One of our first reviews and one of my favorite movies from when I was like 5 years old. We didn’t have cartoons back then.

The poster features the breakout star of the film: Bigfoot.

TRAILER 1

Trailer 2

Brian: One of my earliest memories that I’ve retained over the years is when I was around five or six years old I was sitting in front of our big wooden TV and my mom asking me if I wanted to watch “The Electric Company” or “Take This Job and Shove It.”  I chose “Take This Job and Shove It,” apparently because it was my favorite movie at the time, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom.  What was the appeal?  I doubt it was the biting commentary on large corporations pushing out family-owned businesses in America, or Barbara Herzstein’s unchanging look of anguish on her face.  So what could it have been that attracted me to this kid-unfriendly picture?  Here are some candidates:

• Bigfoot – Not the mythical woodland ape, but the legendary monster truck. The original Bigfoot truck makes its first appearance in a movie in “Take This Job and Shove It,” and as a kid I thought it was totally awesome.  In the movie Tim Thomerson’s character owns Bigfoot, even though he lives in a small trailer, has virtually no money and the car he uses for regular driving is a beat to hell, barely road-worthy Lincoln.  But we can’t rule out that he won Bigfoot in some kind of drinking contest.

• Toilet paper football – The most inexplicable scene in the movie, perhaps ANY movie, is when a sudden game of toilet paper football breaks out inside a bar. The game is played by the quarterback hiking the roll of toilet paper toward a receiver, and the receiver getting smashed into a table full of glassware.  Players go through doors, walls, tables and lots more glass… all for no real reason.  Now, I’m a guy who likes his drink, and in my college days we played a lot of dumb drunken games that had no purpose, but we were never drunk or stupid enough to bust up a bar and cut up our faces fighting over a roll of toilet paper.  The weirdest part is, the bar owner doesn’t seem to mind that these redneck alcoholics are destroying his livelihood.

Why don’t more bars have this game?

• Tim Thomerson sprays a fire hose of beer at the antagonists, unleashing a redneck primal scream for about 10 minutes straight.

• Tim Thomerson can’t get the cap off of a bottle of beer, so he smashes the bottom of it and drinks the beer out of the glass shards, cutting the holy living hell out of his mouth in the process.  Robert Hays is kind enough to point out the blood on his mouth, which he promptly wipes off WITH A CAT.

Tim Thomerson and his cat, Bounty.

Brad: I hadn’t even heard of this cinematic gem until you told me about it earlier this year. I am vaguely aware of the country song but I didn’t know they made a movie based on the song in title only apparently since Johnny Paycheck wasn’t singing about working at a brewery I’m sure.

I really shouldn’t even write a review on my first viewing since I was 3 PBRs in on an empty stomach before watching it and continued to drink heavily during it. But I’ll just go ahead since the movie took place at a brewery so this review is written with my beer goggles on.

The trailer for this film just should’ve highlighted Bigfoot the Monster Truck as the star instead of Robert Hays. Like don’t even mention any human actors at all in the trailer and just say at the end “and introducing BIGFOOT in Take This Job and Shove It, rated R. Coming soon!” That would be all I needed in 1981 to see this picture.

I’m still wondering why it’s called Take This Job and Shove It. Robert Hays is upper management at this brewery and maybe it’s my beer memory talking but he really didn’t have such a hard life or hard job. The only misery he had at the job was the fact it was his old town and most of the employees at the brewery were his old school buddies and he saw how miserable they were working there. So the sympathy I felt for Robert Hays was minimal and since he is in fact the character who tells the superiors to “Take this job and shove it” is weak. If David Keith (or is it Keith David??) or Tim Thomerson told Robert Hays to TTJASI at any point in the movie I’d be OK with it.

Speaking of Thomerson, I believe, looking at his filmography that this is only my third movie in which he’s featured that I’ve seen. How is this possible? He’s in a ton of movies yet I’ve only seen three or four of his? So I’ve seen more Jim Belushi movies? Very strange. Besides Treat Williams I don’t think there’s another actor of that generation I don’t care for more. But since he does commandeer Bigfoot he gets a pass for now.

I should point out that it takes 9 attempts for him to smash that bottle when he cuts his mouth. Nine. In that time wouldn’t one of the two other friends watching what he was doing maybe tell him to stop or run and get a bottle-opener. Another interesting aspect about this scene is Robert Hays visits David Keith and Tim Thomerson while they are drinking beers and sitting in a bathtub in their yard.

I think this may be the first movie featuring Barbara Hershey that I didn’t see her naked.

That toilet paper football scene was incredible. And saying it was sudden is an understatement. Out of nowhere and the strangest part that you failed to mention was no one questions it, no one tries to stop it and moreso to the fact that the participants of this impromptu scrimmage know how to play as if this was a ritual occurrence. They knew exactly what to do and how to play. I know it’s football rules but it’s inside a bar and played with toilet paper. And they play this silly game with such intensity and seriousness too like this is a high school rematch.

All-in-all not a horrible film. It had it’s slow parts but it was a fun look back at how serious Robert Hays took his career right after he did Airplane. Sadly I don’t think many people can name another Robert Hays movie other than the Zucker/Abrahms classic spoof.

Brian: I think the football scene probably came about after the director saw the football scene in M*A*S*H* and decided he could do better by taking that and putting it in a redneck bar.  The scene would have been better if they would have been playing with a broken beer bottle outside in the mud, while trying to avoid being tackled by Tim Thomerson driving Bigfoot.

You’re right, Robert Hays should have told the lowlife brewery workers to take their whining and shove it, while he goes back to his high-paying corporate job.  I don’t understand why Eddie Albert was portrayed as a villain when all he wanted to do was make money from brewery acquisitions.

There’s something about Barbara Hershey that renders her completely void of sex appeal.  Maybe it’s her penis.