Today In Shazbat: “Mork & Mindy”

Finally there is a legitimate reason to say something I've been holding back since 1978. "Dawber? You came all over her face!"

Mork & Mindy

Director: Lizzy Borden
Starring: Evan Stone, Chanel Preston, Seth Gamble, Kagney Linn Karter, Nicki Blue, Tegan Summers, Marie McCray, Tommy Pistol, Bobby Neuwave

Review by: Gram Ponante

I try to imagine a world in which I have not seen the original "Mork & Mindy," the "Happy Days" spinoff that made Robin Williams a star, put Boulder, CO on the map, introduced a grateful nation to the character Exidor, and followed the example set by "The Dukes of Hazzard" in putting pretty girls in Jeeps. But I can't.

Lizzy Borden's parody features Evan Stone as Mork, dancing as fast as he can to fill up the empty spaces not already occupied by a laugh track.

Mork is a spaceman sent by his unseen boss to Earth, where he is to document, for some reason, its sexual customs. Mork balks at first, saying that Earth girls' "other" vaginas smell and are made for excretions. This is what we're dealing with. Then, for reasons not explained, he sets off for Earth in an egg.

By this point in the movie-about three minutes in-we feel the ubiquitous laugh track is our enemy. Not only does it tell us to laugh when something isn't funny, it also cheers at the ends of scenes, as if each unfunny, awkward bit of dialogue is a journey we've all weathered together, its ending a bittersweet time of relief and achievement.

Meanwhile Mindy (Chanel Preston), a nice girl (she spits rather than swallows) gets her Jeep stolen after she delivers a strenuous upside-down blowjob. Somehow her car being driven off doesn't phase her. On her way into town, she meets Mork, whom she mistakes for a priest because he puts his clothes on backweards. I appreciated this because it mirrored the original.

Mindy learns Mork's true identity without much adjustment just in time for a plot twist: A team of blue-bodysuited aliens, the Necrotons, led by head-bodysuit Kagney Linn Karter (I approve), must thwart Mork.

Points added that the Fonz (Tommy Pistol) shows up? Yes. That he makes a Jump the Shark reference? Sure. But to what end?

Director Lizzy Borden has a storied porn past; a former performer, she knows how to film smut and even went to jail on the strength of a simulated rape scene in 2002's "Forced Entry" (well, she only went to jail because she made the mistake of mailing the movie to the wrong undercover federal official posing as a consenting adult consumer, but why quibble?).

So the sex scenes in "Mork & Mindy" are chock-full of labial closeups and heaving breasts, which is great, but they are splendid sex scenes in the middle of a wasteland of a movie.

Even though Borden & company spare no expense in dressing the set with the same sort of ladder stairs featured in Pam-Dawber-as-Mindy's apartment, the oddest choice of prop-probably in any movie all year-is a cameo by venerable AVN editor Mark Kernes (billed as Bobby Neuwave).

As Mindy's father (originally played by Conrad Janis), Kernes meets the foul-mouthed Mork, expresses regret that he has lost his little girl, and leaves in the space of about 45 seconds.

I guess I understand this in a Wouldn't This Be Funny way for people who recognize Kernes, but the interaction is so useless and incongruous otherwise that it is representative of every other bad choice in the movie.

Maybe Borden can't get away with directing simulated rape scenes anymore, but I would have liked to have watched these sex scenes mercifully removed from the context of this movie, which rapes you with the cruel and deceitful laugh track.

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