I’m picturing Thanksgiving dinner at the house of actor Martin Sheen in 1995. His wife, Janet, has cleared the table and is busy scrubbing plates in the kitchen, leaving the guys to loosen their belts and chat.

“We have a lot to be thankful for,” says the patriarch. “Our family has been blessed in so many ways. It was quite a year. I enjoyed working with Rob Reiner and Michael Douglas in The American President. And Emilio, I’m very honored and humbled to take part opposite Kathy Bates in your next directorial effort, The War at Home.”

“You said it, Pop,” says Emilio Estevez, Martin’s eldest. “Work isn’t work when I work alongside you. I’m celebrating two other things tonight: First, I’m going to be in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible movie adaptation coming out next summer with my old buddy Tom Cruise. And second, I’m celebrating a full year of no longer having to have sex with Paula Abdul.”

“Thank Christ! I was afraid you would contract the herp or something,” says Charlie Sheen, Martin’s youngest son. “Speaking of TV shows being made into movies, you know The Fugitive with Harrison Ford? Well, I just shot a sci-fi flick called The Arrival with the guy who wrote that, David Twohy. I have the lead role. But enough about me! What’ve you been up to, Uncle Joe?”

“Who, me?” says Joe Estevez, Martin’s little brother. “I just wrapped a shot-on-video feature in which me and the 18th-billed performer from Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space are chased around an office building by a baby ghost. It’s made by the guy me and Frank Stallone did all those roller-skating ninja pictures with.”

A hush falls over the room. Martin finally breaks the uncomfortable silence. “Janet!” he bellows. “Dig out the turkey scraps from the dog bowl and Ziploc ’em up for Joe, will ya, dear?”

Okay, so maybe it didn’t go that way; perhaps the Sheens are more of a Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil fam. But sure as shit, Joe Estevez did indeed reteam with Donald G. Jackson (Hell Comes to Frogtown) for the kiddietainment containment unit known as Baby Ghost, from a “screamplay” by Aliens effects artist Mark Williams.

The least Estevez dons bow tie as portrait photographer Winslow Cobblepott, working from an upper floor of an Los Angeles high-rise. One of his young subjects goes in search of a vending machine for a peanuts-packed Snickers bar and packs the peanuts of a nosy security guard (James D. Whitworth, Dragon Fury) with her wee fist. Instead of finding candy, she locates a chained and padlocked box in the basement. Out pops Baby Ghost, an anti-Casper creature with an annoying laugh, a fish face and hair made from a cheerleader’s poms. Giggling like a baby, the dog turd-shaped specter appears as an all-green chromakey transparency added in post … or whatever accounted for post in Jackson’s world.

Baby Ghost is pretty harmless, unless you happen to be a box of Entenmann’s baked goods. Attempting to get Baby Ghost back in the box, Cobblepott uses a trail of donuts as bait, followed by a handheld video game (Donkey Kong, judging from the sound effects). Amid these shenanigans, Cobblepott engages with the infantile building staffer (the aforementioned Plan 9’s Conrad Brooks) and full-time fortune teller Madame Zora (Erin O’Bryan, Playboy’s Erotic Fantasies IV: Forbidden Liaisons). Complicating matters are two bumbling robbers created in the “why I oughta” mold in hopes of conjuring good-time memories of Home Alone.

While it’s unkind to speak ill of the dead, thank your lucky stars Jackson passed away before he could make good on Baby Ghost’s end-credit threat of “Watch for Baby Ghost 2.” He was too busy honing his craft via Lingerie Kickboxer and Rollergator. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

An open challenge to Seth Rogen: Try to write a feature-length comedy that contains none of your three crutches. To reiterate the obvious, those are:
• the word “fuck” and all its variations/conjugations;
• references to the male member, especially being sucked and/or jerked;
• and pot-smoking.

He cannot do it. That trusty troika of fallbacks comprises his entire arsenal. Movie to movie, each and every one is trotted out incessantly for jokes — not to set up jokes, not to pay off jokes, but to be the jokes. More on that in one hot minute.

Sausage Party represents the worst offender of Rogen and co-scribe Evan Goldberg’s stoned bag of tricks. And because the film is animated, they’ve doubled down on their juvenile instincts in order to appear more subversive than the cartoon would be in sheer concept alone. That concept, in a nutshell (or a jar of Butt Nutter peanut butter, to borrow a Party-going character) is that, unbeknownst to us (unless you’re trippin’ on bath salts), all the food items in your local grocery store are sentient sexual beings.

The hot dog Frank (Rogen, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising) is particularly eager to wrangle free of his vacuum-packed packaging so he can slip inside a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig, this year’s Ghostbusters remake). Certainly you’re able to see through the subtlety (because it’s completely transparent) and know that means intercourse. Keeping them from doing that are two primary obstacles:
• the revelatory admission that being purchased by a customer leads to being eaten
• and a douchebag — literally, a douchebag (Nick Kroll, TV’s The League) seeking revenge for his bent nozzle, which he’s itching to jam into a vagina … but he’ll settle for a dude’s asshole.

Co-directed by Conrad Vernon (Monsters vs. Aliens) and Greg Tiernan (approximately 100 episodes and videos in the Thomas & Friends kiddie franchise!), the movie truly has a lot going for it technically, from ace character design to seamless computer animation. Spirited voice work gets delivered from the likes of Michael Cera, Craig Robinson, Salma Hayek and Edward Norton as, respectively, a malformed wiener, a gangsta box of grits, a lesbian taco and a bagel that may as well be named Woody Allen.

Too bad they’re ill-served by an elementary premise and a junior-high script that assumes the acts of copulation and bong-hitting are hee-larious, in and of themselves and entirely lacking context. It’s like that kid in the back of the class who would say things like “cunt” and “flappy fuck” in a bid for attention. The difference is that his remarks cost nothing; Rogen and company’s, about $30 million. Sausage Party is not clever enough to merit the markup. In fact, it’s rotten. —Rod Lott