#65 Chairman of the Board (Wes)

Chairman of the Board

So there I am sitting innocently looking at what movie is coming next up on out list and it’s one I’ve never heard of before, Chairman of the Board. In my mind I picture a boring movie about corporate take-overs and dodgy dealings, a little in the vein of maybe The Hudsucker Proxy, or possibly Wall Street. Obviously not as good as it wouldn’t be on this list, but surely something that is, if not interesting, then at least amusing in it’s complete ineptness at understanding the world of business. Then I looked at it on IMDB and saw it starred an actor by the name of Carrot Top and a little more of me died inside.

Surfer Edison (Carrot Top), is threatened with eviction after he spends his rent money on developing his useless inventions. Following a string of failed jobs, Edison meets elderly company owner and fellow surfer Armand McMillan (Jack Warden), when he helps him after his car has broken down. When Armand suddenly dies, Edison gets left all of Armand’s stock and becomes the new owner of McMillan industries. Of course he hasn’t a clue what to do, and it isn’t long before he runs afoul of Bradford McMillan (Larry miller), Armand’s nephew, who is bitter that he wasn’t left the stock himself. Bradford plots to run to companies share prices down so he can legally claim the stock from Edison. Edison must fight back and make the company successful and defeat Armand’s nefarious plans to sell the company to a rival firm. I on the other hand really need to find a new hobby.

The film starts off with Edison getting born. Even as an unborn baby he is mixing up chemicals and trying to invent things whilst in his mothers womb, which seriously leads to some worrying questions. Firstly and foremost being, where the hell did he get all the test tubes, beakers, and chemicals from? (I can only guess that his parents must have been up to some REALLY crazy shit), and who lets a baby play with chemicals in the first place? Once the baby is born (blown out of the womb in a chemical explosion), you see that he has a massive crop of ginger hair, showing anyone who may not have understood why Scott Thompson called himself Carrot Top in the first place (he has ginger hair you see. He even had it as a baby. I know these jokes are a little highbrow, but stick with me, and I’ll walk you through them).

Soon (after the credits) you see a grown up Edison asleep and being fondled by several girls arms and being told that that he was “incredible last night” and that they want him. Hilariously they’re just part of an invention that seems to be part of his alarm clock that catapults him from his bed. I’m not sure if this is meant to endear him to the audience, but I found it to be more Wallace and Vomit, than Wallace and Grommit.

  

This movie reminded me massively of Freddie Got Fingered (to see how much I hated that piece of crap see here http://100reasonstogooutside.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/73b-freddy-got-fingered-wes.html), so I decided to dub it Freddie got Gingered. Like a slightly less irritating, slightly more family friendly Tom Green, Carrot Top gets up to all sorts of hilarious high jinx. No wait, that should read, Carrot Top desperately tries to be as wacky as possible in a way that could only amuse eight-year old boys who have the attention span of a goldfish, which is suffering from short-term memory loss. Ooh look, Carrot Top has a bug zapper hat and has released some killer bees! Ooh look, Carrot Top beats up a corpse whilst trying to borrow a tie. Ooh look Carrot Top covers himself in post it notes. Ooh look, Wes is so bored of these tired antics he’s rocking back and forth and is softly crying to himself to make it all stop.

It’s actually like he decided he wanted to be like Jim Carrey after he stopped being funny. Perhaps he would have had a better acting career if he decided to try and break the Nickelodeon market and become a kids TV star. It worked for Paul Reubens with PeeWee Herman, so I’m sure with a good writer behind him Carrot Top could have had a successful career (he actually was the continuity announcer on the Cartoon Network for a few years in the mid nineties, so he was halfway there). Nowadays he still performs stand-up comedy (and seems to spend the rest of his time in the gym (and I just bet that he tells everyone on Facebook that he’s been there every time he goes)), so I guess he has his fans, but then again so does Tom Green, so there’s really no accounting for taste.

Being a massively ginger haired person must be hard in Hollywood. I’m sure it’s bad enough for them growing up, with the relentless teasing that most ginger people I know suffered in school, but to then go on to somewhere that is obsessed with looks is a brave move. Then to call yourself Carrot Top, so that people can be in absolutely no doubt about your inability to go out in the sun without immediately looking like you’ve just been dropped in boiling water, is a brave move that NEARLY paid off.

Sure he got the starring role in this movie, but this is the only one. Three years too early for the ginger revolution that the Weasley family would kickstart in the Harry potter movies (I see Rupert Grint as the ginger version of Rosa Parks. The boy who sat down in Hollywood and refused to be moved), the only other hugely popular ginger star I can think of who was around that time wasn’t even a real person (and I'm not talking about Ginger Spice and her "acting" in Spiceworld). However comparing Carrot Top to Chucky, (the doll from the Child’s Play movies), would be an easy, but totally unfair thing to do (even if they do pretty much have the same pyjamas, I can’t decide if this was done on purpose or not). Chucky was witty, had screen presence and managed to keep me watching his movies long after I felt I shouldn’t have. I suspect the same could never have been said for Carrot Top if he had more success.

It strikes me that so many of these movies that we’ve watched so far are supposed to be comedies, that fail to deliver on the even the most basic of levels, and once again Chairman of the Board is another poor comedy by numbers movie, that has such a formulaic plot that even Mystic Meg couldn’t fail to predict the ending. It’s a 24 carat flop that should be avoided by anyone who has even the slightest modicum of taste.