Directed by: Mariano Ozores
Stars: Fernando Esteso, Andrés Pajares, Antonio Ozores, Alfonso del Real, Jenny Llada, Beatriz Escudero
Language: Spanish | Subtitles: English
Country: Spain | Imdb Info
Also known as: Agítese antes de usarla
Description: Argimiro and Fabricio are two small-time swindlers who meet at La Operadora, a disreputable private clinic on the Costa del Sol. Neither man has any meaningful medical knowledge, but that does not prevent them from disguising themselves as hospital workers and becoming involved in the clinic’s increasingly chaotic affairs.
The pair also share a more profitable objective: moving 200 million pesetas to Melilla without attracting the attention of the authorities. Hiding such an enormous fortune inside a hospital should be simple enough, provided nobody asks questions, inspects the patients, or notices that the staff members appear to be making up their jobs as they go along.
Unfortunately, La Operadora is already facing its own crisis.
The clinic is expanding despite its terrible reputation, and its administrators desperately need favorable publicity. What they lack in medical competence, they hope to replace with television coverage, preferably involving a famous and apparently satisfied patient.
Opportunity arrives in the form of Deputy Francisco Granja, an important politician who enters the clinic with nothing more serious than a damaged fingernail. The staff immediately recognizes him as the perfect advertisement. The only problem is keeping him hospitalized until the television cameras arrive.
Argimiro and Fabricio solve this difficulty with characteristic medical precision: they cover the politician in plaster and turn his minor complaint into a spectacular public-health event.
While the deputy struggles to escape his unnecessary treatment, the clinic fills with eccentric patients, confused nurses, angry relatives, suspicious officials, accidental injuries, and increasingly desperate attempts to protect the hidden money. Every corridor produces a new misunderstanding, and every improvised solution creates another emergency.
The two impostors continue shifting between the roles of doctor, nurse, patient, and criminal according to whatever the situation requires. Their plan might still succeed if they can avoid the tax inspector, calm the deputy’s wife, satisfy the clinic’s administrators, and remember where they concealed the fortune.
Shake Before Use is a broad Spanish hospital comedy built from disguises, misunderstandings, political jokes, sexual innuendo, and the unstoppable double act of Andrés Pajares and Fernando Esteso. The clinic functions less as a place of healing than as a stage on which every institution in Spain—medicine, politics, television, taxation, and law enforcement—can be made equally ridiculous.
Legacy Note:
Written and directed by Mariano Ozores, Agítese antes de usarla belongs to the enormously popular series of comedies that paired Andrés Pajares with Fernando Esteso during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The duo generally played ordinary schemers whose attempts to improve their fortunes pulled them into situations far beyond their intelligence or control.
The film uses the familiar Ozores formula: a rapid production, a large ensemble of recognizable comic actors, a flimsy criminal scheme, attractive nurses, political satire, slapstick accidents, and dialogue that rarely pauses long enough for the audience to question the logic.
Antonio Ozores, Alfonso del Real, Juanito Navarro, José Lifante, Arévalo, Adrián Ortega, Jenny Llada, Beatriz Escudero, and Emma Ozores are among the many familiar faces passing through the clinic. Part of the entertainment lies in waiting to see which veteran Spanish character actor will appear behind the next hospital door.
Beneath the nonsense is a characteristically Ozores-style attack on institutions. The hospital cares more about television publicity than medicine, the politician becomes a prisoner of his own importance, and the supposed professionals are scarcely more competent than the two criminals impersonating them.
The film is also a vivid artifact of Spain’s late-destape comedy era, when newly relaxed censorship, nudity, topical jokes, and old-fashioned variety-show humor were combined into hugely successful popular entertainment. Its attitudes are unmistakably dated, but they preserve the commercial tastes and social atmosphere of early-1980s Spanish cinema.
Loud, politically incorrect, crowded, and determined never to let good taste interfere with a joke, Shake Before Use turns a bankrupt clinic into a complete national madhouse—one where the doctors are impostors, the healthiest patient is trapped in plaster, and the largest medical problem is finding somewhere to hide 200 million pesetas.
Extended Trailer:
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