LADYBUGS (1992)
Label: Paramount Pictures
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: PG-13
Duration: 89 Minutes 40 Seconds
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.78:1)
Director: Sidney J. Furie
Cast: Rodney Dangerfield, Jackee, Jonathan Brandis, Ilene Graff, Vinessa Shaw
In the kiddie sports-comedy Ladybugs (1992) beloved stands-up comic Rodney Dangerfield (Rover Dangerfield, Caddyshack) plays Chester, a schlubby salesman looking to get a promotion at work, and to curry favor with his boss he offers to coach his daughter's soccer team the Ladybugs, with the boss in no unclear terms telling him the only way he will getting that promotion is to take the team to the championship at the end of the season. Of course Chester has no coaching skills t speak of, but he does have determination, and he manages to rope his assistant Julie (TV's Sister, Sister) into helping him coach the team, and of course she has so soccer skills either. While the team was a former championship-winning team their best players have left the team, with only one returning player from the previous season, and the prospects of turning this team into a champions and getting that coveted promotion at work does not look very promising. He ends up recruiting his girlfriend Bess (Ilene Graff, TV's Mr. Belvedere) jock son Matthew (the late Jonathan Brandis, Stephen King's It) to sport a blonde wig and dress in drag and play on the team as Martha, which he does to get close to Kimberly (Vinessa Shaw, The Hills Have Eyes '06), the boss's daughter's who he has a crush on. Of course bringing the kid onboard improves the team's performance, but it is not without it's problems, for starters his mother Bess is unaware of the sport-subterfuge, and balancing the two personalities at home and on the field proves comically difficult.
I was in highschool when this came out and I was a huge fan of Dangerfield at the time, having grown up on Caddyshack and Back To School, not to mention his steady appearance son The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, but the trailers for this kiddie-friendly sports comedy looked way too kiddie for me to deign to see it at the cinema, and I never did catch up with it till now. It's about what I expected, the same old Dangerfield stand-up schtick recycled and shoehorned into a kid's flick about a misfit coach and a band of dreadful soccer players who turn out to be not-so-bad. This might have been advertised as too much of a kiddie flick, even in the early 90's the PG-13 rating was not as watered down as it would eventually become, the first couple of minutes features two utterances of the word "asshole", and it's got some odd sexual humor for a kid's flicks with some upskirt peeps and jokes about boners and Dangerfield's character being kicked out of a bar after being mistaken for a pedophile who dresses his girlfriend's son up in women's clothes, which s only half true. The film also has some fun but undercooked cameos from Nancy Parsons (Porky's), Blake Clark (TV's Home Improvement) and baseball hall-of-famer Tommy Lasorda as competing soccer coaches.
If you're a fan of Dangerfield's patented self-deprecating, bug-eyed antics, and casually misogynist humor there's probably enough here to recommend a watch of this sort of kiddie-friendly curio from his filmography, but as a film on its own it's pretty awful. It's also quite a curio in the career of director Sidney J. Furie whose career ranged from b-horror like Dr. Blood's Coffin to the classy spy-thriller The Ipcress File, onto later director-for-hire stuff like Ladybugs and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, he was a bit all over the place.
Audio/Video: Ladybugs (1992) gets a not-pressed MOD Blu-ray release from Paramount presented in 1080p HD widescreen (1.78:1). This is likely the same dated transfer used for the 2010 Lionsgate Blu-ray, the source is in great shape, but colors seem slightly muted and contrast is not particularly dialed-in. The soft lensing doesn't offer a lot of razor sharp detail, but the grain field looks natural and textures are modestly pleasing. Skin tones tend to look a bit ruddy but otherwise not a terrible looking transfer, just dated. Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround with optional English subtitles. The track is quite front heavy so the 5.1 option is completely unnecessary, but it does the job. The only extra is a fullframe Trailer for the film. The single-disc release arrives in a standard keepcase with a single sided sleeve of artwork.
Special Features:
- Trailer (1:46)
Screenshots from the Paramount MOD Blu-ray:
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