Ever wanted to see Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara doing Anna Karenina? Don’t answer yet.
Actually, don’t answer at all, because That’s Adequate has just that — and more! — wanted or otherwise. File this project under “otherwise,” because it sat on the shelf for three years, which probably suited many of its cameo players just fine.
Having never quite conquered Hollywood, writer/director Harry Hurwitz (The Projectionist, Safari 3000) uses his penultimate film as a mockumentary to spoof the entire industry. With clips aplenty, penny-pinching producer Max Roebling (Scavenger Hunt’s James Coco, the Kmart Dom DeLuise) reminisces about the six-decade run of his fictional Adequate Pictures. In doing so, Hurwitz gives himself a chance to parody a slew of genres without committing to one.
This includes — take a deep breath — D.W. Griffith epics (but erotic), Shakespearean drama (performed in rabbit costumes) and medical dramas (with an accidental laugh track). The comedies of Charlie Chaplin (albeit one in which the Tramp-esque comic ate his pint-sized sidekick), the Marx Brothers (if they were rapey) and the Three Stooges (but with real-world consequences of violence). Plus African-American musicals, 1940s newsreels, Fleischer cartoons, goona-goona jungle adventures, John Wayne war pics, color-tinted serials, Hitchcockian thrillers, Cold War sci-fi, Star Wars and the follies-style films with a banjo player singing next to a dancing penis. (Those were a thing, right?)
Bits play quickly with jokes rapid-fire, but fast rarely equates to funny. Sometimes a segment feels double the length because not one line lands; ironically, these bits all feature big-name talent, from Bruce Willis and Robert Downey Jr. (presaging the Kid ’n Play hair) to yammering stand-up Richard Lewis as a yammering franchise character named Pimples.
Speaking of stand-up, a mystifying USA for Africa sendup assembles every other comedian of the late 1980s — Rick Overton, Ritch Shydner, Sinbad, Joe Alaskey, Robert Townsend, The Funny Boys — and not an off switch among them — which had to be an on-set nightmare. Don’t even get me started on dialogue built upon such bold concepts as “cut the cheese” and “feeling funny and tingly down by their pee-pees and poo-poos.”
Still, That’s Adequate contains a few inspired sketches, starting with a Western using the corpse of its deceased leading man for reshoots, à la Weekend at Bernie’s. Meanwhile, Young Adolf gives the future führer Hitler a George Washington-style biopic, right down to lying to his father about a chopped-down tree: “Father, I cannot tell a lie. The Jews did it.” Guilt-free hilarity arrives with an inspired montage of the movies of infant star Baby Elroy (“a has-been at 2″), lobbing grenades in Baby Elroy Goes to War and encountering a toddler Karloff in Baby Elroy Meets Baby Frankenstein.
Tony Randall hosts. Established filmmakers Martha Coolidge and Marshall Brickman appear as themselves, which may be the weirdest thing of all — and mind you, this is a movie in which The Partridge Family member Susan Dey goes down on a guy as she sings to him.
And that’s That’s Adequate. Only the Danny DeVito/Martin Lawrence vehicle What’s the Worst That Could Happen? bests it in the nonexistent race for the movie whose title best doubles as a review. —Rod Lott