Critic Reviews

It's not big and it's not clever, but it's very, very funny.

Caddyshack has a low-budget look that warmly welcomes the all-important teenage audience. It looks like a film they could have made. And everyone associated with the film—in front of and behind the camera—is aware that he or she is making a frivolous film...That's why Rodney Dangerfield's cornball jokes and spritzing barbs are so perfectly right for the film. These are throwaway jokes for a most disposable motion picture, the kind of film that drive-ins were designed to play.

It's not as funny as "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie," but it is less pushy than "Meatballs." It is not as thickly stocked with outrageous moments as "Animal House," yet it is far easier to take than "Where the Buffalo Roam."

Indeed, their most inspired moment is a total non sequitur -- a parody of "Jaws" involving a Baby Ruth bar and a pool full of terrified swimmers. Nonetheless, between Dangerfield's jokes, which charge like rhinos, and Chase's droll backhand swipes, there are just enough laughs to keep this harmless farce rolling to the eighteenth hole. [11 Aug 1980, p.69]

Caddyshack never finds a consistent comic note of its own, but it plays host to all sorts of approaches from its stars, who sometimes hardly seem to be occupying the same movie.

Too much time is spent on the forced romance between O'Keefe and Holcomb, an attractive waitress, however, and the slapstick becomes utterly mindless toward the end (as if the producer said, "Okay, it's time for this film to really get out of control!"). Still, the laughs keep coming.

This vaguely likable, too-tame comedy falls short of the mark.

If you're still at the age when farting and nose-picking seem funny, then Caddyshack should knock you dead. Buried deep - very deep - beneath the rising tide of effluent is a pleasant enough story of a kind about trying to make it to the top as a caddy while yet remaining human; a movie which could have done for golf what Breaking Away did for cycling. Instead it allows a string of resistible TV comics (Chase excepted) to mug through an atrocious chain of lame-brained set pieces, the least vulgar of which involves a turd in a swimming pool.

The first-time director, Harold Ramis, can't hold it together: the picture lurches from style to style (including some ill-placed whimsy with a gopher puppet) and collapses somewhere between sitcom and sketch farce. Male bonding remains the highest value of the Animal House comedies: women are trashed with a fierceness out of Mickey Spillane.

To attempt a critical evaluation of Orion's new Caddyshack is a little like describing the esthetic qualities of an outhouse.