Film Appreciation - People in the Loon’s Nest

Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for the 1988 comedy The Great Outdoors.

I was only ten years old when John Candy passed away, but those first ten years of my life also happened to be an incredible time for his career. 41 of the 68 screen credits listed on his IMDb page were released during that period, with three more being released posthumously. He worked on so many projects during those ten years, I haven’t even seen some of them – but I saw a lot of them. Candy was a regular presence in the entertainment I watched during those ten years. He was on movies I saw on cable, in movies my family and I rented on VHS, in movies we saw in the theatre. And I adored the guy. I always liked to see him whenever he showed up in the movie, either as a cameo, a supporting role, or the lead. As I have said, there was even a time in my childhood when Armed and Dangerous was my favorite movie. Several of the films I saw Candy in during my childhood remain part of my viewing rotation, and the 1988 film The Great Outdoors is the one that’s gotten the most play in recent years.

Directed by Howard Deutch from a screenplay by John Hughes, The Great Outdoors reached theatres in June of ‘88, at which time I was four, so I was probably five years old by the time it was released on VHS and then started playing on cable... and I watched it many times on those formats. I did a lot of my Candy watching with my maternal grandmother when she would babysit me at her place, but I also remember watching this movie at home with my parents. Generally my father preferred to watch action movies, he rarely strayed away from that genre, but this was one of the few comedies that he would actually sit and watch and laugh along with. Maybe it’s because he was an outdoorsy type and probably would have enjoyed going on the vacation the character go on in this movie... If, you know, his vacation wouldn’t be ruined like the one in the movie is.

Candy stars as Chet Ripley, who heads out into the wilderness with his wife Connie (Stephanie Faracy) and their sons Buck (Chris Young) and Benny (Ian Giatti) to spend a week in a cabin on Lake Potowotominimac. It’s a place Chet’s father used to take him to when he was a kid. It’s the place he and Connie went to on their honeymoon. And now they’re hoping to create pleasant memories for their kids there as well. It will be a memorable vacation, but not a very pleasant or relaxing one. The issues start almost immediately. Their rental place stinks because the previous tenants left behind some of the fish they caught from the lake. Raccoons keep getting into the trash. And the Ripleys have barely gotten into the cabin before they receive surprise visitors: Connie’s sister Katie (Annette Bening), her wealthy husband Roman Craig (Dan Aykroyd), and their odd twin girls Cara and Mara (Hilary and Rebecca Gordon). The Craigs have invited the Ripleys along on multiple vacations, so they figure it’d be fun to crash their vacation. Chet is definitely not thrilled to see them.

Roman is your typical Dan Aykroyd loudmouth. He’s a city slicker who can’t leave the city behind, trying to make deals on his cell phone from this cabin in the middle of nowhere. He tries to take over the vacation from the moment he gets there, choosing what the families will eat and how they’re going to have fun. Chet wants to rent a pontoon boat to float around the lake in; Roman rents a speedboat. Then drags a reluctant Chet behind it on skis. Even when Chet gets to do something he wants to do, it ends in disaster. So the annoyance and frustration is building throughout the running time, and it’s only a matter of time before Chet is going to blow up.

When we’re not being amused by watching Chet’s plans fall apart or laughing at something Roman has blurted out, Hughes and Deutch also packed in entertaining supporting characters and several encounters with wildlife. Robert Prosky is the owner of the property the families are staying on, and he’s always fun to watch. Britt Leach plays Reg, a local who has been struck by lightning sixty-six times. Lucy Deakins plays Cammie, a local who Buck strikes up a relationship with – a side story that isn’t necessary, but it’s not surprising to see Hughes writing about teenage love. In addition to the raccoons (who talk to each other through subtitles), there’s a memorable sequence involving a bat that gets into the cabin – and this is a sequence I can relate to, because nearly twenty years after The Great Outdoors I found myself in a very similar situation. Teaming up with a friend to try to shoo a bat out of a building in the middle of the woods. So I have lived that, in a way... (and when Chet and family go to a restaurant and Chet takes on the challenge of trying to eat a 96 ounce steak, that’s definitely a situation I could imagine getting myself into as well.)

Then there’s the most memorable supporting character of all. Bart the Bear. There’s a legend of a giant, man-eating bear in the Lake Potowotominimac area, a bear that’s said to have had the hair sheared off the top of its head by a shotgun blast. This legend turns out to be very true as the film heads into its climactic sequence. I very clearly remember watching the bear scenes when I was a kid, and I’ll always remember the sound of my father laughing at what happens with the bear in the end. Something that could also be worded as, “what happens to the end of the bear”.

The Great Outdoors brought my family and I entertainment in the ‘80s, and it has brought more entertainment every time I’ve revisited it in the decades since. One of those viewings came in the fall of 2017, during one of the darkest periods of my life, as I had just lost both of my parents over the spring and summer. I saw that The Great Outdoors was airing on cable, so I put it on – and then, in the midst of this dark time, the movie was able to make my nephew and I laugh again at moments we had already seen and heard multiple times before. It seems to get overshadowed by other John Candy and John Hughes movies, but it’s a great comedy and it still holds up all these years later.