Offbeat comedy shown on the late great ABC's TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (made for TV movies were born here). Two groups of professionals who play basketball each week to release stress from their urban livlihoods devise a new game: Each team will hide a basketball somewhere in the big city for the other team to find. The catch? It must be somewhere in full view of the public. Plus, the opposing must retrieve the basketball. This gets kind of tricky when one basketball is used in a modern art exhibit at a high security museum. Kind of an all male version of WHO'S MINDING THE MINT. Great cast, great pacing, great idea. I wish ABC would release more of this series of films on video (DUEL, SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, and TRILOGY OF TERROR have been released so maybe more will). Great source for remakes. I would love to see Shirts/Skins made with a contemporary coed cast. It would have to be retitled of course.
2 Reviews
"It's not funny. It's not a game, and it's got to stop!"
mark.waltz26 June 2020
Warning: Spoilers
The most intelligent line in this movie comes from Loretta Swit as Bill Bixby's wife in this outlandishly awful TV movie comedy that has a group of misfits who have created a basketball team to create a basketball scavenger hunt, and the adventures that go as individual members of the team (alone and in small groups) go out of their way to find, some marked shirts and the others marked skins. The men are bears in their daily professions, but bear cubs on the court, and they are given perhaps the single most unfunny script I've yet to see in a so-called TV movie comedy.
The cast of this comic misfire includes a varied cast with Leonard Frey, Rene Auberjonois and Leonard Frey among them, and in one of the tackiest scenes I've seen in any medium from 1970 on up, one of the men covers themselves in black shoe polish to break into an office, only to be confronted by Ron Glass and his group of buddies hanging out inside a parking lot. The attempt to explain his blackface results in MacLean Stevenson being forced to explain that he's a karate expert and proceed to make a complete fool out of himself. The men are all written as idiots with the women (Swit, Audrey Christie and Jessica Rains) obviously much smarter. It is a complete embarrassment as entertainment and painful in every way to try and get through.
The cast of this comic misfire includes a varied cast with Leonard Frey, Rene Auberjonois and Leonard Frey among them, and in one of the tackiest scenes I've seen in any medium from 1970 on up, one of the men covers themselves in black shoe polish to break into an office, only to be confronted by Ron Glass and his group of buddies hanging out inside a parking lot. The attempt to explain his blackface results in MacLean Stevenson being forced to explain that he's a karate expert and proceed to make a complete fool out of himself. The men are all written as idiots with the women (Swit, Audrey Christie and Jessica Rains) obviously much smarter. It is a complete embarrassment as entertainment and painful in every way to try and get through.
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