Quick, pull these knives out of our backs! We've been stabbed!
Oh... wait. That's not a knife. That's the pain inflicted by this movie.
Run for your lives! It's the Bradys!
The makers of A Very Brady Sequel took out everything that was funny in The Brady Bunch Movie and replaced it with everything that was annoying about the first film. Gone are the jokes about the Bradys living in a perpetual '70s mindset and trying to interact with the '90s world. Back in spades are Mike Brady's boring monologues. Great cameos by actors from the '60s & '70s? Out. Embarrassing jokes about Sam the Butcher slipping Alice a tube steak? In.
It's enough to make us cry. Did they want to punish themselves for having done such a good job on the first film? Did they want to punish US for spending the money to see the sequel to a film about the Brady Bunch? Or did they just slap a movie together to make a quick buck?
Oh God. You probably want to know about the plot. Okay, here goes.
Seven years ago, Carol's first husband, Roy, uncovered a valuable statue of a horse from the Tang Dynasty while on an expedition. However, Roy's assistant, Trevor, had designs on the statue and blew up the boat in which they were to return home. Roy had already sent the statue ahead to Carol for safekeeping, and so it became a fixture in the Brady household years later.
Seven years later, in our present day, Trevor arrives at the Brady household, pretending to be Roy. He offers some lame excuses as to why he doesn't look or sound like Roy, and tells them he had amnesia, and so he doesn't know everything Roy used to know. Being the Bradys, they buy it. "Roy" is then free to roam the house, looking for the statue so he can sell it. Carol, of course, has donated it to the Women's Charity Auction. Roy/Trevor steals the horse from the auction, kidnaps Carol, and lights out for Hawaii in the last 30 minutes of the movie.
The portions of the film that actually relate to this plot take about 45 minutes. The other 45 are filled with gruesome Brady jokes lifted from the most sordid imaginings of the writers as they watched the original episodes. Greg wants to move into the attic? Well then, so does Marsha, and they end up sharing the room, divided down the middle. The predictable sex jokes result.
Jan in a bikini?
This is one of the worst things about A Very Brady Sequel: although all of us who grew up with the Bradys imagined what would happen if Greg and Marsha ever got together, none of us actually wanted to see it on screen. And since the actors are mere stand-ins for our original obsessions, the consummation of this 20-year old desire is anticlimactic at best.
There are two things worth watching in this film: the scenes where Tim Matheson (as the impostor Roy) gives advice to the Brady kids, and the scene where Alice accidentally puts Roy's hallucinogenic mushrooms in his spaghetti. His advice to Peter: Do whatever you must to keep on top ... "even if you have to lie, cheat, steal, or kill." And this right after handing the boy a weapon.
The mushroom scene gives up the funniest line in the film. As Roy's world turns psychedelic, he realizes: "Oh my God... I'm tripping with the Bradys!" The subsequent Yellow Submarine animated sequence further illustrates how frightening that can really be. As if the Bradys weren't psychedelic enough.
Thankfully, this film was bad enough that we won't see another. Now we can finally put the walking corpse of the Brady Bunch where it really belongs: in reruns, on cable TV.
