Caddy Hack
Written and directed by Anthony Catanese
Starring Jake Foy, Chrissy Cavallo, Jim Gordon and Nick Twist
Unrated
Runtime: 75 minutes
Streaming on demand October 10 and available on Blu-Ray October 24

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

I watched Caddy Hack the day after getting the latest Covid booster. And as I got woozier and more feverish as the microchips and 5G coursed through my veins (note to RFK Jr. et al: that was a joke), this movie was the perfect filmic comfort food. Caddy Hack is absurd, it is dumb, it is hilarious, and it wears its miniscule budget on its sleeve with pride.

The premise is straightforward: it’s a story centered on the caddies at Old Glory Holes Golf Club, somewhere in New Jersey, some time between the mid-’80s and now. (Writer-director Anthony Catanese doesn’t spend much time getting into the details of setting, either in time or space.) Club owner Welles Landon (played with Trumpian buffoonery, and an awful hairpiece to match, by Jim Gordon) is preparing for the big tournament weekend, with groundskeeper Hambone (Nick Twist) preparing the greens with his proprietary fertilizer (which he is constantly huffing). Meanwhile, horn-rimmed reading nerd Googie (Jake Foy) and the caddies are goofing off. Mr. Landon and his constantly-giggling assistant Ms. Flannager (Ilene Sullivan) call in Landon’s niece/nepo baby Becky (Chrissy Cavallo) to serve as caddy manager despite a lack of experience.

Then the gophers get a few whiffs of Hambone’s fertilizer and turn into murderous beasts with glowing eyes. (Credit to Cavallo alongside Amanda Strauss for the design of the gophers, both in their adorable pre-transformation forms and after their menacing turns.) Hambone, Becky, Googie, and the rest of the caddies are thrust into a war against the gophers (sound familiar?) before the gophers bring bloodshed and destruction to the course and (worse yet for Landon) his dues-paying members.

Catanese’s script is a loving homage to ‘80s sex comedies, with just enough horror to differentiate from its source material. (Sometimes it’s too loving — there’s a couple leering shots of Cavallo too many — but with a film that has a magazine titled Golf Boobs as a prop, it’s clearly tongue-in-cheek.) A slew of puns and double-entendres abound. There’s a liberal use of silly sound effects and a soundtrack in the vein of that Incompetech “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” song. There’s a radio DJ offering meta-commentary on the film. There’s a gratuitous dance-off sequence causing the explosion of a caddy’s head, his photo pinned to the wall of fallen caddies after his only scene. There’s a romantic musical number between Becky and Googie as their star-crossed love blossoms. There’s a Vietnam PTSD scene, and a “where are the characters now” epilogue that serves as the perfect end-cap to said scene. There’s a montage of ribald, kinda racist Punch & Judy show-like roleplay when the gophers take over the caddyshack. There’s, like, twenty nutshots. And there’s my favorite genre of credits song, the rap that explains the plot of the movie we just saw.

Realistically, Caddy Hack could have probably been a ten to fifteen-minute short film. The plot is thin (essentially, “what if the Caddyshack gopher was a monster”) and the scenes do not blend into one another so much as they’re strung together by transition wipes and stock footage of golf courses. Not to mention the film’s “two-dollar budget” (to quote the credits rap) is evident throughout. But the joys of watching such a relentlessly and gleefully stupid movie easily win out here. This spooky season, get your Covid booster, get your flu shot, and watch Caddy Hack.