Really Weird Tales (1986)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This is without doubt the worst omnibus movie I have ever seen. It's basically a crap Twilight Zone type of thing. But without any of the imagination that made that show interesting. The three stories here all try to mix weirdness with humour. I think it's supposed to be a parody of the genre but it's so witless it's hard to notice. Martin Short, John Candy and Catherine O'Hara star in this but none of them can elevate it much. The first story is about robot playmates, the second is about a charismatic salesman and the third about a nun who makes people explode. The writing is terrible and without exception every single segment is completely pointless. I can't recommend this to anyone really. It's very bad.

All fans of both Martin Short and John Candy beware! Both segments, Short's and Candy's, are really weak, uninteresting, and strictly predictable, or utterly ridiculous. The third segment is mildly successful, but no better than a Saturday Night Live skit. Perhaps two giggles total in all three segments makes this not worth the time to view. Absolutely disregard the rave reviews on this site, or you will be destined to follow my mistake of putting far to much hope in the named actors. This is not even on a par with National Lampoon's most tiresome efforts. Save your time and save your money, and avoid, avoid, avoid. - MERK

Joe Flaherty hosts this anthology movie. As host, he plays it a bit like Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone, but really over-the-top goofy, and yet not terribly funny unfortunately.In the first segment, Martin Short plays an insecure lounge singer who's been invited to perform at a place like the Playboy Mansion. This has been his dream, and the Hugh Hefner- type host seems to like him, and one of the young women there seems to like him too. She's played by Olivia D'Abo, who looks absolutely adorable here (and also sexy in a hot tub). One running gag is that Short, when asked for a drink, asks for a "Pouss Café," which takes a long time to make, and he doesn't end up drinking it either time. After Short and D'Abo stumble into a secret passage, you'll guess how it will end long before the segment gets to the end.In the second segment, John Candy plays a confident man who wants to make real estate barons out of every member of a poor town ("the flyswatter capital of the world"). As long as you don't read the brief plot summary on the back of the video box, you'd probably never guess how this one ends. It's not very satisfying.In the final segment, a young woman who was raised by nuns is sent out into the world. They all treated her badly, since whoever (or whatever) she loves will explode. She does her best to try not to love anything, but is such a soft touch she finds it difficult and looks for a cure. I don't know that I liked how it ended, but it is at least the most interesting segment of the three. The surly talking Cabbage Patch-type dolls were amusing.Not really recommended. It would help a lot if you're a big fan of the actors from SCTV.

I am a fan of John Candy so I will tell you up front that I loved the guy but Cursed with Charisma for being only about 30 minutes long was one of the funniest pieces of forgotten work that John Candy ever did. It summed up the 1980's America perfectly with all the leveraged buyouts, hostile take overs and real estate boom and portrayed the perennial TV real estate seminar and home study salesman that still exist today in the 21st Century.I rate it up right up there with Planes Trains and Automobiles. If you ever get a chance to see it by all means do you will laugh yourself silly and you will have seen one of the great men of comedy doing what he did best making people smile and laugh. John may be gone but his comedy now belongs to the ages.