Only on occasion having anything remotely funny on the level of Mel Brooks or Monty Python or any of the great spoof film makers, this is about as funny as cleaning up the ashes after someone is wrongly burnt as a witch. There's a lot of talent about, but you don't see the talent because they're having to deal with a very unfunny script, outlandishly stupid in nature, thinking that if you speak in modern lingo in a time long past, that people are going to laugh out of the irony of it. Like she did with "The Wicked Stepmother", Barbara Carrera is a beautiful witch who has an alternate look. Instead of Bette Davis, here it's Anne Ramsey, getting lots of work after her success as Mama the previous year.
The comedy is so obvious this that there are more groans than giggles, chuckles or smirks, with modern references mistaken for something that would automatically be funny in context with the plot. That screams desperation to me, and instantly dated it. Watch this after watching "Young Frankenstein" or "High Anxiety" or "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", and the evidence of what makes good comedy just piles up.
This is TV sitcom style comedy on the big screen, and that medium doesn't always work when looking a hundred times larger. Even on home video it fails. The VHS of this barely moved off the new release shelf when it was first released, and had more dust than Salem did witch ashes six months after it moved into general rental. The actors try, but none of them really seem extremely comfortable with the material, as if they knew deep down that it was going to bomb and just decided to up-play the silliness to the point where it just comes off as rude and obnoxious. With money at stake, "Love at Stake" was handed the noose the moment it left the lab.
The comedy is so obvious this that there are more groans than giggles, chuckles or smirks, with modern references mistaken for something that would automatically be funny in context with the plot. That screams desperation to me, and instantly dated it. Watch this after watching "Young Frankenstein" or "High Anxiety" or "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", and the evidence of what makes good comedy just piles up.
This is TV sitcom style comedy on the big screen, and that medium doesn't always work when looking a hundred times larger. Even on home video it fails. The VHS of this barely moved off the new release shelf when it was first released, and had more dust than Salem did witch ashes six months after it moved into general rental. The actors try, but none of them really seem extremely comfortable with the material, as if they knew deep down that it was going to bomb and just decided to up-play the silliness to the point where it just comes off as rude and obnoxious. With money at stake, "Love at Stake" was handed the noose the moment it left the lab.