It’s always a bummer to watch an older film and realize some talented person is no longer around and passed away while relatively young. In the case of Noises Off!, that’s both John Ritter and Christopher Reeve. Thankfully you can still enjoy their truly fantastic performances – alongside the rest of the game cast – on DVD from Nashville Public Library.

If you’ve already seen the stage version, I may not be able to convince you that the film adaptation is worth watching; the source material is most often superior. But considering the fact that most of this movie is actors moving around the stage for 100 minutes, it manages to wring quite a bit of comedy out of all the cascading mishaps and neurotic cast members. As the show-within-the-show (“Nothing On”) is in final rehearsal stages, nothing can go quite right, whether it’s the veteran actor perpetually angling for whatever booze is laying around, or one of the leading men continually questioning the believability of the script.

Michael Caine attempts to wrangle the chaos, which includes great comedic work from Carol Burnett, Julie Hagerty, Marilu Henner, Nicollette Sheridan, and Denholm Elliott. The screenplay is frequently clever, without sacrificing visual humor or some moments of slapstick, and the cumulative effect is a pretty funny movie that just might encourage you to seek out whatever local theater troupe is still performing the original play.