Film Year: 1990
Genre: Drama
Director: Johnathan Sanger
Starrig: Rue McClanahan, Kristy McNichol, Jack Coleman, Anne Bobby, Connor O'Farrell, Patrick Duffy, Beverly Mitchell, Casey Wallace
RiffTrax Year: 2022
Riffers: Bridget Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl
The Movie
It's the prequel all RiffTrax fans were dying for just as Star Wars fans were on pins and needles awaiting The Phantom Menace. Previously we featured Baby of the Bride and Mother of the Bride, which deceptively were not spin-offs of Father of the Bride but rather a sequel to this TV movie starring Maude and Golden Girls starlet Rue McClanahan. This movie sees our lovely Rue engaged to a charming and lovable man who is fifteen years her junior, played by Patrick Duffy. The wedding brings her four children back to their home and shows them coping with their mother marrying a mad who is barely older than they are. They also must put up with each other, as none of them have seen each other in years and for the most part can't seem to stand one another. Also one is a nun who decided to leave the convent because she got knocked up. Compelling drama.
This all comes to a head when the entire family gets into a barroom brawl, which I will admit I one hundred percent did not see coming.
If I can say nothing else about this movie then I can dare argue that it has some serious TV star cred. Not just Rue McClanahan, who was on the tail end of Golden Girls when this was released, but Patrick Duffy deserves a mention, the Dallas star who was just starting his hit sitcom Step by Step, and also Jack Coleman, who had starred on Dynasty and would eventually gain roles on Heroes, The Office, and Castle. There are even some lesser names with solid resumes, like Kristy McNichol, who had healthy TV runs on Family and Empty Nest, and this was also the film debut of child actor Beverly Mitchell, who would go on to star as one of the many children on 7th Heaven. It's a pretty stacked cast to be honest, even if they aren't given a lot to do.
The "hook" of this movie is the fact that Rue McClanahan is cougaring around and is now engaged to a man who is old enough to be her son. This gets lost in the sibling relationships however and as the film goes on it barely seems to matter to whatever plot the movie has. It's almost refreshing that we have an unconventional relationship between two different age groups and neither one is revealed to be some sort of villain at the end, but this winds up almost irrelevant overall and it doesn't have much to say about it. It's a shame, because the "love transcends age" message could be a strong one, but the movie isn't interested in backing it up.
The focal point of the drama gives up on this relationship and then decides to focus on the siblings, where they're at in life, and what they mean to each other. Unfortunately the film doesn't have anything powerful to say about them either and it gives up on having a plot entirely. The movie then becomes about the brothers and sisters giving exposition dumps about why they're miserable and what might make them happy, very little of which see resolution by the end. Maybe it's a bit of a therapeutic watch as viewers might be able to relate to thirty-somethings who aren't sure if they're adulting correctly only to realize there is no true way to adult correctly, though that might be giving the film too much credit.
The primary example of ideas being lost is probably the sister who became a nun only to reveal that she met a "nice guy" and is now pregnant with the child of an absent father. This almost feels like it should be a movie by itself but the movie really gives it no plot thread except shock value. The other siblings mostly have generic attributes that are opposite of one another. One is a drunk who has been in one or two abusive relationships, one is a single father, and one is horny. Like really horny. He-cannot-look-at-a-woman-and-not-have-sex-with-her level horny. He is given little character attributes other than this, though one odd thing I did notice is that he spends one scene complaining about his father's infidelity on their mother and then in the very next scene seduces a married next door neighbor into having sex with him behind her husband's back.
Children of the Bride seems to think its about pondering our family relationships as we grow older, though it's scenes like the one above that make me doubt it gave any of this any pondering itself. Instead it's just a silly melodrama about attractive people doing whatever. If Beverly Hills 90210 taught me anything it's that in 1990 that would have guaranteed ratings, so I'm not surprised it got two sequels.
The Trax
I almost feel fortunate in that I have not seen Bridget and Mary Jo's previous riffs of Baby of the Bride and Mother of the Bride (as of this writing) and I just happened to get flung into the first film of this series in my rotation almost seemingly by accident. I don't know if watching these movies in order is any help or hindrance to them, but I do have the sequels at the ready on my computer as soon as they hit my episode selection. What I do know is that I already knew I was gearing up for a good time as the movie started and Mary Jo drops some killer delivery of this line:
"Oh great, another one of these treacly, ridiculous, obvious movies with unlikable characters and ::starts sobbing:: universal truths about life and love, oh they always suck me in and it JUST MAKES ME SO MAD!"
I suppose you could call this line of riffs featuring the ladies riffing on cheesy TV movies that target women a "RiffTrax-For-Her" label, but while these movies don't offer much for men who don't like to get mushy and prefer their cheesy movies with a lot of action and nudity (see Fugitive Rage for that), funny transcends gender and boy are Bridget and Mary Jo funny. There is a lot of flavor in targeting these specific movies and handing them to a pair of comediennes who happen to be the target audience, because they're likely to "get" them and also just make fun of them on their own level. Children of the Bride certainly falls into that category. It's a dopey and slow movie that isn't really about anything at all, but that's how the audience wants it. Bridget and Mary Jo certainly know that, so they just sit down and sass it, heckling the douchey characters, the aimless plot, and over-the-top melodrama.
I do feel a lot of the best stuff in this riff is in the second half as all the setup is out of the way the movie is fully rolling downhill. The emotional moments tend to set up better material than the character introductions, with one of my favorites being the alcoholic sister claiming that her brother's breaking down caused her life to go down the tubes. "Well sorry my emotional collapse inconvenienced you," Mary Jo responds, which caused me to throw my head back with laughter. Things like that show how well the duo can play with melodrama in particular and just snap it back from absurdity.
Speaking of absurdity, this movie ends with a bar fight for some reason. The movie not-so-subtly alludes that one of the daughters was being beaten by her ex-boyfriend and her brothers want to teach him manners, but Mother Rue tells them to stay out of it (Bridget sides with the brothers, and I must say so do I). It's pretty irrelevant until the end when he pops up at a restaurant, given almost no dialogue at all, then the family starts beating him up. One of the movies concluding moments has one of the very young granddaughter characters biting him in the hindquarters, to which all Bridget can say is "Okay, just try and think of an appropriate 'child bites guy's ass' joke. YOU CAN'T!" All you can say about something at some points in life is to gesture at it, and Bridget and Mary Jo get that.
Good
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