Bad Medicine (1985)

OK, these folks had a cast of good actors - in fact there are some pleasant surprises in that department, enough to make this a slightly better than average film. More on that later.The screenplay and direction... well, it seems sometimes that any laughs in this thing were accidental - what may have been intended to be the big jokes fall flat, leaving incidental chances for levity. Very occasional chances until well into the film - so hang in there, people, it does get better.What excuse does the director offer for this film? If you're going to do accent and ethnic humor, DO it. Don't hire Alan Arkin, then let him sleepwalk through an acting job - make him ACT, more than he did in the first half of this film. Beat him if you must, but do it. Don't let him be a walking ad for Ambien. Good points? Steve Guttenberg actually surprised me on this one - he did an excellent job of acting, up there with his opening scenes in "The Boys From Brazil" as the young amateur Nazi hunter. So did Gilbert Gottfried, for that matter - he's much better than I have seen him perform in his other films. Bill Macy puts in an honest job, much more than I can say of Arkin, who seems to phone his lines in.Production values? The camera-work's pretty good - they shot the film in Spain and decent professionals did the technical work, but the person responsible for the soundtrack should be shot for having a very heavy hand with the brass in the orchestra and stealing the guitarist from some backyard porn studio in Marin County.Yeah, you should watch it. It's worthwhile if you stick with the film until almost halfway through.

The archetype of Medical School Comedy is the British film DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE to which no American flick can hardly dare to be compared.Yet this film and Gross Anatomy deserve an honorable though distant second place. In BAD MEDICINE young Americans out of the zone of consideration for American schools transplant themselves to Latin America to study medicine against the challenges of a strong local culture, particularly the absolutism of Latin schools where discipline is considerably more rigorous than back home.There are two characters who best represent the reaction of the locals: the director of the school who openly tells Americans: HERE WE ARE THE ELITE and the director's secretary who proclaims her love for American culture having studied it thoroughly through Philip Roth's pulp novels.But there is a serious side to the dictatorial ways of the director. A doctor handles people's lives and must account for his actions.That degree of understanding of the serious task at hand is bye the bye entirely lost in PATCH ADAMS who can cause a young med student's death and make a joke of it.

You'd have to be a fan of farces to like this. It has some novel ideas, such as illegally obtaining a fresh cadaver that has to be transported from the city morgue to the school, while rigor mortis is beginning to set in. Alan Arkin has a secondary, not a starring, role. He brings more to the part than the writer gave him. Steve Guttenberg is surprisingly good as the son of a doctor who can't get into an American medical school, or even a first or second grade foreign one. Curtis Armstrong, in particular, is terrific in his medical student role. Over all, however, this is strictly a B movie. Julie Haggerty is terrible as the glamorous student with whom the school director (Arkin) is enamored. There is nothing alluring about her looks, and her approach to comedy acting is out of sync with the rest of the cast's.

Putrid comedy about a medical school where the cross-cultural transition is complicated by idiot students and curriculum. Embarrassing misfire for Arkin, who is horrible behind what is either a Mexican accent...or Jewish, whereas it would be a dead on impression of Jackie Mason.