Nothing but Trouble (1991)

Of Auteurism and Akroyds: BSC Cinephiles Good/Bad Film #1

Dante Simoncelli

Dan Aykroyd is a strange public figure. He very much believes in aliens. And his current business venture is vodka based on his belief in aliens. (Side note: I’ve heard it’s pretty good vodka).

However, his 1991 film Nothing but Trouble, the first and only movie he directed, is stranger than his belief in the paranormal. I first heard about when popular YouTube comic film critics Red Letter Media reviewed it. And then again when the true crime comedy podcast Last Podcast on the Left tried to get a campaign going to inflate its Rotten Tomatoes score (they ended up getting it to drop). Inspired by the public attention the film received, as well as the BSC Cinephiles Good/Bad Film Festival, I decided to see if the truth was really out there.

This horror-comedy follows a big shot New York City financial adviser named Chris Thorne (Chevy Chase) as he embarks on a road trip in an effort to woo the heartbroken Diane Lightson (Demi Moore). The odd couple end up in a run-down Pennsylvania coal town called “Valkenvania” (Loosely based on the real-life ghost town Centralia, Pennsylvania, which is also the inspiration for the classic horror video game series Silent Hill). There they are pulled over for ignoring a stop sign by a cop (John Candy, also appearing in drag as another character later in the film), who brings them to a junk riddled mansion to face the 106-year-old Judge (Dan Aykroyd, accompanied by gobs of spirit gum and a giant, fat man-baby-monster something). We soon learn the Judge, descended from the family that ruled Valkenvania in its hay day, administers extra-judicial punishment to any wealthy undesirables who pass through the town, as The Judge blames them for his town’s downfall.

Nothing but Trouble’s script (co-written by Aykroyd’s brother Peter) routinely breaks the rules you learn on the first day of Screenwriting 101—and not in the avant garde sense. The main characters have no inherent motivations, they seem to decide to take their trip for no real reason moments after meeting each other. Three characters disappear from the plot without anyone else noticing and reappear at the end without any explanation. There is a pleasantly surreal interlude in which the film breaks completely from its main story for a musical performance by Digital Underground, famous for “The Humpty Dance,” which features a guest performance by Tupac Shakur in his film debut. Oh, did I forget to mention that? THIS IS TUPAC’S FILM DEBUT.

To be fair to Aykroyd, it seems he didn’t want to direct; the film was rejected (for some reason) by both John Landis and John Hughes. The filming was marked by turmoil, a lot of which was the expected Chevy Chase on-set assholery (Chase’s displeasure is even more evident in his lackluster acting here than it is elsewhere). Nothing but Trouble also went through a superfluity of studio meddling in post, although I have an eerie sixth sense that tells me the director’s cut might be more insane than the already bonkers film in current circulation. From a production standpoint, it is little more than a box office failure that did irreparable damage to multiple stars’ reputations.

Not a fan of HarmonTown — Not a fan of *HarmonTown*

But from the perspective of a film viewer today, I can’t help but recommend it. It remains a curious look into Akroyd’s strange visions, a celebrity whose imagination strays from the rote expectations of standard filmic form. While it is unavoidably true that his imagination benefits best from strong editing (as in the example of Ghostbusters), there is still a lot here to admire. For example, Aykroyd clearly let his set designers have free reign over how the staged environments were built, resulting in some of the more vivid backgrounds in recent studio film. To summarize, I can’t say it’s a “good film,” whatever that means. But I won’t say it’s bad either. I recommend it to you in the sense I would recommend outsider music: an acquired taste worth the acquisition.