is the fact that he returned to direct the sequel, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, in 2004. It wound up being his last film.