The Billy Madison/Happy Gilmore Collection
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).
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)
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