Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #135 Sour Grapes AKA Happy Hour (1986)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

Our heroic journey through the films of Tawny Kitaen has only just begun but it’s already apparent that unlike the tawdrier, sexier realm of hair metal music videos, film did not understand who Kitaen was as an actress and a performer and how best to use her. 

Kitaen’s appeal should be self-evident. She’s a world-class beauty with an ebullient personality and sparkling presence. Audiences of the Reagan era obviously wanted to see Kitaen romping about joyously in a bikini or less, in the company of handsome men or equally unclothed, similarly gorgeous women. 

So why does the perplexing and ultimately vexing 1986 sex comedy Happy Hour AKA Sour Grapes cast Kitaen pointlessly against type as a gun-toting sidekick to Jamie Farr’s glowering corporate spy Crummy Fred? 

Then again Sour Grapes makes a number of puzzling, counter-intuitive decisions. It introduces the juicy sex comedy premise of a beer additive so addictive and irresistible it turns anyone who drinks it into a booze-guzzling fiend and changes society instantly and permanently, only to devote a good hour of its 87 minute runtime to corporate espionage. 

It’s a little like how the Star Wars prequels promised derring-do and thrilling space battles, then lulled audiences to sleep with exposition involving tariffs and trade wars and federations. 

Sour Grapes toyed with my emotions by initially soaring high above my non-existent expectations and exhibiting at least a modicum of ambition and craft in an opening credit sequence that uses pictures and press clippings to document the relationship and career progressions of protagonist Blakely Teegarden (Richard Gilliland) and Meredith Casey (Debbie Gates), his best friend and closest professional colleague. 

We watch as these two grow close personally and professionally before their bond is threatened by Blakely’s marriage to beautiful blonde Cathy (Kathi Diamant). It’s a surprisingly artful opening credit sequence. My hopes were raised further by such irresistible enticements as “Special Appearance by Eddie Deezen”, a song credit for Devo and finally “Rich Little as Mr. X.”

I am particularly puzzled by Deezen getting a Special Appearance credit for what is ultimately a fairly sizable supporting role as one of Blakely’s office-mates. Then again, I suppose that any time Eddie Deezen appears in a motion picture is, by definition, a special appearance. Hell, if Deezen goes anywhere, it’s a special appearance. If he makes a Taco Bell run then he’s making a special appearance employees and fellow customers will remember and treasure forever. 

Sour Grapes is a science-fiction comedy with an outrageous conceit: what if there was something in beer that made it irresistible and addictive, to the point where people will do anything to get more? 

Of course beer does contain something that makes it irresistible and addictive: it’s called alcohol, and it makes a lot of people happy and destroys a lot of lives. 

The existence of alcohol consequently renders Sour Grapes’ premise both redundant and irrelevant. Instead of this hackneyed MacGuffin making beer irresistible and addictive it just ends up making it even more irresistible and addictive than it already is. 

Blakely and Meredith create a chemical that makes seemingly anything delicious and irresistible, beginning with Marshall’s beer. Alas, only one vial of this magical elixir exists and Meredith absconds with half of it in a fit of resentment and jealousy. 

Marshall’s beer is so delicious and so popular that seemingly everyone other than Blakely is drunk on it all the time. The drinking age is lowered to six. At home Blakely looks on in horror as his daughter is encouraged to pour beer on her Corn Flakes instead of milk. 

At a diner Blakely makes the mistake of ordering coffee rather than beer, and is jeered and ridiculed by cartoonish punk rockers and other beer enthusiasts so hopelessly infatuated with brews that they are personally offended by sobriety. 

If everyone in the world was drunk off the most delicious beer in the world it would be a boozy, bleary paradise followed shortly by pure hell. Sour Grapes has some demented fun in the very early going imagining a world where the party never stops.

Sour Grapes quickly loses interest in its wacky satirical premise, however, and focusses monomaniacally on corporate sabotage no one in their right mind could possibly care about. Call me crazy, but I think a wacky sex comedy about a world where everyone is sloshed should focus on partying and booze, not corporate espionage and business competition.

Just as Kitaen is perversely cast for how tough she looks waving around a piece while backing up Jamie Farr, impressionist extraordinaire Rich Little is bizarrely cast for how good he looks in formal wear as the James Bond of the corporate intrigue biz. 

Oh sure, the screenwriters find an excuse for Little to trot out his Cary Grant impersonation but otherwise a man famous only for impersonating famous celebrities plays a paragon of glamour and excitement as “Mr. X”, a wily secret agent of the business world tasked with tracking down the secret formula that makes Marshall’s beer so damn good. 

Watching Little act couldn’t help but remind me of The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles’ legendarily lost and then found New Hollywood psychodrama. For the central role of a hotshot filmmaker exactly like Peter Bogdanovich, right down to his predilection for punishing the people around him with non-stop celebrity impressions, Welles inexplicably cast Little on the grounds that the character does a lot of impressions and Little is a famous impressionist. 

After several weeks of shooting, Little and Welles both seem to have come to the realization that casting Little as someone EXACTLY like Peter Bogdanovich was an exercise in insanity when Bogdanovich is available to essentially play himself, which he ended up doing when he replaced Little in the role.

Sour Grapes puzzlingly casts Little as a figure of romance, glamour and intrigue who gets the girl as part of his dangerous life as a man whose loyalty can be bought along with his unique skill set. 

While Mr. X tries to steal the formula for his bosses, Farr’s Dirty Harry parody Crummy Fred is dispatched, alongside sidekick Misty Roberts (Kitaen) and nerd Hancock (Deezen) to stop him. Blakely, meanwhile, wants to use his invention to cure world hunger rather than promote alcoholism. 

Sour Grapes roars out of the gate with an excess of energy and ideas, if not inspiration. In its first act at least it has satirical aspirations that quickly fall by the wayside so that the film can devote itself wholeheartedly to an espionage plot it would be better off either eschewing or mocking. 

This rare non-killer tomato-themed comedy from the team behind the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes franchise runs out of inspiration quickly. It over-achieves briefly before becoming every bit as stupid and insulting as it looks. 

As a cinephile and a human being, I deserve so much more from this dopey sex comedy from the 1980s. I will NEVER forgive Happy Hour for getting my hopes up before dashing them sadistically.

Then again I was sober when I watched this, and imbibing a beer, or two, or three, or four, or five, or even six probably would have greatly enhanced the experience. It certainly couldn’t have made it any worse.  

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