Jerky, jerky, jerky, hmmmmmm . . . could it rhyme with turkey?
Not only does it rhyme with turkey, you could baste "The Jerky Boys" at 800 degrees for four hours and serve it for Thanksgiving. It's already stuffed.
The movie has one selling point: It teases you and then shows you the faces of the two legendary radio guerrillas, answering an inchoate need that people feel when they make an empathetic connection to a voice. Too bad they couldn't have come up with a story.
If you don't know and haven't run into them on radio, the Jerky Boys are two tough-talking, hysterically funny unemployed construction workers from Queens, and New York's harsh, jangly rhythms, seething hostilities and off-the-wall diversity swirl through their every syllable.
Eight years ago, Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed began making crank calls to potential employers as a way of irritating the people who had been irritating them by not hiring them. It turned out that they had unusual levels of creativity and an
amazing ability to sustain the conceits of their impersonations for extended lengths of time. It was goofing the man raised to an art form.
Ultimately, they amused themselves so mightily that they began making tapes of the calls for their friends, who were also amused. Copies of the tapes were made and re-made and began to circulate on a completely ad hoc, hand-to-hand and friend-to-friend basis; eventually they began turning up on radio. It was guerrilla comedy at its best, and for years Brennan and Ahmed didn't make one thin dime off it.
Then last year, a record company bought the rights to the tapes: "The Jerky Boys" became the best-selling comedy album of 1994. "The Jerky Boys 2," now out, went gold in 12 days. There's an authorized book. Now, the film.
Why the film? Particularly, why this film? The strength of the boys was their spontaneity, their remorselessness, their willingness to take it to the limit. The humor is black, edgy, powerful, unsettling, but all those virtues vanish when embalmed in stale formula as director James Melkonian has done. (He co-wrote with Rich Wilkes and Brennan and Ahmed.)
The movie is essentially a tortured sitcom plot that twists itself into strange places in order to make some attempt to accommodate logically the characters the boys made famous. It's like a formal exercise in creative writing, in which the teacher puts three disparate items on her desk and commands you to write a story using all three, usually ending up with a last line like, "And so Phil picked up the melon-ball scooper and broke the soup tureen with it."
The characters are Frank Rizzo, who crackles with profane anger (Brennan's best voice), Tarbash the Egyptian Magician, old Sol Rosenberg and the gay actor. It takes too much doing to get them all in, and each sequence must be further distorted to include some form of electronic vocal communication, like the phone, an intercom, a mike. It grows tiring.
The story begins with Rizzo convincing Mafioso Alan Arkin that the boys are actually Chicago torpedoes come to New York to take over. The same Alan Arkin who was once Yossarian? Where are the great roles of yesteryear? This leads to lame chases, unfunny phone calls, dim mix-ups and phony violence, as two cops try to sort out all the confusion.
Of the boys, only Johnny Brennan really seems to get that he's in a movie. Ahmed is a doughy presence who always seems a beat behind and overacts except when he underacts. Brennan may be a find: He radiates a kind of grungy, anti-heroic presence, is fast and clever with his tongue and photographs well. Think of Denis Leary with biceps.
MOVIE REVIEW
"The Jerky Boys"
Starring Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed
Directed by James Melkonian
Released by Caravan
Rated R (extreme profanity)
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