Nothing But Trouble (1991) on Netflix
Financial publisher Chris Thorne agrees to drive lawyer Diane Lightson to Atlantic City, and two of his clients come along. A detour into Valkenvania ends in a police chase.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb5.2/1030,665 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes15%
Trailer
Plot summary
Chris Thorne, a financial publisher, hosts a party in his Manhattan penthouse and meets Diane Lightson, a lawyer. He agrees to drive her to Atlantic City the next day to consult her client Howard Suntz. Two of his own clients, the Brazilian siblings Fausto and Renalda Squiriniszu, hear the plan and invite themselves along. The Squiriniszus want a scenic route away from the New Jersey Turnpike, and the four of them reach Valkenvania, a rundown town. After they run a stop sign and try to outrun police chief Dennis Valkenheiser, they are caught and taken before his grandfather, Judge Alvin "J.P." Valkenheiser, who is 106. Chris's disrespectful manner at the hearing offends the judge, who shuts the group in a hidden room beneath his courthouse to await judgment.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Nothing But Trouble (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Peter Aykroyd relayed an event from 1978 in which Dan had been pulled over for speeding in upstate New York and taken to the justice of the peace in what Dan called a "kangaroo court"; after a $50 fine, the justice invited him to stay for tea and he stayed four hours.
- Aykroyd wanted to play the parts of both Judge Alvin "J.P." Valkenheiser and Chris Thorne, but the studio wanted Chevy Chase as Thorne and he agreed; with no director attached, Aykroyd reluctantly agreed to direct the film to secure the deal.
- The story was developed after a screening of the 1987 film Hellraiser that producer Robert K. Weiss attended with Dan and Peter Aykroyd; Weiss had a fractured rib so it could not be a comedy, and when the audience laughed at the horror film anyway he suggested they make a horror comedy together.
- Roger Ebert famously hated Nothing But Trouble so much that he refused to write a review for it after giving the movie an emphatic "Thumbs Down", and wanted a few noisy teenagers to make even more noise so he would not hear any more of it.
- Aykroyd offered the script to John Hughes, who was interested in the story but turned it down because he only directed his own scripts, and received a special thanks credit; John Landis disliked the script and immediately turned it down.
- Much of the bizarre characters and events, such as the giant mutant babies, were based on a series of dreams Aykroyd was having, and he set the story in the fictional town of Valkenvania, based loosely on Centralia, Pennsylvania.
- Decades later, in a 2024 interview, Dan Aykroyd defended the film as "a fun, very serviceable comedy," arguing its failure was really due to opening in theaters against The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy.
- Warner Bros. gave the production a $40 million budget, but filming ran $5 million over, bringing the final cost to $45 million.
