Caddyshack

It's not big and it's not clever, but it's very, very funny. Read full review

Caddyshack has a low-budget look that warmly welcomes the all-important teenage audience. It looks like a film they could have made. And everyone associated with the film—in front of and behind the camera—is aware that he or she is making a frivolous film...That's why Rodney Dangerfield's cornball jokes and spritzing barbs are so perfectly right for the film. These are throwaway jokes for a most disposable motion picture, the kind of film that drive-ins were designed to play. Read full review

It's not as funny as "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie," but it is less pushy than "Meatballs." It is not as thickly stocked with outrageous moments as "Animal House," yet it is far easier to take than "Where the Buffalo Roam." Read full review

Indeed, their most inspired moment is a total non sequitur -- a parody of "Jaws" involving a Baby Ruth bar and a pool full of terrified swimmers. Nonetheless, between Dangerfield's jokes, which charge like rhinos, and Chase's droll backhand swipes, there are just enough laughs to keep this harmless farce rolling to the eighteenth hole. [11 Aug 1980, p.69]

Caddyshack never finds a consistent comic note of its own, but it plays host to all sorts of approaches from its stars, who sometimes hardly seem to be occupying the same movie. Read full review

Too much time is spent on the forced romance between O'Keefe and Holcomb, an attractive waitress, however, and the slapstick becomes utterly mindless toward the end (as if the producer said, "Okay, it's time for this film to really get out of control!"). Still, the laughs keep coming. Read full review

This vaguely likable, too-tame comedy falls short of the mark. Read full review

If you're still at the age when farting and nose-picking seem funny, then Caddyshack should knock you dead. Buried deep - very deep - beneath the rising tide of effluent is a pleasant enough story of a kind about trying to make it to the top as a caddy while yet remaining human; a movie which could have done for golf what Breaking Away did for cycling. Instead it allows a string of resistible TV comics (Chase excepted) to mug through an atrocious chain of lame-brained set pieces, the least vulgar of which involves a turd in a swimming pool. Read full review

The first-time director, Harold Ramis, can't hold it together: the picture lurches from style to style (including some ill-placed whimsy with a gopher puppet) and collapses somewhere between sitcom and sketch farce. Male bonding remains the highest value of the Animal House comedies: women are trashed with a fierceness out of Mickey Spillane. Read full review

To attempt a critical evaluation of Orion's new Caddyshack is a little like describing the esthetic qualities of an outhouse. Read full review

Shabbily photographed and raggedly assembled. Caddyshack is hanging evidence that Ramis wasn't prepared for the assignment or clever enough to fake it...Ramis proves unable to sustain a single frayed thread of plot continuity, and none of the prominent cast members -- Chevy Chase, Murray, Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight -- enjoys opportunities decisive enough or direction competent enough to generate a little comic momentum and help prevent the gratuitous material from falling in a stinky, dismembered heap. Read full review

Unreconstructed fans of Chevy Chas, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight or Bill Murray might find something to guffaw at in this lamebrained movie that purports to be a satire on country club life but makes everybody look like slobs. Except - perhaps - a little Irish wench named Sarah Holcomb and the gopher who tears up the golf course. Should have put the gopher to work on the script. Read full review