That was an excellent one.

Pretty Good

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

as a long-time baseball fan who has seen many baseball movies, there have been many hits such as Field of Dreams, Major League, The Natural and my all-time favorite The Bad News Bears. But there have been a number of errors in the mix, including Here Come the Tigers.First of all, almost all the common player stereotypes that were in the successful Walter Matthau movie, except for the fat catcher were in this one. The two additions were the Japanese home run hitter who can also hit balls with his fist, even though he only utters the sound "OOH!" throughout the movie since he doesn't speak English. The other was a deaf-mute pitcher who got into a fight with some members of the rival Panthers at an arcade and suffered a broken arm but recovered in time to pitch in the championship game.Second, there are no name actors in the movie. Is Richard Lincoln a household name? I'm sure a lot of people have never heard of him. It seems that the producer didn't have the money to pay a "name" actor to play the Tigers coach, so they went with unknowns.As for the movie, it suffers from predictability and a weak script. It also has the standard slow-motion cliché scene of the big hit and the end of the movie.The only bright spot was that when the movie first appeared in theaters, the long time Voice of the Yankees Mel Allen did the promo. Other than that, it's a forgettable baseball movie that definitely goes down swinging.

Amiable cop Eddie Burke (a decent and engaging performance by Richard Lincoln) and his bumbling partner Burt Honneger (James Zvanut, who mugs way too much for comfort) get the impossible job of coaching a little league baseball team called the Tigers that's made up of assorted losers and misfits. Can Eddie and Burt whip the Tigers into shape so they can start winning games and have a real shot at the local championship? Arch McCoy's shamelessly derivative script copies "The Bad News Bears" without capturing any of the charm, wit, or verve which made that particular picture such a caustic treat. Instead McCoy offers dire attempts at crude humor which include stale jokes on such desperate topics as flatulence, nose-picking, and kids swearing (natch). Worse yet, there's even a painfully sincere and hackneyed "you just gotta believe in yourself" central message and occasional ham-fisted attempts at gooey sentiment. The mostly bland acting from a lame no-name cast, Sean S. Cunningham's flat (non)direction, a grindingly predictable narrative that delivers zero surprises (guess who wins the big climactic game), the plodding pace, Harry Manfredini's irritatingly bouncy cutesy-poo score, and a dreadful artificially sped up slapstick chase set piece don't help matters any. 70's porn mainstay Fred Lincoln is wasted in a nothing minor role as incredibly annoying seedy stoner drunk Aesop. Only Barry Abrams' polished cinematography manages to rise above the general mediocrity. A real dud.

The saddest part of this is the fact that these are 87 minutes I'll never get back. I knew this was terrible from the get-go, with the guy dressed as a lunatic Indian chief on top of the roof. (See if they could get away with that in 2008). My 10-year-old boy is really into baseball right now, so we decided to rent it on a rainy day. Even though he seemed to enjoy parts of it, I had to cringe when I heard all the needless foul language. Bad, bad movie. This was an awful ripoff of Bad News Bears. Completely shameless and completely predictable. I don't mind a predictable movie if it's done well, but this one absolutely was not.

Call it morbid fascination, like motorists slowing down to get an eyeful of a bad wreck on the side of the road, but I cannot to this day get over how fascinatingly awful Sean S. Cunningham's "Here Come the Tigers" is. For years I've wrestled over which is the worst film I've ever seen, "I Spit on Your Grave" or this, with "Ernest Goes to Camp" running a close 3rd. I finally came to the conclusion recently that despite it's amateurish look and sadistically glorified rape scenes, "I Spit..." was, at the VERY least, original (compared to "Tigers"). Don't get me wrong. That's the only defense the trashy, stomach-churning "I Spit..." will EVER get from me.Come to think of it, "Tigers" is *such* a blatant Bad News Bears ripoff that it makes ANY film look original in comparison. I don't know how Sean S. Cunningman and AIP got away with it, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone got hold of a BNB script and went through it page by page and simply penciled in their characters' names over the Bears' names. The two films are SO alike (squatter's rights going to TBNB, of course) that for me to compose a laundry list of similarities would be futile. To see "Bears" but not "Tigers" is an impossibility, because if you have seen "Bears", you've also seen "Tigers". If this formula happens to be reversed for you, my condolences.I remember when the film came out, back in March 1978. Oddly, its short-lived and subliminal theatrical run seemed limited exclusively to the drive-in circuit. Not knowing any better, I was curious to see it since, at the time, Bad News Bears flicks were all the rage amongst my 5th grade peers. My curiosity, however, quickly turned to disinterest when the majority of my classmates universally trashed the film. I knew it had to be bad, particularly since at that age kids tend to buy into and gobble up anything thrown our way.It wasn't until 1985 that I finally saw the film on TV. Packing as many bleeps as a typical "Osbournes" episode of today, I sat with mouth agape, bewildered at how the word "plagarism" held such new meaning for me. I taped the broadcast and held onto it for many years, dusting it off every now and then and popping it in to satisfy any bad-movie urge I may have been craving at the time.Then just the other day, I purchased a pre-recorded uncut copy off of Ebay. I tend to keep a soft spot in my heart open at all times for certain bad movies. "The Crater Lake Monster" and "Squirm" hold permanent residences, along with "Empire of the Ants" and the first "Police Academy". "Here Come the Tigers", however, is in a class all its own. Here is a film so sloppily made (continuity gaffes and sound-looping blunders at every turn), so lazily written, so contrived and intelligence-insulting, not to mention unoriginal... that I cannot get enough of it. Call it what you will, but perhaps my fascination lies in the fact that here is a movie so bad that it's actually, well, bad. Really bad.Echoing back to my opening analogy, I am not a motorist who'll slow down in traffic to get a better look at some roadside carnage. I am, on the other hand, one who subjects himself to repeated viewings of stinkers like "Here Come the Tigers". And even though I have yet to see it, I eagerly await the arrival of my Ebay purchase of Cunningham's follow-up kiddie-sportster, the sure-to-be-a-dud "Manny's Orphans" (1978), with soccer the subject this time around, and featuring a good deal of the "Tigers" cast.To quote a certain Linda Blair movie: "Mother? What's wrong with me?"