Sunday 11 January 2009

Herbie Goes Bananas (1980)

[Movie 24 / Day 11]


The fourth installment of the Herbie movies is really scraping the barrel. With no real explanation of how it got there, Herbie is for sale in South America somewhere when a pair of Americans buy it in order to enter it into a race. Long before they can do that, however, the car saves a young street boy and smuggles him onboard the cruise liner the Americans are using to get to the next leg of their journey.

The car then spends the next 20 minutes driving around the hold, being chased by a variety of seamen. Then the slightly mental captain decides to make it walk the plank, in the middle of the ocean.

Cue very sad little boy. Wait a minute... What's that? It can't be! It's Herbie! He's SWUM ASHORE. Yes, it's as stupid as that. And while the exterior of the car is all rusted up by the seawater, the interior is absolutely pristine.

Then bad guys chase the little boy, Herbie saves him several times (including by having a bull fight which features some of the worst blue-screen ever), Incan gold is involved, Herbie manages to drive into the middle of the jungle in about 5 minutes (after it's taken the bad guys hours to fly there), then they cover Herbie in bananas (clearly the best way to hide a Beetle), then Herbie throws the bananas at the bad guys and thwarts their evil plans.

It's terrible. Bears no relation to the original, bar the fact that it has a Beetle called Herbie in it. It feels like it's never going to end too.

My rating: 3.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 4.5 / 10
Running time: 100 mins
IMDB link

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