#67 Leonard Part 6 (Wes)

Leonard Part 6

Bill Cosby is an excellent comedian. His stand-up show Himself is brilliant, and shows such an assured comedian that he spends much of it sitting down, a move that many stand-up comedians would never do. After years of being a guest star on other peoples shows, he became one of the most loved TV stars playing Cliff Huxtable in The Cosby Show which ran for 8 years between 1984 and 1992. In fact he’s still performing stand-up shows now at the age of 76. So how did it come to pass that in 1987, as he was so successful elsewhere, that he was the lead in Leonard Part 6? A film that he was so ashamed of, that he publically told audiences not to waste their money watching it. Was he over-reacting? Let’s find out…

Leonard part 6 (you haven’t missed parts 1-5, that’s supposed to be a joke which is explained at the beginning of the movie), centres around a spy (Leonard – played by Bill Cosby) who is forced out of retirement when an evil vegetarian, Medusa Johnson (Gloria Foster) tries to take over the world with animals that have been trained to attack humans. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. Even Kids Say the Darndest Things had more of a coherent narrative. In fact I think that this film may have been written in crayon on a kindergarten wall by some of the future stars of that show.

 But it wasn’t just the script that seems to have been written by a bunch of six year olds, no it seems they designed the opening credits too. When a movie starts with a bunch of poorly drawn animals plastered over the credits then you can pretty much guess what level the film is going to be at. It actually looks like it’s going to be a movie that was a junior school project. Hardly the image that any professional movie maker wants to project I’m sure. Maybe it was a prototype for Cosby’s next project: Kids Design the Crappiest Things.

Then the movie starts. For some reason it starts with an amalgamation of scenes that are quite near the end of the film. Bill Cosby, jumping a tank off the top of a road, Bill Cosby ballet dancing and Bill Cosby jumping off of a roof riding an ostrich (unfortunately it was a “real” ostrich, and not a Bernie Clifton style ostrich costume). Now I can see why they did this: The movie is so dull that starting it with something wacky may hold the audience in place just to see how Cosby got into such a crazy situations, but maybe if somebody just pointed out that holding an audience’s attention is much more easily done by making a movie that doesn’t make The Only Way is Essex look like it was written by Shakespeare.

  

As I’ve already mentioned, the plot is spread so thinly it could be mistaken for the sandwich filling in a motorway service station café. It’s only a few minutes before you’re introduced to Medusa Johnson’s plan, when a rainbow trout is shown a picture of a CIA agent he wants assassinated, and like the last vindictive fish we saw, the shark in Jaws: The Revenge, this trout barks (it also pauses to look at a discarded copy of Playboy, which raises all sorts of questions that I’m not sure I want answered…). I know this is a family film, so I can understand the bloodless death, and the use of something silly like a rainbow trout over something that may be scary like a piranha, but I can’t overlook the fact that even the child that sits in class eating glue would realise the size difference between a man and a single trout. Maybe a shoal of trout attacking him could have worked, but nobody involved in this movie seemed to credit children with any intelligence.

The movie continues in its stupidity from there. A man is killed by a bunch of frogs gathering under his car and hopping it into the river, Leonard spends four minutes choosing a tie (I’m not kidding), Leonard gets some ballet shoes and a queen bee from Nurse Carvalho (Anna Levine), a fortune teller he doesn’t understand, which are soon used in a fight/dance-off seemingly against the cast of The Lion King Musical, and then to empty a room of bees that were guarding something or other (yeah I really wasn’t paying attention at this point). Eventually the stupidity culminates in a battle between Leonard and Medusa’s vegetarians which includes Medusa’s head henchman, Man Ray’s (David Maier) head exploding as he meat for the first time (now I’ve had a dodgy hot dog or two in my lifetime, but it was never my head that eventually exploded…).

  

I think there’s maybe one thing we can all take from this movie, and that’s not to trust Morrissey. This movie really is like an anti-vegetarian propaganda film. It’s actually worse than the short movie “The Meat Council Presents Meat and You: Partners in Patriotism” from the classic Simpsons episode Lisa the Vegetarian. The message in this film seems to be that veggies are both evil, and that they can’t handle the taste explosion that is a hot dog (for the record, I do actually eat meat and my blood type is probably gravy. But I still think this is a crappy message to be sending out to the audience).

The acting, whilst not brilliant, is standard for most low budget family films of the time and whilst the costumes and sets look crappy, again this is pretty much what you’d expect from any similar film from the time. The fact that this movie is so dumb and yet so boring at the same time really is the only major problem with this film. Bill Cosby not only starred, but co-wrote it too, so most of the blame should rest with him. He obviously didn’t have the ability to write outside of what he knew. His comedy was always based around family life and trying to write a spy comedy just didn’t suit him.

  

As a movie it’s just a confused mess that wastes the talent and charisma of Cosby, but then again that could pretty much describe any film that he starred in. Cosby was better off on TV, or sitting on a stage telling jokes, but he seemed to be determined to try and conquer the movie world too. When Leonard Part 6, and later Ghost Dad were the results, you wonder why he bothered. I really can’t recommend this movie on any level, it really is an absolute joke. Which is funny really as jokes are exactly what Cosby forgot to include.