I Hate Critics 1995 Review: 'Houseguest'
The first movie of the year for season 3 of the I Hate Critics 1990s Podcast is Houseguest starring comedian Sinbad.
Houseguest
Directed by Randall Miller
Written by Michael G. Di Gaetano, Roger Birnbaum
Starring Sinbad, Phil Hartman
Released January 6th, 1995
Published January 7th, 2025
Houseguest stars comedian Sinbad as a fast talking con-artist named Kevin Franklin. Kevin owes the mob $50,000 dollars via a failed business loan. With a pair of dopey mobsters, Pauly and Joey Gasparini (Paul Ben Victor and Tony Longo), on his tail, Kevin tries to flee the country but gets caught at the airport. After throwing a few curveballs to escape his would-be captors, Kevin stumbles upon the Young family, headed up by milquetoast lawyer Gary Young (Phil Hartman).
Gary and his kids are at the airport to meet Gary’s oldest friend, one he’s not seen in person in more than 25 years. All that Gary knows about his buddy, Derek, is that he’s black and has agreed to show off his knowledge at a presentation at Gary’s kids' school. This is all the information that Kevin needs to pretend that he’s Derek and use the Youngs as a way to escape from the mob. But first, he has to get rid of the real Derek, played by Ron Glass, by crafting an off the cuff lie so stupid that you can’t help but feel dumber listening to it while feeling a sense of sympathy for actor Ron Glass as he feigns buying into this nonsense.
With Derek disposed of, Kevin/Fake Derek gets thrown into a series of supposedly wacky misunderstandings in which he fakes his way through a school presentation about the career that he, as Derek, supposedly has. He’s then forced to fake his way through ever more dimwitted misunderstandings that are crammed into the film between a remarkable number of McDonald's product placement scenes. What? You don’t remember the 1995 partnership between a little known Sinbad family comedy and McDonald’s? Oh, that’s because there wasn’t one.
For reasons that defy any attempt to make sense of them, director Randall Miller and star Sinbad thought it would be hilarious for his character to impersonate a hardcore Vegan while the real guy, Kevin longs for a Quarter Pounder with cheese with the kind of desire more often associated with erotic obsession. The film score even incorporates the then current McDonald’s commercial jingle phrase “You Deserve a Break Today” into the film score as the music rises triumphantly as Kevin happens upon a McDonald’s curiously existing as a small town store front.
The film is set in a small town in Pennsylvania where there has never actually been a McDonald’s franchise. Now, you’re probably thinking that the movie switched to a location shoot where there was a McDonald’s franchise they could shoot in but you’d be mistaken, dear reader. No, the makers of the $10 million dollar family comedy Houseguest took money from that relatively small budget to rent a storefront and dressed it up with purloined McDonald’s logos.
But that’s not all. The scene featuring the commercial jingle actually follows Sinbad inside this McDonald’s. And again, you’re thinking they simply went to another, working McDonald’s, what other option could there be? Well, the other option was to build their very own working McDonald’s store that operated surreptitiously during the film’s production. This elaborate location appears in the movie Houseguest for no more than 60 seconds of screen time. Not a single, plot-important moment occurs in this location and not a single joke appears either.
And all of this was done without ever having made a deal with McDonald’s to include their product. McDonald’s paid no money to be part of the movie Houseguest and was not consulted for the film. The only reason this was allowed to happen without a lawsuit was because Houseguest was produced by Buena Vista Pictures, an offshoot of the Walt Disney Company. McDonald’s turned the other cheek out of deference to Disney and because the movie has nothing but nice things to say about McDonald’s. Why is McDonald’s in this movie???
There really isn’t much more to say about Houseguest. It’s a bad movie that is more forgettable than loathsome. It’s a comedy that somehow manages to make comic genius Phil Hartman unfunny. If a movie is bad enough that Phil ‘F*****G’ Hartman is rendered unfunny, you know the film is quite bad. The film is also a needless 1 hour and 47 minutes long, a runtime desperately prolonged by the inclusion of seemingly every ad-lib Sinbad dreamed up throughout the movie. Sinbad is not an unfunny man. I distinctly remember enjoying him in the 80s and early 90s but this movie is devoid of comedy and much of that is the fault of Sinbad and his astonishingly unfunny ad-libs.
Houseguest is the subject of the ALL-NEW I Hate Critics 1995 podcast. New year means a new 90s year. We suffered through 1994 and now 1995 starts with Houseguest. This is truly a cursed show that we do every week, chronicling, in release order, movies released 30 years ago the same weekend. The goal is to chart how movies and pop culture have changed in just a mere 30 years. I Hate Critics 1995 is the sister podcast to the weekly I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast and features myself, along with Amy K, a Gen-X’er, and M.J a perpetually baffled Gen-Z’er haunted by having to see the 90s via the movies of the time. Find I Hate Critics 1995 on the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast feed, wherever you listen to podcasts.
About the Creator
Sean Patrick
Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.
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