WAGONS EAST! (1994)

Richard Lewis plays Phil Taylor, a frontiersman who rallies a gaggle of discontented neighbors to leave the dumb, brutish, 19th-century West and return east to St. Louis in this dumb, brutish Western comedy. The late John Candy, in his final performance (and thus, unfortunately, memorialized at his most corpulent and least inventive), plays James Harlow, the hard-drinking wagon master hired to lead the convoy. The usual wrong turns and farcical menaces appear, but the worst menace may be John C. McGinley, who, as a gay bookseller, was encouraged by director Peter Markle to turn in the kind of crudely stereotypical performance applied to no other special interest group -- including whores and fat men -- in this broken-down nag of a movie.

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