Here Come the Tigers
Here Come the Tigers
PG | 24 May 1978 (USA)
Here Come the Tigers Trailers

A cop and his partner manage a little league baseball team, trying to turn the group of misfits into a competitive team.

Reviews
Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?
Manthast Absolutely amazing
Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.
Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.
Woodyanders Amiable cop Eddie Burke (a decent and engaging performance by Richard Lincoln) and his bumbling partner Burt Honneger (James Zvanut, who mugs way too much for comfort) get the impossible job of coaching a little league baseball team called the Tigers that's made up of assorted losers and misfits. Can Eddie and Burt whip the Tigers into shape so they can start winning games and have a real shot at the local championship? Arch McCoy's shamelessly derivative script copies "The Bad News Bears" without capturing any of the charm, wit, or verve which made that particular picture such a caustic treat. Instead McCoy offers dire attempts at crude humor which include stale jokes on such desperate topics as flatulence, nose-picking, and kids swearing (natch). Worse yet, there's even a painfully sincere and hackneyed "you just gotta believe in yourself" central message and occasional ham-fisted attempts at gooey sentiment. The mostly bland acting from a lame no-name cast, Sean S. Cunningham's flat (non)direction, a grindingly predictable narrative that delivers zero surprises (guess who wins the big climactic game), the plodding pace, Harry Manfredini's irritatingly bouncy cutesy-poo score, and a dreadful artificially sped up slapstick chase set piece don't help matters any. 70's porn mainstay Fred Lincoln is wasted in a nothing minor role as incredibly annoying seedy stoner drunk Aesop. Only Barry Abrams' polished cinematography manages to rise above the general mediocrity. A real dud.
BIOSphereopts I just watched this horrid thing on TV. Needless to say it is one of those movies that you watch just to see how much worse it can get. Frankly, I don't know how much lower the bar can go. The characters are composed of one lame stereo-type after another, and the obvious attempt at creating another "Bad News Bears" is embarrassing to say the VERY least.I have seen some prized turkeys in my time, but there is no reason to list any of them since this is "Numero Uno".Let me put it to you this way, I watched the Vanilla Ice movie, because it was so bad it was funny. This...this...is NOT even that good.
ghintaris Have not watched kids films for some years, so I missed "Here Come the Tigers" when it first came out. (Never even saw "Bad News Bears" even though in the '70s I worked for the guys who arranged financing for that movie, "Warriors," "Man Who Would Be King," and "Rocky Horror Picture Show," among others.) Now I like to check out old or small movies and find people who have gone on to great careers despite being in a less than great movie early on. Just minutes into this movie I could take no more and jumped to the end credits to see if there was a young actor in this movie who had gone on to bigger and better things--at least watching for his/her appearance would create some interest as the plot and acting weren't doing the job. Lo and behold, I spied Wes Craven's name in the credits as an electrical gaffer. He'd already made two or three of his early shockers but had not yet created Freddie Krueger or made the "Scream" movies. Maybe he owed a favor and helped out on this pic. More surprising was Fred J. Lincoln in the cast credits as "Aesop," a wacky character in the movie. F.J. Lincoln, from the '70s to just a few years ago, appeared in and produced adult films. He was associated with the adult spoof "The Ozporns," and just that title is funnier than all of "Tigers" attempts at humor combined. Let the fact that an adult actor was placed in a kids movie be an indication as to how the people making this movie must have been asleep at the wheel.
Alan-66 Call it morbid fascination, like motorists slowing down to get an eyeful of a bad wreck on the side of the road, but I cannot to this day get over how fascinatingly awful Sean S. Cunningham's "Here Come the Tigers" is. For years I've wrestled over which is the worst film I've ever seen, "I Spit on Your Grave" or this, with "Ernest Goes to Camp" running a close 3rd. I finally came to the conclusion recently that despite it's amateurish look and sadistically glorified rape scenes, "I Spit..." was, at the VERY least, original (compared to "Tigers"). Don't get me wrong. That's the only defense the trashy, stomach-churning "I Spit..." will EVER get from me.Come to think of it, "Tigers" is *such* a blatant Bad News Bears ripoff that it makes ANY film look original in comparison. I don't know how Sean S. Cunningman and AIP got away with it, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone got hold of a BNB script and went through it page by page and simply penciled in their characters' names over the Bears' names. The two films are SO alike (squatter's rights going to TBNB, of course) that for me to compose a laundry list of similarities would be futile. To see "Bears" but not "Tigers" is an impossibility, because if you have seen "Bears", you've also seen "Tigers". If this formula happens to be reversed for you, my condolences.I remember when the film came out, back in March 1978. Oddly, its short-lived and subliminal theatrical run seemed limited exclusively to the drive-in circuit. Not knowing any better, I was curious to see it since, at the time, Bad News Bears flicks were all the rage amongst my 5th grade peers. My curiosity, however, quickly turned to disinterest when the majority of my classmates universally trashed the film. I knew it had to be bad, particularly since at that age kids tend to buy into and gobble up anything thrown our way.It wasn't until 1985 that I finally saw the film on TV. Packing as many bleeps as a typical "Osbournes" episode of today, I sat with mouth agape, bewildered at how the word "plagarism" held such new meaning for me. I taped the broadcast and held onto it for many years, dusting it off every now and then and popping it in to satisfy any bad-movie urge I may have been craving at the time.Then just the other day, I purchased a pre-recorded uncut copy off of Ebay. I tend to keep a soft spot in my heart open at all times for certain bad movies. "The Crater Lake Monster" and "Squirm" hold permanent residences, along with "Empire of the Ants" and the first "Police Academy". "Here Come the Tigers", however, is in a class all its own. Here is a film so sloppily made (continuity gaffes and sound-looping blunders at every turn), so lazily written, so contrived and intelligence-insulting, not to mention unoriginal... that I cannot get enough of it. Call it what you will, but perhaps my fascination lies in the fact that here is a movie so bad that it's actually, well, bad. Really bad.Echoing back to my opening analogy, I am not a motorist who'll slow down in traffic to get a better look at some roadside carnage. I am, on the other hand, one who subjects himself to repeated viewings of stinkers like "Here Come the Tigers". And even though I have yet to see it, I eagerly await the arrival of my Ebay purchase of Cunningham's follow-up kiddie-sportster, the sure-to-be-a-dud "Manny's Orphans" (1978), with soccer the subject this time around, and featuring a good deal of the "Tigers" cast.To quote a certain Linda Blair movie: "Mother? What's wrong with me?"