Sandler flushes Hanukkah down the toilet with 'Eight Crazy Nights'

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Unlikely to ever wind up on a network Christmas lineup, "Eight Crazy Nights" (named after a line in Adam Sandler's "Hanukkah Song") is a steady stream of fart gags and foul language, belches and butt-cracks, animal droppings and human feces and urine stains.

MOVIE REVIEW

EIGHT CRAZY NIGHTS

DIRECTOR: Seth Keasley

CAST: Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider

RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for frequent crude and sexual humor, drinking and brief drug references

WHERE: Auburn Cinema 17, Bella Bottega, Crossroads, East Valley, Everett 4-10, Factoria, Galleria, Gateway 8, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Longston, Metro, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Parkway Plaza, Woodinville 12

GRADE: C

Penned and produced by Sandler, the movies' man-boy of adolescent toilet humor and juvenile sex jokes, there's little here that your average 12-year-old hasn't giggled about in the company of other kids. But that hardly makes it appropriate material for Hollywood's first genuine Hanukkah movie, an animated picture ostensibly aimed at the family audience.

The innocence of holiday cheer ain't what it used to be.

Drunken 33-year-old misanthrope Davey Stone, the overage juvenile delinquent of a hero voiced by Sandler, makes the Grinch look like George Bailey. He even flips the (animated) finger to the harmless old codger Whitey, his oblivious dwarf of a guardian angel.

Sandler also voices Whitey (in a grating soprano squeal) and Whitey's kvetching fraternal twin sister Eleanore, a toadstool-size odd couple living in their own eccentric, insulated world.


Insults and scatological sight gags stain "Eight Crazy Nights," Hollywood's first genuine Hanukkah movie. It features the voice of writer and producer Adam Sandler.

They are the best thing in a truly flabbergasting movie that careens from bullying insults and scatological sight gags to a barrage of product placements playing the ghosts of Christmas past in a soppy sentimental lesson. It's "A Christmas Carol" transformed into a celebration of shopping mall culture!

Director Seth Keasley, making his feature debut, brings good comic timing to Sandler's juvenile jestering and makes the most of his rare moments of goofy inspiration, while old "Saturday Night Live" buddies Kevin Nealon and Jon Lovitz hit Sandler's wavelength. Rob Schneider's relaxed narration could have come from a Disney TV special.

The film has good design, effective animation and generic if endurable songs, but Sandler wants to slam his sentiment and wallow in it too, and he compromises with the worst of both worlds.