Bob Einstein
(the brother of Albert Brooks) plays the gravel-voiced “Super Dave,” who
introduces the film with a message to kids “not to try these stunts at
home.” The movie itself begins as young Dave at his grandfather’s
funeral (being eulogized by Billy Barty!) gets advice from his dead relative’s
ghost in the form of a locket. After a pratfall into the grave, we
cut to the present day, where Dave is being driven to his millennium charity
stunt by Ray Charles. After a crash through the bus window, Dave
arrives, has his foot accidentally tied to a midget, is harassed by evil
promoter Dan Hedaya and prepares for his big stunt, which amounts to bouncing
up and down between two trampolines 2,000 times on (free) TV. The
Pope, the Dalai Lama and President Clinton are in the audience.
Well, the stunt goes wrong and Dave decides to retire. He quickly loses all his money and people start abandoning his stunt carnival in droves. He meets his love interest, an accident-prone single mother who with a kid in need of an operation (!) after she nearly runs him over by driving her truck through a hall of mirrors. When the evil promoter turns Dave’s star protégé (Van Wormer) into an evil stunt man who gives kids the wrong message, it’s up to one last, half-mile jump in a souped-up car to save the day and Little Timmy’s life.
I really don’t know where to begin with this. I could talk about the profanity, which is edited out and poorly over-dubbed for a PG-rating to the point where certain scenes make little sense. I could talk about how seeing the same dummy get crushed under a car just isn’t funny the third time. I could talk about the hopelessness of having Dave rescue a dog from a burning building. I could talk about how useless the running gag of Dave mixing up everyone’s name was. I could talk about the bulging eyeball computer effects, the outrageous Japanese assistant named Fuji, or the possible motivations of having Dave’s going-through-puberty-with-a-cold voice coming out of the mouth of the kid playing him as a child, though only some of the time.
Instead, I think I’ll talk about the mimes.
For some reason, Dave’s stunt carnival has lots of mimes corralled like animals. His assistant Donald (veteran character actor Don Lake) brings him a new mime on a leash, but it protests (verbally) when forced to wear white face paint. Dave is occasionally nostalgic for one mime that he lost, a long time ago. Later in the film, he finds his lost mime, and then falls down a hill.
Say what you will, The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave is exactly what it’s supposed to be. It’s an incredibly silly, mind-numbingly dumb ego project. While the making of it doesn’t make any sense at all, the fact that this movie cost $15 million to make and got backing by a major studio like MGM for video instead of being quietly sold as a mid-summer TV-movie for the Warner Brothers Network defies every rule of the film industry I’ve ever known. I’m glad I live in a time and place where a movie like this, despite all evidence of “logic” and “common sense,” can still get made.
Also available on DVD. Thank God.