Things Are Tough All Over (1982)

Cheech and Chong have a good time with Things Are Tough All Over, and you will, too.

The jokes tossed into this feeble effort involve Cheech and Chong in drag, herpes, and an S&M porno adventure featuring the comedians' real-life spouses Shelby Fiddis and Rikki Marin.

Even the premise for this sputtering attempt at a picaresque farce seems to anticipate a vehicle prone to misfires and breakdowns. [12 Aug 1982, p.E1]

With Things Are Tough All Over their once well-oiled comedy has rusted firmly into place. Now, the erstwhile darlings of the counter-culture seem about as raucously rebellious as a senescent Lucy Ricardo. [2 Aug 1982]

It's a shaggy-dog road movie, with all the team's usual ingredients but one -- it's not funny. There's no fresh insight in Things Are Tough All Over, little of their surrealist pothead non sequiturs, and to see them through, they've begun to fall back on tired, conventional sight gags -- a car going through a carwash with its top down, Cheech hiding in a spinning laundermat dryer. [6 Sept 1982, p.75]