Cabin Boy (1992)

We watched this one via @walnutbatard , who also provided this introduction. 

Cabin Boy stands out as a movie that often requires a good amount of credit extended towards its creators, faith that there’s something covert or even diabolical about all of it despite every reason to believe that isn’t the case. This is of course a lot for a movie to ask, particularly in 1994, and may explain its quantum state as both one of the most derided and appreciated comedies by the few Boomers and Gen-Xers (respectively) who remember it. Its fans were invariably familiar with Elliot & Resnick’s chocolatey fingerprint on the Letterman Show (1982-1989) as well as their own network TV show “Get A Life” (1990-1992), which was somehow well-regarded but of course doomed from the start. Its detractors many and merciless, almost certainly including the guy credited for the “Fantastic Fun!” byline on the The Mask poster, which came out a few months later.

The appeal of Chris Elliott to me, and to a slightly lesser extent Cabin Boy, is that i just can’t pin him down. Despite everything I have seen (or possibly because) I still do not have the faintest idea what this person’s actual personality is like, when he’s trying to be funny, trying to be annoying, or just kinda let go of the wheel. That mystery is pretty rare, and to me, that’s the good stuff. Even when it’s the bad stuff.

Cabin Boy is about a fancy lad who prays to not break a sweat. Trained in the ways of polite society, he tries to take a trip to Hawaii, but is tricked by David Letterman and gets on the wrong boat. Once out to sea he accidentally kills the previous Cabin Boy, whose place he is forced to take, and sets the ship on a course for the Devil’s Triangle, where heavy shenanigans await. The ship is manned by an extremely sick crew of cool fisherman, who take every chance they get to humiliate/maroon/attempt to murder the Cabin Boy.  There’s also a cool cross-pacific swimmer collected from the sea, who sadly morphs into an uncool love interest. Most of the film is pretty funny stuff, with many scenes currently mulling like a fine wine in my mind-bottle (giant getting choked to death with his own belt… *kisses fingers* ; tobacco-spitting cupcake… bravissimo!). These moments of deep weirdness are the best parts of the movie; every scene bears a bountiful capacity for surprise.

However, at a certain point someone decides that Cabin Boy should start to resemble something of a normal movie, and that ends up as a tale of how a Cabin Boy becomes a Cabin Man.  Once the transition to manhood happens, the movie trades in many of its good jokes for jokes about how Cabin Boy is suddenly a man with respect and admiration, which overall are not as funny. This is also where the movie introduces the gag where he stands on his love interest’s back while she swims him places, which made me extremely bummed, and that I probably could have overlooked, except for the fact that it’s repeated for the movie’s last shot. So while there’s lots to recommend in this story, and it’s an undeniably important missing link in the evolution of comedy between 90s dumb man style and 2000s Adult Swim “dumb man” absurd style, it leaves something of a bad aftertaste.

Respect must be given to the wild trick this movie plays: I found the Cabin Boy delightful at the beginning of the film, where he’s deservedly hated by all, then disliked him in equal proportion to the increasing respect he gains as the story progresses. Was the darkness I felt at the ending born of having exposed myself as a bloodthirsty ghoul who hates Cabin Men everywhere, and wishes they would stay in a state of arrested development?  Or did this feeling come from the fear of one day being forced to become a Cabin Man myself? Am I a Cabin Man already, who the world loves but I despise? Did I just not like the ending of the movie because it seemed flimsy and rushed? Do humans have the capacity for change on a meaningful level, or do our experiences only affect the world’s perception of us, while we are trapped as fundamentally unchanging persons? Ultimately these big questions the film poses were inconsequential for me, since I was there for the yuks, and they’re where the yuks dropped off.  But if you’re up to the task, take a ride on this wrong boat, as there are wondrous sites to see.

Compared to Blockers (2018), which I also watched the other night, Cabin Boy had more jokes per minute, and more of them were funny. But unlike Blockers, which is still relatively fresh except for the already-anachronistic “butt chugging” part, chunks of Cabin Boy are past the expiration date. It features no women other than Ann Magnuson, an island goddess who Chris Elliott has sex with to become a man (until which point he is dismissed as a girl, a woman, a sissy, etc.), and Melora Walters, a swimmer whose back Chris Elliott stands on to get around. If the hypothetical reader is interested in separating rotten pieces from parts that’re totally still good, like mold from a dumpstered Trader Joe’s cheese, there’s a lot left over to get a lil stupid and enjoy here. But if you’re not interested in dumpstered cheeses I 100% get that.

Ann Magnuson has an erotic scene with David Bowie in major “billowing curtains” movie The Hunger (1983). I spent a while thinking about what it would be like to follow that eleven years later with an erotic scene with Chris Elliott, and realized this isn’t unrelated to the 2009/2019 pics I’ve lately seen ppl training the surveillance algorithms with in my social feeds – like, everyone I know is doing the transition from “I was young and kissed Bowie” to “haha I guess I’m still out here kissing Chris Elliott” in their own way right now. While this transition out of hot youth into whatever’s next has a tragic quality, I like that it’s also basically comedic and unknowably confusing. “It me” : A grinning six-armed god (age 35) on a magic island (no roommates other than my partner) married to a giant (having a full time day job) and seducing Chris Elliott for fun (doing a movie blog). That’s you too, when you think abt it.

That’s my review of “aging,” what else about Cabin Boy? Four of the five main characters are grizzled old fishermen led by Brian Doyle-Murray, and the ship most of the action takes place on is a chaos zone. The basic unromantic unpleasantness of the set and supporting cast have a fun tension with the naive staginess of Chris Elliott and the overall production design, especially e.g. the extremely fake ocean. There’s little to no action of consequence – it’s just a mixed bag of scenarios at sea, ranging from the typical (sailor songs; getting hammered below deck) to the slightly weird (fat-cheeked angry-blowing Harryhausen clouds; Dr. Jacoby as a merman) to the Mel Brooks-ian (Mike Starr as a giant… salesman?! A mafioso style… limo driver?!) to the befuddling (glacier monster fought with a coffee urn; heatstroke tobacco cupcake). In total it reads as “weird trip,” a movie feeling I love, but it def suffers from the matter of Chris Elliott’s manly education causing the best jokes to get front-loaded and the least funny, most bleak stuff to end up in act three. So if you do eat this cheese be warned that the last bites are where most of the mold is.