2008's Harold, a "Comedy" About a Balding Child, is One of the Most Obscure SNL-Derived Films as Well as One of the Worst
Holy crap does this movie not need to exist
I have seen a lot of bad movies. It’s kind of my thing. I’ve been writing a column, My World of Flops, on bad/failed movies for SEVENTEEN years now. That is a long, long time.
I am consequently pretty damn jaded when it comes to crummy movies. A motion picture has to be spectacularly awful and woefully misguided for it to really stand out in my mind.
The 2008 “comedy” Harold is an outlier because it is a Saturday Night Live-derived comedy that even super-fans of the show don’t know exists and because it is one of the most pointless films I have ever seen.
As we have already established, I see a lot of flaming garbage but Harold’s existence flummoxes and perplexes me.
I honestly cannot imagine seemingly sane human beings looking at the film’s screenplay and thinking that it was worth making. It’s easier for me to believe that Harold is a nefarious financial fraud like the one at the heart of The Producers and the financiers were Lithuanian drug lords who financed the movie as a money-laundering operation because there was no chance whatsoever that the movie would ever break even, even if it had all the luck and all the breaks in the world.
Harold began life as a Saturday Night Live sketch that somehow made it onto the air and then was adapted into a short film. This horrible idea should have died a natural death at that point.
Instead someone, quite possibly Lucifer himself, convinced co-writer/director T. Sean Shannon that his one joke sketch must be expanded into a one joke feature film.
That is not entirely accurate or fair, however. Depending on how you’re counting Harold has either two jokes or one joke with various permutations.
The one joke is that the title character, who is played by child star Spencer Breslin, is a thirteen year old who is aggressively balding and because he sort of looks like an old man, he behaves like an old man as well.
Here, behaving like an old man pretty much means regularly shouting out Matlock and Murder She Wrote.
It’s an inversion of one of the saddest, most exhausted cliches in all of comedy: old people hilariously behaving like young people with the dancing and the drinking and the fucking and the drug use and the rapping.
To give the film credit, having a child behave like a senior citizen is a less ubiquitous and worn out comic trope, mainly because it’s just not funny.
Harold is just not funny. This is particularly true of its second joke. Due to unfortunate genetics, Harold is a 13 year old who looks kind of like he’s 63 so there are a LOT of jokes about adults, both male and female, wanting to molest Harold or violently sodomize him because they are under the mistaken impression that he is an adult and consequently it would be legal to have sex with him.
Harold is not of age, however, so much of the film’s “humor” is either gay panic or statutory rape-based. There’s a lot of sexual stuff in Harold. I would argue that there is way too much sexual stuff here and due to the fact that it all revolves around a horny 13 year old it’s all creepy.
Harold opens with its protagonist explaining that men in his family go bald very early but that the residents of the town where he lives have learned to embrace him and his eccentricities.
Harold is living the good life of a content retiree until his mother Maureen (Ally Sheedy) announces that they’re moving to a new city because of work.
Being the world’s oldest 13 year old, Harold is not crazy about change or new things but he has no choice in the matter so they move to a house where Maude Sellers (Suzanne Shepherd) , the next door neighbor, is a total cougar who becomes erotically obsessed with Harold because she thinks he’s a peer and not a child.
Maude REALLY wants to have sex with a child, which is HILARIOUS, to the film at least. Also hilarious? Butt stuff! What if I told you that the legendary Fred Willard has what is curiously billed as a “Special Appearance” as a doctor who gives Harold a GUT-BUSTING rectal exam and marvels that a man he mistakenly thinks is a senior citizen has the prostate of a ten year old?
He has finger in the child’s butt and everything! And Harold has a look like, “I don’t know about this!”
At his new school Harold instantly develops a crush on Evelyn Taylor (Victorious star Elizabeth Gillies in an unfortunate feature film debut), the most popular and pretty girl.
Harold befriends Afro-sporting janitor Cromer Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr.). Their friendship confuses those around them, particularly an Asian shop-keeper who is convinced that Harold is a homosexual in an interracial, inter-generational relationship with his African-American friend.
Our hair-challenged hero realizes that he can exploit his geriatric appearance by buying alcohol for thankful children.
Harold gets arrested because the police believe that he is a grown-up buying alcohol for children. Because of how he looks he ends up in an adult prison where he is terrified that he will be violently sodomized by a large African-American prisoner but it is implied that he made it through his time in adult prison without being raped by an adult.
There’s also a strip club scene whose humor comes, I suppose, from the hilarity of a child interacting with sex workers who think he’s much older than he actually is.
It might seem like nothing happens in Harold beyond jokes about different kinds of sexual assaults and Matlock. Also, during gym Harold has to take off shirt and he has a back hairier than that of the late, lamented Robin Williams.
It all leads up, inexplicably enough, to the big climactic Go-Kart race where Harold, being old of mind if not of body, is racing with a Rascal-style scooter beloved by old people all over the world
Hairspray’s Nikki Blonsky has a thankless role as the good friend of Harold we know he’s supposed to end up with because she’s nicer and less conventionally attractive than the girl he’s pining for.
Because Harold has the mindset and sensibility of a proud member of the AARP it seems weird and inappropriate for him to be lusting after a fellow thirteen year old.
I’ve seen worse films than Harold but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen one more pointless.
If you really hate yourself and want to experience three hours of pure torture I recommend subjecting yourself to a It’s Pat/Harold double feature.
Harold is beneath the dignity of Gooding Jr., a man who famously said, “Hell motherfucking yes! This masterpiece will be my enduring legacy. I will literally do anything, including murder, for an opportunity to be a part of this wonderful film” when offered Boat Trip.
It’s rare where even the poster art for a movie is repulsive.
I get it. It’s called Harold because he is losing his hair and looks/acts like an old man. How clever