That combination of gallows humor and contemporary cross-references is repeated again and again in "Young Doctors in Love," and it's finally not very funny. Yet the movie sounds like a good idea. Maybe it was a good idea, lost in the execution. Maybe there are two problems here: 1 It is rather hard to outflank "General Hospital," a parody of itself, and 2 If you do, you wind up skirting the edges of very unpleasant comic material about blood and death. Hospitals are just not very funny. The movie takes place in a loony Los Angeles city hospital, where we meet all the standard types: the monomaniac surgeon, the befuddled chief of staff, and sex-and-dope crazed interns and nurses, and the ambitious young medical students in their first year of residence. There also are several long-running gags, the unfunniest being about a hit man who is turned into the hapless victim of accidents and near-fatal emergency treatments. The movie looks at times like a real life version of one of those drawings by Mad magazine's Jack Davis, in which lunatics chase each other in circles. Are there funny moments in the middle of the chaos?
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Sendup of the medical profession. Michael McKean. Stephanie: Sean Young. Prang: Dabney Coleman. Ludwig: Harry Dean Stanton. Garry Marshall directed. Close Ad. Live TV. New This Month. More TV Picks.
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A group of young medical interns join the City Hospital surgery staff run by Dr. Prang, a brash and cynical surgeon leading an expensive and dissolute lifestyle. Meanwhile, old mafioso Sal Bonafetti is admitted to the same hospital under an assumed name after suffering a stroke ; his son Angelo disguises himself as a woman in order to tend to Sal, fearing retaliation by rival crime syndicates.
