#165: Hot to Trot

Release Date: August 26th, 1988

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Hugo Gilbert, Stephen Neigher, and Charlie Peters

Directed by: Michael Dinner

1.5 Stars

Ah, the 1980s. What a time to be alive if you were a screenwriter in Hollywood. Movie theaters were booming, cable was up and running, and the VHS market was a gold mine. 

You could make a living as a writer of cheap straight-to-video stuff, or melodramatic TV mini-series, or trash like Hot to Trot, a feature film comedy starring Bobcat Goldwait.

The movie, about a man-child (a la Pee Wee Herman, but not funny) who inherits the family stock brokerage and his mother’s talking horse - yes, you read that correctly - is dead on arrival. The script is bad. There are no laughs here, unless the idea of a talking horse does it for you.

The ‘80s was also the golden era for comedians with deranged personas and funny voices. Some were total hacks (Howie Mandel), while others were brilliant (the aforementioned Pee Wee). Bobcat falls somewhere in the middle, but he has nothing to work with here. 

Reportedly the movie previewed so poorly with audiences that the horse’s part went through two voice actors (Elliot Gould of all people, then John Candy) and a series of rewrites in post production where the horse dialogue was punched up with new jokes that had to be puzzled into the already finished film and its existing human dialogue. What a nightmare. In the end, John Candy ended up improvising the whole thing in the booth. 

He knew he was dealing with a big pile of manure.