The Brady Bunch Movie

The makers of The Brady Bunch Movie have too much affection for the show simply to skewer it with satire. What they’ve done is closer to alchemy: turned this cheese into comic gold. Read full review

This is enormous fun, one of the best TV adaptations to date, and guaranteed to provoke a nostalgic misty eye and mischevious grin in anybody who's ever owned a crimplene tank top. Read full review

Director Thomas (once Sgt Lucy Bates of Hill Street Blues) has recreated '70s sitcom-land with the kind of unerring attention to detail Merchant-Ivory lavish on a society ball, and she's drawn hilariously synthetic performances from a shrewdly cloned cast. Read full review

A funny, savvy, camp yet family-friendly look at the Generation-X TV icons. Read full review

The genius - and there is a cockeyed genius permeating "The Brady Bunch" - is that it nails the entrapment and anxiety beneath the happy faces as unmistakably as the films of Douglas Sirk did the decade before. [17 Feb 1995, p.41]

However improbable this sounds, The Brady Bunch Movie is to the original television show what real grass is to Astroturf. [17 Feb 1995, p.03]

The cameos are out-of-sight, though the gay jokes and sexual innuendoes are overdone. But even if you don't know Peter from Bobby, you'll still be apt to find the Brady brand of geeky optimism thoroughly infectious. [17 Feb 1995, p.1D]

More successfully silly than non-Brady fans will expect. Read full review

The movie is as insistently bubbly as the Bradys themselves, but it does run out of carbonation before the end. "Bunch" fans won't mind a bit, while others will be amused by the juxtaposition of the family's wholesome idyll with the harsher realities of life in the '90s, as evidenced by "Roseanne," "Married ... With Children" and "Grace Under Fire." [17 Feb 1995, p.F01]

As real as the Astroturf in the Brady's backyard and as eager to please as Alice's meat loaf, The Brady Bunch Movie is -- to exhaust this string of metaphors -- pure junk food. But like most junk food, it sure tastes good. Read full review

Like The Flintstones and The Beverly Hillbillies before it, The Brady Bunch Movie is an amusing facsimile of a pop culture archetype. If only the script had been given such attention to detail. [17 Feb 1995, p.3]

The Brady Bunch Movie is ultimately little more than a kitschy gold mine for TV trivia buffs. Diehard Brady-acs will get a kick just out of reading "Pork chops and Applesauce" on the kitchen blackboard. But these characters have a strange yet undeniable appeal. Twenty-five years after that tinny theme song hit the airwaves, The Brady Bunch is still going strong. Who knew? [17 Feb 1995, p.4G]

The Brady Bunch Movie is certainly watchable, which is a lot more than I had been expecting. [17 Feb 1995, p.19]

If you can convince yourself that this movie has a reason to exist (I can't), then this big-screen recycling of the popular early-'70s TV series is not half bad. [17 Feb 1995, p.13]

Part homage, part spoof, the deft balancing act is a clever adaptation -- albeit culled from less than pedigreed source material. Read full review

The film establishes a bland, reassuring, comforting Brady reality - a certain muted tone that works just fine but needs, I think, a bleaker contrast from outside to fully exploit the humor. Read full review

The length is the film's undoing. No matter how tantalizing the premise, overexposure leads inevitably to boredom. Read full review

The Brady Bunch Movie is fairly innocuous, and ought to satisfy the twenty- and thirtysomethings who grew up on the sitcom. Just one problem: It may be unsporting to point this out, but the whole notion of holding up the Bradys as the ultimate cultural icon of the '70s is basically a lie. Read full review

The movie manages to be painless and pointless in equal measure. Read full review

A curiously sour movie in its amused contempt for this fatuous family laced with affectionate nostalgia for its unshakable slickness and insularity, but also an undeniably strange one in its adoption of TV formats and cliches, as if these were the only indexes of contemporary reality that we have left. Read full review

Once you've embraced a show for its stupidity, you might as well go all the way and applaud its dullness, triviality and bad taste. Read full review

There's a risk of taking The Brady Bunch too seriously but, please, let's not think of it as funny, then or now. [18 Feb 1995]

The Brady Bunch Movie, which was directed and written by at least five people whom we prefer not to embarrass, looks bad, sounds bad and doesn't make any sense. There's even something nightmarish about it. All these bad jokes and vacant sets become almost horrifying, as if the film were on the verge of proving that life itself is a bad joke on a vacant set. [17 Feb 1995, p.J]