Bill Murray Week: Stripes

Back again boys and girls for Day 3 of Bill Murray Week and we need to do a double feature due to yesterday kinda caught up with me so no worries you will get your fix.  That being said; today’s film is a collaboration of Harold Ramis (SCTV, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II), Len Blum (Meatballs, Feds, Dream Tower, Private Parts and Over the Hedge) and Daniel Goldberg (Cannibals Girls, Meatballs, Heavy Metal and Feds) collective writing to bring out brash comedy, reckless behavior and the modern Army.   Our boy of course is the focus of this movie as former cab driver John Winger so make roll call, get your gear together and get ready to raise Hell.  This is Stripes.

Cabs handle better after an entire bottle of cough syrup.

General Barnicke:  Are you telling me that you men finished your training on your own?

John Winger: That’s the fact, Spoiler!

Soldiers: That’s the fact, Jack!

John Winger (Bill Murray) is a cab driver who manages within the sitting of a few hours systematically loses his job, his car is repossessed and his girlfriend leaves him.  His best friend Russell Ziskey (Harold Ramis of SCTV, Heavy Metal, Ghostbusters, Baby Boom, Ghostbusters II and As Good as It Gets) a professor of English at a community college and they both make the decision to join the Army.   Off the bus to Fort Arnold they meet up with their cohort recruits and their drill sergeant, Sergeant Hulka (Warren Oates of In the Heat of the Night, The Wild Bunch, Badlands, 1941 and The Border) who does not see eye to eye with the sarcastic Winger and helps him with his attitude with pushups and a bit of an ass whooping.  Due to training accident with a mortar explosion; Hulka is in medical so the boys sneak out with their fellow boot campers to a mud wrestling bar.

War games gone askew.

Their floundering commander Captain Stillman (John Larroquette of Black Sheep Squadron, Altered States, Green Ice, Cat People, Night Court and The John Larroquette Show) reprimands them and demands the whole unit does not get to graduate.  Winger and company shape up and finish their training for graduation proving them to the brass and are on assignment watching an Urban Assault Vehicle called the EM-50 (the RV from Hell).   Winger and Ziskey take off to West Germany to visit their MP girlfriends AWOL and Stillman is convinced they are commie spies so it is a search and destroy mission off the books.

Now I have a quick couple of highlights of the film.   A gathering of actors cut their teeth on this film such as: John Diehl, Judge Reinhold, P.J. Soles, Sean Young, John Larroquette and Timothy Busfield.  SCTV Network 90 members joined this film were of course Harold Ramis, John Candy, Dave Thomas and Joe Flattery.  This is deemed by many as a Bill Murray classic for the raunchiest behavior, sexual references, drugs, liquor and snarky comedy that is still funny.  Czechoslovakia of course now the Czech Republic now no longer under Soviet standing but hey it’s no Wisconsin.

Clearly she is getting the Aunt Jemima treatment.