Verdict
Summary
The film is amusing, but more nerve wracking than hilarious. That said, I watched this movie a lot on TV when I was younger, so the film has some nostalgic value.
Kino Lorber’s new 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray edition of The Great Outdoors brings the film to levels of vibrancy it’s never seen before on home video in a new 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative. Special features include three audio commentaries with film historians and on with director Deutch, the trailer, and a slipcover.
Plot:
In-laws share a cabin in the “great outdoors” for a week, leading to hilarity.
Review:
Chet Ripley (John Candy) is a humble, working class hero dad who takes his wife Connie (Stephanie Faracy) and his sons Buck (Chris Young) and Ben (Ian Michael Giatti) to “the great outdoors” for a week vacation, staying in the same cabin they honeymooned in. Unbeknownst to them, Connie’s sister Kate’s (Annette Benning) husband, a go-getter Wall Street dude named Roman (Dan Aykroyd) and their twin girls show up in a Mercedes, fully intending to also stay in the cabin for the week! It’s like night and day with the two families, and it’s a bitter rivalry, as Chet is way more laid back and just wants to relax and have fun, while Roman is all about spending the big bucks to get a kick (such as renting a speedboat for water skiing, which ends in disaster). Meanwhile, teenage Buck finds romance in town with a cute local girl who’s been through it all before with city boys and knows how the weeklong romance will end.
Written by John Hughes at the height of his tenure as the comedy guy who conquered the ’80s, and directed by Howard Deutch (who directed Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful), The Great Outdoors is very much in the vein of a National Lampoon Vacation movie, with a slight variation. Candy and Aykroyd don’t have the perfect chemistry you’d expect, and while the movie has a few laugh-out loud moments (the local guy who’s been struck by lightning 66 times is my favorite bit), the movie has some set pieces that don’t quite pay off, such as the scene where Candy is forced to eat a 96-ounce steak to pay for everyone’s dinner, or when a scary climax with a home invasion by a huge bear (which is way more frightening than funny) ends with the bear literally getting his pants shot off. The film is amusing, but more nerve wracking than hilarious. That said, I watched this movie a lot on TV when I was younger, so the film has some nostalgic value.
Kino Lorber’s new 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray edition of The Great Outdoors brings the film to levels of vibrancy it’s never seen before on home video in a new 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative. Special features include three audio commentaries with film historians and on with director Deutch, the trailer, and a slipcover.
