Troma/Zucker Brothers Connection Revealed!

Take one part The Kentucky Fried Movie, one part Vacation, one part Wilderness Family, mix lightly with a Marty Stouffer nature travelogue and you’ve got the recipe for Troma’s 1985 feature When Nature Calls.

Not to be confused with the Ace Ventura sequel, When Nature Calls is the tale of the Van Waspishes, your average urban nuclear family. There’s Dad the construction worker, Mom the happy housemaker, eleven year old junior entrepreneur Billy, and the vapid but nubile daughter, Bambi. The Van Waspishes become dissatisfied with city life in the Rotten Apple and decide to load up their station wagon and move to the country. Along the way they face long, harsh winters, mental institute escapees who think they’re Indians, and a killer Cougar with a bad attitude.

Actually, there’s a lot more to When Nature Calls than the bare-bones synopsis above. An anything-goes smorgasbord of sight gags, puns, slapstick, and sing-and-dance numbers, WNC repeatedly smashes down the cinema’s fourth wall in order to engage the audience. And that it does. Complete with fake trailers ("Baby Bullets," "Gena’s Story in Blind-O-Vision," and "Raging Bulls**t"), public service announcements, commercial breaks, and the truth about those dancing concessions you see before the movie begins. WNC also has the dubious distinction of being one of the most cameo-heavy of all Troma films. Surprise appearances include antiquated Vegas "comedian" Morey Amsterdam, baseball legend Willie Mays, Fred Blassie – pro wrestler extraordinaire – as a screaming psychologist, G. Gordon Liddy as the spokesperson to help stop the spread of "Jerry Lewis Syndrome" (a particularly funny sequence), and – last but not least – Jerry Mathers as the Beaver. Other great sequences involve daughter Bambi falling in love with a bear, son Billy bringing urban street smarts to the wilderness (at one point showing "Stag" – literally – films to the local antlered (should I say ‘horny’?) populace), and a baby elephant (!) in the wilds of New York state.

When Nature Calls is an labor of love that succeeds despite obvious budgetary limitations. It’s also a Kaufman family project – no less than three members of the family were involved. It is rife with outlandishness and, like the best Troma films, an almost puppy dog-like eagerness to please. Sure, twenty percent of the jokes are kind of lame or silly. But when you put in ten jokes per minute, a twenty percent failure rate only clocks in at a few minutes of groaning. Silly? Yes. But I still laughed the whole time . . .

As with all great Troma films, When Nature Calls can be bought straight from the source at their excellent website (see links to the right).