Kummeli: Kultakuume is a 1997 Finnish comedy film

Comedy film

Comedy film is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humour. They are designed to elicit laughter from the audience. Comedies are mostly light-hearted dramas and are made to amuse and entertain the audiences...

 starring Heikki Hela

Heikki Hela

Heikki Hela is a Finnish entertainer, actor and musician, best remembered for his role in the early 1990s hit show Kummeli and his hit song "Uneton Yö", featured on his debut album, Kaikista Kaikkein...

, Heikki Silvennoinen

Heikki Silvennoinen

Heikki Johannes Silvennoinen is Finnish musician and actor. He was guitarist and songwriter of several notable Finnish bands in 1970s and 1980s. He is also a singer on his solo albums...

, Timo Kahilainen

Timo Kahilainen

Timo Eero Kahilainen is a Finnish actor best known as one of the four original members of the Kummeli comedy crew, along with Heikki Silvennoinen, Heikki Hela and Heikki Vihinen. Kahilainen is best known for portraying the many short but energetic characters of the Kummeli character gallery.He is...

 and Heikki Vihinen, stars of the Finnish sketch-series Kummeli

Kummeli

Kummeli is the name of a Finnish comedy crew formed by Heikki Silvennoinen, Timo Kahilainen and Heikki Hela from Tampere. They are also the heads of Porkkana Ryhmä, the crew's production company...

. This was their second cinema-release after 1996's Kummeli: Stories. Unlike Stories, Kultakuume has a single plot whereas Stories was composed of long-sketches.

Plot

The story is set in 1984. Elmeri Hautamäki (Silvennoinen) is a man who has lived his entire life in a mental institution. He escapes with his homosexual nurse Janne-Petteri Broman (Hela) and is joined by the Kagelberg-twins Jönssi and Dille (Vihinen and Kahilainen) on a quest for the hidden gold treasure of his father Kyrpä-Jooseppi Hautamäki, who was killed by a fleeing German soldier Peter North (Jukka Puotila) back in 1944, in Lapland. Their escape leads them to be pursued by not only the Mental Institute's doctors Rasikangas and Kulokoski (Mari Turunen and Kari Hietalahti) but by the police as well.

The motley crew arrives at Elmeri's father's site but are unable to extract a reasonable amount of gold from the river. At the dead of night Jönssi stumbles on a buried German motorbike and the bodies of two dead SS-troopers. They find out that the motorbike's side-cart carries a chest full of Third Reich gold.

Later a police-pursuit lands the group on the grounds of gay baron Eugen von Lahtinen (Vesa-Matti Loiri

Vesa-Matti Loiri

Vesa-Matti "Vesku" Loiri is a Finnish actor, musician and comedian, best known for his role as Uuno Turhapuro, whom he portrayed in a total of 20 movies between the years 1973 and 2004....

) during a poetry-themed spring-celebration. The gold-exchanger that the group goes to, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge (Oiva Lohtander), turns out to be working for a secret Nazi-organization. Through this contact Peter North , still alive and well, learns that Elmeri has found his gold and he returns to Finland. When Hautamäki returns to exchange the rest of the gold for cash he ends up in hand-to-hand combat with North. Hautamäki wins the fight (by asking North for a cigarette).

The gold is split among the good guys, Broman marries baron von Lahtinen, becoming the mistress of his estate. Jönssi becomes the owner of the food-processing plant from which he and his brother were fired from at the beginning of the film. Dille becomes a professor at the University of Tampere

University of Tampere

The University of Tampere is a university in Tampere, Finland. It has 15,400 degree students and 2,100 employees. It was originally founded in 1925 in Helsinki as a Civic College , and from 1930 onwards it was known as a School of Social Sciences...

. Elmeri marries a call-girl named Vanessa and has many children. He takes Peter North's name in order to stay out of the mental asylum. Peter North ends up locked up in a Mental Institution under Hautamäki's name for the rest of his life.

Characters

• Elmeri Hautamäki is the son of the prospector, Kyrpä-Jooseppi Hautamäki. Elmeri has lived his entire life in a mental institution. His violent hormone-activity makes him very unpredictable, he also appears to possess super-human strength, easily throwing several heavy opponents with one hand while enraged over not being offered a cigarette. However, Elmeri speaks in perfect literary Finnish and is usually very well behaved.
• Janne-Petteri Broman is an homosexual nurse who Elmeri convinces to help him escape when he shows him the gold flakes that were recovered from his father's excrement. At first Broman does not take kindly to Jönssi and Dille who Elmeri befriends after Broman's SEAT Málaga
  SEAT Málaga
  The SEAT Málaga is a four-door saloon produced by the Spanish automaker SEAT from 1985 to 1992, named after the city of Málaga in Andalucía, southern Spain....
  
   crashes with their Dodge Aspen
  Dodge Aspen
  The Dodge Aspen, produced from 1976 to 1980, was a compact car from Chrysler Corporation's Dodge division; its Plymouth-branded counterpart was the Volaré . It was launched as a two-door coupe, a four-door sedan, and a unique-for-the-segment station wagon...
  
  . Mirroring a common Finnish stereotype, Broman's speech is sometimes littered with Swedish utterances.
• James "Jönssi" Kagelberg is the taller of the Kagelberg twins, their mother died when the two were just children and they were abandoned by their father. The state tried to reintroduce the twins into society starting from the 70s, with very little success. Jönssi is fond of Finnish iskelmä-songs and is heard singing them throughout the movie. Jönssi is named after James Dean
  James Dean
  James Byron Dean was an American film actor. He is a cultural icon, best embodied in the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause , in which he starred as troubled Los Angeles teenager Jim Stark...
  
  .
• Dean "Dille" Kagelberg is the shorter and the crosseyed one of the Kagelberg twins. Dille often confronts people with philosophical anecdotes. He is named after Dean Martin
  Dean Martin
  Dean Martin was an American singer, film actor, television star and comedian. Martin's hit singles included "Memories Are Made of This", "That's Amore", "Everybody Loves Somebody", "You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You", "Sway", "Volare" and "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?"...
  
   and not James Dean like his brother. He is known for his catch-phrase Legendaarista meaning Legendary.

Example of use:

-This is a BX windshield? How much did it cost?

-Nothing!

-Legendary.

• Peter North is a former Nazi officer who had to leave a treasure of gold behind him during the Lapland War
  Lapland War
  The Lapland War were the hostilities between Finland and Nazi Germany between September 1944 and April 1945, fought in Finland's northernmost Lapland Province. While the Finns saw this as a separate conflict much like the Continuation War, German forces considered their actions to be part of the...
  
  , and decades after returns to seek for it.