Caddyshack (1980) and Caddyshack II (1988)

“Caddyshack” well may have been the first “R”-rated movie I ever saw, back in the early 1980s on HBO, then the only way a child got to see forbidden movies. I didn’t get 90 percent of the jokes, but I laughed hysterically at the gopher and Bill Murray’s grungy assistant groundskeeper. I’m older now, but I still adore that puppet and Murray’s stoner wiseass, and that random Baby Ruth incident. Heck, the entire film is random, packed with adlibs from Murray, Chevy Chase, Ted Knight, Brian Doyle-Murray and Rodney Dangerfield, plus a gaggle of horny youth. Its bare-bones plot tracks a series of characters in and around a snobby golf course and country club, focusing on balls of both the greens and sheets, and drugs and booze. Some scenes soar, others fail. I’ve known many rich, white, golf clubbing, country club bigots who love this fully and openly un-PC film, but have no idea they are the butt of every gag. B+

In “Caddyshack” everyone thought a Baby Ruth candy bar in a pool was a piece of shit. They bolted. No mistake about “Caddyshack II,” though. It is shit. Anyone with brains from the first film got out of the pool after reading the script to this laugh-free snoozer. Not Chase. He stayed. Idiot. Dan Aykroyd replaces Murray, while Jackie Mason tries to be Dangerfield. Both give performances too awful to discuss. A fiasco with a capital F.

Fletch (1985)

Chevy Chase is in nearly every scene of “Fletch,” a guy-and-a-dame gumshoe spoof done far better and deeper in “The Long Goodbye” a near-decade earlier. But this has a slice of Woodward/Bernstein-tweaking journalism. Chase is “L.A.Times” reporter Irwin Fletcher, a master-of-disguise undercover star reporter with a Jane Doe byline. His recent gig has him on the path of drug-dealing beach bums until he’s sucked into a murder-for-hire scam that will take him all the way to exotic Idaho. The whole plot is a screwball joke. There’s a good deal of laughs as Chase dons disguises or just balls-out improvises his way through interviews, mostly with dumb people, snatching and stealing info for his story. I wish the film had more spark or life, but it happily glides from start to finish, just as Fletch glides through deadlines. Chase’s seemingly effortless deadpan work is riotous. B+

Snow Day (2000)

"Snow Day," a comedy about children relieved of school for the day, is too awful to ponder here for more than this next sentence. Chevy Chase stars, painfully, riffing on decade old “Christmas Vacation” gags. Terrible. D-

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

The “Vacation” films with Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold are a mixed batch: “European” and “Vegas” are trash. The first “Vacation” is wonderful, and I adore “Christmas Vacation.” Here, the Griswolds stay home while parents, great aunts and cousins visit. Utter fantastic, wonderfully funny mayhem ensues. I love Chase in these films, he has the gleam of a hap-hap-happy psychopath in his eyes, one bent on not murder but fatherly perfection. But it’s Randy Quaid who walks away with the film as a redneck from hell, with an RV and raccoon-eyed children in tow. “Merry Christmas! Shitter was full!” he says to yuppie neighbors as he empties a chemical toilet into a street sewer grate. Priceless. Penned by John Hughes in his glory days, this reminds us that family can be hell, but we all need a little hell now and then. A