I have a secret, dear reader. One which I will disclose to you now. I understand that upon reading these words you may wish never to visit this blog again and also immediately disavow any friendship we may have had in the past. But I’m wiling to take the risk. I can’t hold this inside anymore. I have to speak my truth. So here it is.

I think the movie Caddyshack sucks.

Yes! Sucks! One might forgive its dated hairstyles and clothing which remind me most unpleasantly of how the world looked when I was 10 years old. One might even forgive Kenny Loggins. Might. But the film’s awfulness goes far, far beyond these atrocities. It’s humor can only charitably be described as puerile. Many of its performances are painfully amateurish, including and especially that of Bill Murray, a man whose subsequent career is actually pretty admirable. Mumbling unscripted lines in a silly voice out the side of your mouth isn’t the kind of thing a professional actor does unless he’s trying be funny by emulating someone who doesn’t know how to act. (Or unless you’re Adam Sandler, who as far as I can tell modeled his entire career after Murray’s performance in this film.)

The only thing that isn’t completely without merit are the scenes between Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight. But they aren’t nearly enough to make watching the entire film worth your time.

I won’t even get into the puppet gopher.

So what’s up with the rest of you? 78% on the Tomatometer, people? Really? It must be that Americans of my generation were imprinted on this film like ducklings who, emerging from their shells to see a gardner, subsequently follow him around in error for the rest of their lives. Everyone seems to have seen this movie at a similarly impressionable stage of life, it perhaps being the first R-rated film they’d ever seen, and, God help them, liked it. I, however, was absent that day and didn’t see it until much later, which is why I recognize its inherent and unwavering terribleness while the rest of you wander about hopelessly lost in egregious cinematic tastelessness.

There. I said it. I feel strangely free. No more pretending! And maybe somewhere in this wide world there are others like me. Maybe we could start a colony somewhere, like lepers, leaving the rest of the Caddyshack-loving world to carry blithely on without us.