Movie Info
Movie Name: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure
Studio: Warner Bros. Television
Genre(s): Comedy
Release Date(s): December 20, 2003
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Season’s greetings…we’re here to ruin your holiday!
Eddie Johnson (Randy Quaid) can’t get a break. He loses his experimental radiation testing job to a chimpanzee at Christmas time, but when the chimp bites him, he and his family are given an all expenses paid trip. Now, Cousin Eddie, his wife Catherine (Miriam Flynn), their genius son Third Johnson (Jake Thomas), their cousin Audrey Griswold (Dana Barron), and Uncle Nick (Ed Asner) are headed to Hawaii with their dog Snots. When a shipwreck occurs during a chartered tour, Eddie and his family are trapped with their tour guide Muka Luka Miki (Sung Hi Lee) on a deserted island…and facing missing Christmas.
Hi…you’re slumming yourself to this too?
Directed by Nick Marck, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure is a Made-for-TV follow-up to the holiday comedy classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation from 1989 (but Eddie and his kin last appeared in Vegas Vacation in 1997). The movie received poor reviews but has been released on DVD.
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is an institution (which it even states on the back of the DVD for this movie). Unfortunately, there is money in institutions and as a result you get movies like this…Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure.
I’m rooting for the boar!
The movie is out-and-out awful. The story is force, it isn’t funny, and it goes on and on. This outing sees the family with a free trip to Hawaii (they are staying with Audrey Griswold so naturally she comes along with old Uncle Nick). The movie goes for a bit of a Gilligan’s Island idea with the whole group plus their tour guide getting stranded on an uninhabited island (which of course really isn’t uninhabited). About all the characters have their own plot lines and none of the characters’ stories really develop into anything.
Cousin Eddie was good in small doses, but Eddie here is too much. As dumb as he was in the original films, they made him even slower here. Quaid plays it up, but that isn’t a good thing. He’s joined by a rather dull cast but the movie does see the return of the original Audrey played by Dana Barron. Ed Asner plays the lecherous uncle and the movie also has the return of National Lampoon’s European Vacation’s Eric Idle as the disaster prone Englishman.
This pretty much sums it up…
If the movie at least looked ok, it would be one thing, but the movie is also horrible looking. The slapstick humor is poor and overdone and it is loaded with bad blue-screen, some CGI, and poorly constructed imagery. You could argue that moving the location to Hawaii hurts the “Christmas image”, but this movie lost any Christmas feel long before the crew gets to Hawaii.
Steer clear of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Eddie’s Island Adventure. There is a reason that this was Made-for-TV and it isn’t even up to the standards of a Lifetime movie. The Griswolds were fun…the Johnsons not so much. I hope that more “Cousin Eddie” adventures are not planned.
Related Links:
National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985)
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