The Billy Madison/Happy Gilmore Collection
This entry was posted on 4/14/2006 12:50 AM and is filed under DVD Reviews.
A warm glass of shut
the hell up, to borrow a phrase from Ben Stiller’s two-faced Happy Madison orderly, to anyone who
doesn’t appreciate the comedic brilliance of these, Adam Sandler’s first
leading man big screen forays. And rightly bundled here in new special editions
they are too, for each movie (don’t you dare
call these films) is of a comfortable template that allows Sandler to merely
and mildly tweak his own personality to suit these two titular comedic
personas. (Billy’s a happy, clueless buffoon; Happy, ironically, is the one
suffering from a pent-up social rage.)
When Billy Madison opened at the top of the
box office chart in February of 1995, it was a very big and surprising deal,
and by no means the guaranteed coronation of another SNL alum turned movie star. After all, Airheads, with Sandler as a highly touted co-lead, had flopped
miserably less than a year earlier. But audiences took to Sandler’s special
blend of dopey sweetness and sanitized rage, and bestowed upon him back-to-back
smashes that laid the groundwork for both his branching out into more dramatic
fare (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk
Love, James Burrows' Spanglish) and
a production shingle, Happy Madison, that would bring us movies starring SNL pals David Spade, Rob Schneider and
Norm MacDonald (who also appears in Billy
Madison).
Each movie,
co-written with Sandler’s New York University roommate and Saturday Night Live scribe Tim Herlihy, is built on riffs, rapport
and surrealistic whimsy. Billy Madison,
helmed by Tamara Davis, finds Sandler’s dimwitted heir to a hotel fortune
having to repeat grades one through 12 in 24 weeks in order to gain his
father’s respect and satisfy nervous board members about the future of the
company. The West Wing’s Bradley
Whitford has a blast as his nemesis, a vice president at Madison Hotels with designs on the top spot for himself.
Extras on this disc include feature commentary from director Davis, plus four
minutes of outtakes (ahh, the joys of working with kids) and more than half an
hour of deleted scenes, most of which revolve around pool lounging, porn and
Billy’s unexplained, hallucinatory visions of a penguin. There’s also a house
staff kickball match and more that fleshes out the subplot of maid Juanita’s
silly romantic obsession with Billy.
1996’s more polished Happy Gilmore, helmed by Dennis Dugan, finds Sandler’s amateur
hockey enthusiast (he’s got a killer tee game, courtesy of a powerful slapshot)
tackling the pro golf tour in an effort to win enough money to buy back his
beloved grandmother’s house. Christopher McDonald provides buckets of smarm as
Happy’s sneering foil, Shooter McGavin. Extras here include outtakes and 20
minutes of mostly interstitial deleted scenes, though there is material that
finds Stiller’s nasty orderly running a phone sex racket out of the nursing
home where Happy’s grandmother is forced to stay. My guess is this didn’t fit
too well within the MPAA’s unofficial guidelines for a PG-13 rating. Similarly,
Billy Madison’s cursed O’Doyle family
suffers a (slightly) more explicit just deserts in the bonus material for that
picture. While some sort of supplemental tip of the cap from the notoriously
press-averse Sandler would have been a nice, direct-address gift to fans, both
films — err… sorry, movies — are
warmly inviting and still exceedingly quotable, and as such these discs are
both welcome additions to the DVD library of any comedy fan. B+ (Billy Madison) A- (Happy Gilmore) A- (Extras)
