My review was written in October 1986 after a Greenwich Village screening.
"America" is an unfunny social satire from filmmaker Robert Downey. It's a hard-to-watch misfire representing a severe decline from the creator of "Putney Swope" and "Greaser's Palace" some 15 years ago.
Though produced in 1982 and on the shelf till now, picture seems a decade or more older than that, in its counterculture sensibility, washed-out color and grainy photography.
Zack Norman toplines as a reporter for the 9 o'clock news for New York cable channel 92, an amateur operation which features a black anchorman (Howard Thomashefsky) who shouts as if his microphone wasn't close enough.
Episodic mishmash has Norman deciding to wear a plaid skirt (a la wrestling's Rowdy Roddy Piper) while interviewing people on the street and on the air, because his wife (Tammy Grimes) found the incriminating apparel in his suitcase. Inexplicably, Norman becomes a big hit in this new guise; later the station becomes a huge success after Grimes and the weatherman (Michael J. Pollard) fiddle with the equipment and accidentally beam its signal off the moon, broadcasting briefly all over the world (film's original shooting title was "Moonbeam").
Various running gags and subplots include a tiresome routine about a big lottery winner (Monroe Arnold) who decides to have a homosexual marriage with a millionaire investment adviser (Michael Bahr) and then buys Channel 92.
Closest the film gets to actual laughs is a ridiculous homage to Martin Scorsese in the final reel: standup comic Richard Belzer portrays a looney taxi driver who accosts Norman and literally dreive his cab onto the set in order to do his comedy routine on the cable news show. He becomes a hit and a regular on the news, which is literally turned into a circus.
Acting is quite loose, with Norman, once funny in the semi-improvisational atmosphere of Henry Jaglom's "Sitting Ducks", merely grim in the lead role. Name talent such as Grimes and Pollard gives embarrassing performances, especially with poor lighting and makeup proving quite unflattering. Most technical credits are a shambles.
