Hamburger: The Motion Picture

An awful movie from the mid-1980s. I watched this.

If the boys at Red Letter Media haven't covered this yet, I'd be genuinely surprised. There's no way they don't know about this movie.

I stumbled upon this movie while browsing around the internet, meaning I wasn't actively looking for it. It took me two days to get through this because I could only watch it in 15 to 20-minute bursts...

...because it's that bad.

According to the IMDb Trivia Page for this flick:

The movie was not sold to a distributor and was released independently by its production company, which has been long out of business. It's unclear who exactly owns the rights to the movie, and it's unknown once the movie will ever see its DVD or Blu-ray release.

This means you can watch the movie completely for free on the internet. More on that in a minute.

Okay, let's get into this.

Hamburger: The Motion Picture is one of those '80s movies that has a Porky's and Screwballs flavor to it. It doesn't take itself seriously at all.

The storyline? Well, there is one, so that's something. It's about a guy who is doing poorly in college because he can't stop having sex, so he decides to enroll in a corporate hamburger franchise camp to "graduate" there and become a franchise owner. He figures that's easier than college and is certain to "graduate" because it's a place where he can't have so much sex. I am totally not kidding. That is the plot.

You'd think there would be a ton of nudity in this movie, but there really isn't. Yes, it has it but it's not constantly in-your-face.

In the way this movie works, you get a few barely-there minutes of story, a gag that goes on way too long, a little more story, another gag that goes on too long, rinse and repeat until the end.

Most of the gags aren't funny, and for some you have to suspend your disbelief a lot. An example is one scene where a bunch of fat people fart in the bathroom and blow a hole in the side of the building as a result.

There was one thing about the story that really ticked me off. The guy doesn't get the girl at the end. Don't worry, I am spoiling nothing by telling you that. It's a completely missed opportunity by the writers. They could have had the guy, the protagonist, get the girl, signifying his days of fooling around were over and that he finally found his calling. Then they could have shown them getting married in a "Busterburger" themed wedding and afterward running their own franchise store, together and happy. It would have been easy for them to put that in there. They didn't do that. Instead you're just left wondering whatever happened to those two.

For the few positives I can say, there is a defined protagonist (main character) and antagonist (villain). Most characters in the context of the movie are fairly well defined.

The biggest positive, oddly enough, is the music.

Where the music is concerned, somebody cared. I recognized the style from the very opening theme Hamburgers for America. This is the first thing you hear when the movie begins. It's pro-level jingle style music you heard all over the place in the 1980s. For the time, it has got some seriously high production value to it. When I heard that song, I was thinking, "Wow.. that guy is really putting his all into a song about hamburgers." Catchy? Yes, very. It's WAY too good of a soundtrack for this movie.

But make no mistake, this movie sucks. Watch it for a guilty pleasure and nothing more.

Yes, this this movie is available to watch completely for free... if you can stand to watch it. Here it is:

Published 2021 Oct 28