My review was written in June 1986 after watching the movie on Paramount video cassette.
Take a faulty concept and execute it ineptly and you have "Stoogemania", feature-length filler intended as homage to The Three Stooges. Understandably never trade-screened, Atlantic release had a few regional playdates in October and is now available on video cassette.
Filmmaker Chuck Workman, better known as a director of coming attractions trailers as well as the poor B-picture "Kill Castro", attempts here to cash in on the ongoing craze among young folks for the Stooges, which recently has pushed the late lowbrow comedians to the top of the heap in terms of screen team popularity.
Poor Josh Mostel is cast as a stoogemaniac, a young man whose life is falling apart due to his obsession with the Stooges. He wants to marry girlfriend Beverly (Melanie Chartoff) but is afraid her parents will object to him. Oddly enough, they approve but he gets cold feet and ultimately ends up in a mental home for stoogemaniacs. Sappy happy ending has them get married with the puerile message that it's okay to love the Stooges.
Film makes all the wrong moves, starting with the unforgivable boner of including mainly Shemp Howard 1940s editions of the Stooges in the film clips. Shemp certainly is okay and had an interesting solo career, but "Stoogemania" should be primarily about original stooge Jerry (Curly) Howard. Curly does appear in a few clips, but fans are bound to be bewildered and disappointed. Quality of the film clips chosen is quite variable as is the mode of presentation. Essentially, Mostel keeps dreaming or hallucinating about the Stooges, cuing poorly selected excerpts. Centerpieces here are Shemp plus Larry Fine and Moe Howard in a marriage sketch and Curly & teammates in a courtroom skit.
At one point, Workman incompetently attempts a "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid' gambit of matching old and new footage. Sloppily added color (credited to Color Systems Technology) to the Stooges' original material is drab and smeared, as well as failing to fill the whole frame (walls and a couch occasionally are left gray & white). Use of colorization in several sequences is pointless in context: original 1932 MGM Stooges shorts exist that were filmed in color as well as the 1961 feature "Snow White and the Three Stooges" featuring Joe de Rita as the third Stooge, but none of this material is used.
For no good reason, several segments of the new Mostel scenes (or Josh Miller as the Young Mostel) are presented in black & white to match the original Stooges' work in this mishmash. When all else fails, Workman adds inappropriate rock songs to drown out the action. True to his trailer maker roots, he has a filler montage at the end, not of additional material but merely a recap of Stooges' scenes already used earlier.
Mostel tries hard but his slapstick routines aren't funny. Best bit is by Mark Holton (effective as the villain last year in "Pee-wee's Big Adventure") doing a nice Curly impression as a fellow stoogemaniac. Sid Caesar guest stars doing his mittle-European professor shtick as a shrink who diagnoses Mostel's problem. Hopefully no one will do a fan's tribute to Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" that's as shoddy as this feature.
