Pauly Shore: A Career Retrospective...Buuu-ddy

by Adam Thas

How did I get here and what exactly is happening right now?

I found myself asking this question as just a few weeks ago I watched Pauly Shore sing Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” while groping people’s heads at Zanie’s Comedy Club. It was bizarre, and for the first few minutes I found myself feeling bad for whatever substance abuse problems Shore appeared to have. It was only after a few minutes that I realized this is his gimmick. After an hour of this comedic amalgam of written jokes, improv, Hollywood stories, and jokes that fell flat, I can admit to being entertained. I didn’t walk away feeling taken or that I didn’t get money’s worth. As we like to say here at F This Movie, it was “Fine.”

When people think about the 1990s and all the nostalgia that comes with it, there is plenty to choose from, AS much as we’d care not to admit it, mixed in with the Grunge, Movies, Boy Bands, Beanie Babies, and Pogs, there was Pauly Shore. Right there in the center of the timeline that is the '90s is the former MTV VJ turned actor that, from 1992 to 1996, released one movie a year. A lost age of mall movies made to be the perfect runtime so they could be shown over and over on cable TV post theatrical release, these teen comedies were part of the suburban consciousness of the decade.

While Shore’s celebrity has no doubt faded to obscurity at best, he’s still here. While his movie career is gone, he still has had a successful career through bit parts and voice over work. To look at his full career that spans his early days on the comedy circuit until now would require a lot more than a modest column. Like others who lived through the '90s, I’ve seen many of Pauly Shore’s movies, but haven’t watched them in decades. So I decided to give each of them a rewatch, and while no one demanded it, I give you “Pauly Shore: A Cinematic Retrospective.” (Sounds fancy enough).

Encino Man (1992): The movie that introduced the world at large to Pauly Shore. The short of it, Dave (Sean Astin) wants to be cool, and after an earthquake he and his best friend Stoney (Shore) discover a frozen caveman they name Link (Brendan Fraser) who thaws out and attends high school with them. Chaos ensues.

It's a ridiculous plot that somehow manages to make the most unbelievable thing about it that Dave winds up with the girl after spending an entire movie being a dick. After watching his movies, this is the best version of Pauly Shore we ever got. In each subsequent movie, the plot can be summed up as “Isn’t this guy annoying, let’s put him in a situation where people have to deal with him.” In Encino Man, Stoney isn’t the cool kid or the main character, he’s there for comic relief and does this while showing some moments of compassion that make him the most relatable character. He’s good in this movie and you can see why Hollywood decided to give him another shot.

Son in Law (1993): Out of all the Pauly Shore movies, this is probably the most famous of all of them, and the highest-grossing one with him as the main character. Shore plays Crawl (in every movie he has a one word name), an RA at a college where small-town Rebecca (Carla Gugino) has begun her freshman year. Things are not going well for her until Crawl shows her how to live like a young Californian. Crawl accompanies Rebecca back home to South Dakota for Thanksgiving; after finding out her high school boyfriend plans to propose to her, Crawl pretends to be Rebecca’s fiancée. Chaos ensues. When I initially saw this movie in the '90s, I remember liking it, and while it’s premise of “City-Folk come to the country” is very universally palatable, I found myself having a lot of problems with it this time around.

In Encino Man, Shore is a side character and can be an idiot the entire time, but as a leading character he needs to have moments where he saves the day, Crawl never does this. He’s an idiot who lucks through life even messing up CPR while someone appears to have a heart attack. The end scene is bonkers, in which the main antagonist is knocked out and everyone just sits down to have dinner, never addressing the unconscious man on the floor. It’s lighthearted and easy to watch, but I found this one to be a lot less funny then I did the first time around.

In the Army Now (1994): If you asked me a few weeks ago what my favorite Pauly Shore movie was, I would have said In the Army Now. Here we have Shore playing Bones, who, together with his best friend Jack (Andy Dick), decides to join the Army Reserves in hopes of saving enough money to start a stereo store. Their plans hit a snag when their regiment is called into active duty in the African country of Chad. Chaos ensues. What makes this one work more than some of his other movies is that In the Army Now has the best supporting characters. Along with Dick, In the Army Now adds Lori Petty and David Alan Grier as other members of the regiment.

While I still found this one fun, I did not enjoy it as much as I did the first time around. I also think this one had the highest expectations for me going into it, so it was a bit more of a downer for a movie I still enjoy despite it not being as much as I did originally.

Jury Duty (1995): This is the only movie of Shore’s where it was not a “rewatch” and was my first time seeing it. With a bar that was already pretty low going into it, somehow this managed to go even lower. It started off interesting enough and seemed to lean a bit more into a slapstick type of humor. Shore plays Tommy, who gets kicked out of his trailer park and discovers that if he gets on a long trial while on jury duty, they’ll put him up in a hotel. So he gets on a serial killer trial where he proceeds to do everything possible to make the trial go longer. There is nothing funny about this movie in which the peak of humor is where Pauly Shore says “Chinese” in an Asian accent. It was somewhere during the scene where Shore dresses up as a woman in an attempt to question the killer that I decided Jury Duty is one of the worst movies of the 1990s.

Unfortunately for Pauly Shore, Jury Duty is the movie that took him from being a niche movie star to a punchline. This movie is so bad that Tia Carrere, Staley Tucci, Abe Vigoda,  and a dog sidekick couldn’t save it. About halfway through, I found myself wondering what it was like to be Stanley Tucci sitting in the audience during the premiere and wondering how his career had barely started and had already reached its low point.

Bio-Dome (1996): In the last of his five-year run and his final attempt to keep his movie career going, Shore stars alongside Stephen Baldwin as Bud and Doyle, two Gen X misfits who concentrate on partying while others go to college. Trying to find a bathroom, Bud and Doyle accidentally get locked in an experiment called the Bio-Dome with a bunch of scientists. Rather than admitting that being locked in was a mistake, the scientists pretend this was all planned and attempt to spend the next year with Bud and Doyle. When I first saw this in 1996, I did not like it. Maybe it was the low bar set by my previous opinions paired with the absolute low of Jury Duty, but Bio-Dome is the one during this rewatch that I liked more than before. While Stephen Baldwin is awful and Shore isn’t doing anything different than he has in previous movies, the overall movie is better. There are some funny parts to this Bio-Dome, and dare I say, has a theme.

Yes, a movie starring Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin is actually trying to say something about what it means to care about the environment and what scientists are up against. Please don’t get me wrong: this movie is still not good, I’m just saying it’s better than my memory serves. With the financial failure of In the Army Now, declining interest from MTV, and the absolute garbage that is Jury Duty, Shore’s stardom was very much on the decline when Bio-Dome was released. Had this been the follow-up to Son-in-Law, I think history would have been a lot kinder to Bio-Dome.

Upon leaving the comedy club, I had to walk around the back door to get to my car. There were several people standing around with various copies of DVDs for Shore to sign. He walked out and gave them all shit for not coming to get things signed at the convention across the street he was attending, but signed a few anyway. He still has his fans. If I had my copy of In the Army Now with me, I would have been one of them.