THE SECRET TO MY SUCCE$S (1987 - USA- Comedy/Drama/Romance) is an epic of bad behavior and even worse hair...oh yeah, and incest

 Choreographer turned director Herb Ross has made some great films. THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. THE TURNING POINT. THE GOODBYE GIRL. Then the beyond silly, loving paen to awkward white-people dancing, FOOTLOOSE, dropped and he was really off to the races. He soon followed that up with PROTOCOL, then SECRET OF MY SUCCESS, which seems now like a culmination of every bad idea/decision every creative person involved with the film ever made.
From the absolutely hypocritical, creepy, morality of the lead character Brantley Foster (Michael J. Fox), a country kid with an education who moves to the Big Apple, and gets his distant uncle to give him a job in the huge company he runs. Oh yeah, through  a turn of odd events, Brantley starts screwing his uncles' wife. But that's not creepy and fucked up enough for this guy,  soon he is literally stalking the female lead character Christy Willis (Helen Slater, SUPERGIRL, THE LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN), a corporate executive to his mail room clerk, in hopes of getting into her pants. But hey, fake it til you make it, so Brantley decides to take over an empty office, impersonating an executive, and single-handedly save his uncles failing mega-business. Oh yeah, he eventually wins over the snowy Willis with his lies, and finds out his uncle is screwing her as well. If this sounds like a mess of a film, it is. It's excuse making for men who fuck around, and sexist views of women who do the same, it's overt attempt at sexualizinf Fox (ewwwwww yuchhhh!) with scenes of him listening to his neighbors fuck, as he leads their actions from the other side of a wall with a conductors baton, his make-out scenes with Slater, his shirtless boy-body bared after screwing who is for all intents and purposes, his aunt, etc all serve to make this a skin crawlingly skeevy failure of a screwball sex-comedy.

Then there's the incredibly lazy writing, and the inane and beyond stupid fantasy of "You can move to the city and take over a huge industrial business in a couple weeks" which didn't come off as a wish-fulfillment dream, so much as a completely lame, stupid fucking pipedream, full of ridiculousness that came off annoying rather than zany. And the "weekend gathering at the bosses manor" ring around the rosy whose sneaking into whose bedroom scene towards the end, so obviously trying to homage Ernst Lubitsch, was just long, poorly, edited, and overall fucking stupid.

To add, the only times I've been more grossed out by love scenes than in THE SECRET OF MY SUCCE$S, have been when I saw the aerobics epic PERFECT with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis, or MOMENT BY MOMENT, which paired Travolta with Lily Tomlin, in which they played lovers (beware the hot tub scene where he admonishes her for smoking "the pot", and eventually leads to them in bed...it's tghe cinematic equivalent to chemical castration...you'll never want to have sex again). The one "bright spot" (or least "brown" of all the stains this piece of shit leaves) is the anachronistic soundtrack, which is so "1980"s my hair was frosted when I looked in the mirror after watching.

Holy shit this movie is bad. The fact it outgrossed ROBOCOP, PREDATOR, LETHAL WEAPON, and DIRTY DANCING, spending five weeks at number one at the box office, even with the suggestive poster that looks like Fox is on the receiving end of a bath house gangbang, riding high atop a mountain of what is obviously supposed to look like a fountain of jizz, is kind of jaw dropping.

The scariest part of it all though? is I still had fun trying not to barf while I watched it.

- 3/10