Hot to Trot (1988)
Article 5868 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-24-2020
Directed by Michael Dinner
Featuring Bobcat Goldthwait, Dabney Coleman, John Candy
Country: USA
What it is: I miss Francis

A ne’er-do-well inherits half of a brokerage firm and a talking horse. Can the talking horse help him to succeed at the brokerage firm?

I’d heard of Bobcat Goldthwait, but I never caught his act. If, however, this movie catches him at his usual shtick, I don’t think I missed much. Ultimately, though, I suspect that the movie doesn’t really do justice to him; from what I gather from the trivia on IMDB, he was talked into doing it for the money. It’s pretty much what I’d suspect from an eighties movie that borrowed from a much earlier concept (the Francis the talking mule and Mr. Ed talking animals gimmick); it mostly uses the idea to take advantage of the increased permissiveness to add off-color jokes to the proceedings. Every once in a while I catch an idea that I find clever; I like the concept of the human having to move his lips to make it look like he’s saying what the horse is saying. Mostly, the movie is just really lame and obvious. There’s a few fun movie clips that pop up, and some of the trivia on IMDB is interesting (the lead role was originally supposed to be Joan Rivers?), but other than that, it’s a bore. Incidentally, the horse was originally voiced by Elliott Gould, but after some advanced screenings, John Candy was called in to redub; he ignored most of the dialogue in the script and ad-libbed.