by Susan Starr and Kevin Kocur
Issue #81—Winter 2006

"Police Academy: Mission to Moscow"
Directed by Alan Metter
Warner Brothers (1994)
83 minutes

Susan sez:
"Police Academy: Mission to Moscow" is a bad, bad movie. It is the 7th and last in the “Police Academy” series. A group of police officers go to Moscow to help the Russian police catch the mobster Konali (Ron Perlman). Konali has a nefarious plan to break into all the computers in the world using a really lame computer game his company has created. It is kind of amusing to see a state-of-the-art computer game circa 1994.

The police officers include Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook) who has breasts so large they enter a room before she gets there, Jones (Michael Winslow) who can make all sorts of sound effects using just his voice and Cadet Connors (Charlie Schlatter) who is afraid of heights. The head of the team is Lassard (George Gaynes). I suppose some of these characters may have been in the earlier movies, but I wouldn’t know since I never saw any of them. I’m going to assume the earlier movies were funnier than this one or they never would have made seven of them.

In Moscow, a translator, Katrina (Claire Forlani), is assigned to help the Americans. Her presence is unnecessary because every Russian speaks English, even when they aren’t in the presence of the Americans. But they speak English with an accent so you can tell they are Russian.

The team is on their own because when they arrived in Moscow, Lassard accidentally got into a limousine holding a grieving Russian family enroute to a funeral. Lassard spends the rest of the movie trying to communicate with the family, but unfortunately they are the only people in Russia who speak Russian instead of English.

The Police Academy group gets into one painfully unfunny slapstick situation after another. A typical scene has Harris (G.W. Bailey) dressed in a ballerina costume joining the dancers on stage during a performance of Swan Lake. All the scenes have weird screechy noises and fart sounds going on in the background. It is all totally random.

Several people recommended we review this movie because it had a scene with a[ Ural. I’d like to find all these people and give them a wedgie for forcing me to sit through this painful, unfunny comedy.

Kevin sez:
Good news/Bad news department: this film is only 83 minutes long, but you have to sit through 69 minutes of it before you come to the chase scene featuring a Ural/sidecar combination. At least the scene features some very good stunt driving, with the hack driver constantly “flying the chair” with a passenger on back and one in the hack. Watching this scene I could only think of our own three-up sidecar team—that of Metallic Waste (MMM #71). The big difference being that I doubt any of MW’s crew had to put up with all of the shenanigans endured by the riders on the Ural.

The only other comparisons I can make with Metallic Waste are that A ) the Ural three-up crew DID have a 10 year advantage over MW for doing some serious three-up riding, but B ) MW was made at a cost of around a couple thousand bucks, while "Mission to Moscow" was made for significantly more than that, yet only managed to MAKE $126,274 at the theaters. You do the math, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that MW has a better bang for buck equation.

Trivia time:
The sounds coming from The Game are actually from the video game Donkey Kong (but Donkey Kong has way better graphics).

The character Konstantine Konali’s name is spelled with K’s throughout the movie. In the credits however, the name is spelled as Constantine Konali. Which leads us to the obvious: beware of anyone with the initials KK.

M.M.M.