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

Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo (1977)

[Movie 23 / Day 11]


The third Herbie film brings back Dean Jones as Jim Douglas. The film starts out in Paris, where Douglas and his new mechanic have decided they are going to take Herbie and make a comeback. They enter a race that involves driving from Paris to Monte Carlo. Before the race starts however, a pair of bungling burglars steal a huge diamond from a Parisian museum and hide it in Herbie's petrol tank.

Then, during qualifying, Herbie falls in love with the pretty Lancia in the screenshot.

Madcap hilarity ensues. Or at least, I'm sure that's what the Disney execs were hoping for. What actually ensues is plenty of sped up footage of racing (fairly well done though, it's nowhere near as obvious as in The Car - probably because they were driving fairly fast and haven't sped it up massively). In between racing segments are bits like Herbie wooing the Lancia with flowers, lots of gurning by the new mechanic and probably the gayest fist fight ever committed to film. Oh, and the French police inspector is like the bastard offspring of Hercule Poirot and Inspector Clouseau, which is slightly irritating.

Not as good as the second, and that's really saying something - it's pretty ropey in places.

My rating: 5.3 / 10
IMDB rating: 5.2 / 10
Running time: 105 mins
IMDB link

Herbie Rides Again (1974)

[Movie 22 / Day 11]


The first sequel to the smash 1969 hit, The Love Bug, none of the original cast made a return, apart from the car. Which was probably a different one anyway.

In this installment, Herbie helps to stop an evil developer from turfing an old lady out of her house to make way for a skyscraper.

Oddly, it seems that Disney decided that if one little car with a mind of its own = big money at the box office, then lots of items with minds of their own would only increase their take. Obviously, they didn't realise that the reason the original did so well was because of its charm, and I imagine being released in 1969 when most of the people that went to watch it had ingested some kind of narcotic probably helped.

Adding a jukebox that plays tunes relevant to the situation unfolding on screen, a trolley bus that beeps in response to the batty old woman's chatter and a whole army of Beetles driving themselves didn't help this movie to live up to the original. It's still fun, but not a patch on The Love Bug.

Still, I can remember watching these movies over and over again as a youngster, so they still make me misty eyed and nostalgic.

My rating: 5.9 / 10
IMDB rating: 5.4 / 10
Running time: 88 mins
IMDB link