My recent throat surgeon was from New Zealand, and even though he was completely no-nonsense, I kept waiting for him to crack a simplistic joke, mostly because the night before my pre-op, I watched the guffaw-getting Mega Time Squad, the new temporal-twisting flick from Tim van Dammen, the director of the trailer-park musical Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song.

Low-level neighborhood criminal John (Anton Tennet) wreaks polite havoc in the small town of Thames, New Zealand, famous for its tourist-trap outdoor toilet. When he’s politely betrayed by his best friend over a few dollars worth of stolen Chinese money, he uses an ancient Asian amulet, politely stolen in the same robbery, to go back in time, a few minutes at a time.

Much like the far more serious Timecrimes, various incarnations of John run into each other, eventually teaming up to become the titular Mega Time Squad, despite that fact it could resurrect an infernal demon hellbent on destroying the time-space continuum unless all the replicas themselves are killed in outlandishly gory ways.

With help from his polite, suicide bomb vest-making girlfriend, Kelly (Hetty Gaskell-Hahn), John has to not only defeat the area crime team made up of locals working their way through night school, but also the so-called Triads and an army of increasingly irritated Johns, as piss-poor shots from .22s injures eyes, well-aimed slingshots cause major welts and explosions galore, all done in very dry, very clever and very polite ways, all with absolutely no meaning.

Come to think of it, my throat surgeon — a qualified man of medicine — was also very polite. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Whether they are accepting or denying, giving in or holding back, every teen struggles with their sexuality in the same beautiful way: begrudgingly perverted.

This plaintive shamefulness is the style that Eugene Jerome deals with his outright horniness, far more than I originally remembered, in this adaptation of Neil Simon’s Broadway play of the same name. Starring the usually irritating Jonathan Silverman as said Eugene, we follow the fourth-wall-breaking nebbish teen over a couple of weeks as he devises different ways to leer progressively at old-time broads and get himself off subsequently.

Eugene is supposedly 15 or so, but looks to be about a solid 25. Still, his life primarily consists of running to the store for his mom for sugar or playing stickball in the street while, in the background, his pre-WWII family is facing real problems: His brother tells off his racist boss, his father has a heart attack and a boatload of European relatives escaping Hitler is coming to stay.

These are things that would affect many people, but not Eugene — instead, he’s either looking up his dancer cousin’s skirt or fantasizing about his aunt in the shower, which is refreshingly disgusting and, saddest of all, woefully honest. Maybe one day I’ll write my own youthful remembrance entitled Blooming Grove Boners because, believe me, there were many.

In retrospect, Brighton Beach Memoirs should probably be remembered as one the dirtiest teen movies of the 1980s, a horndog flick with nostalgia for the old folks, family values for the parents and undergarments galore for the inquisitive kids who’ll wonder for years what the “Golden Palace of the Himalayas” is — a viewing party without any true shame because it’s got the guy who wrote The Odd Couple’s name attached to it.

It was followed up a few years later with Biloxi Blues starring the equally grating Matthew Broderick, but I never saw it. I heard it’s got a prostitute, though. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.