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

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In the midst of a freebase freakout, famed comedian Jo Jo (Richard Pryor) blows up his living room, as you typically do. Somehow, he’s taken to the hospital where, as he lays dying, his astral form steps out of his dying body and he wanders naked through the parking lot; good thing a limo is there to pick him up and, I suppose, clothe him.

Over the next 90 minutes, we’re taken through Jo Jo’s (nonfictional) life, starting as a child growing up in a whorehouse, to a teenager leaving home to work in a comedy club. By this point, it’s easy to see that Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling is semi-autobiographical, as then we’re treated to the drink, the drugs and the women plaguing and, ultimately, destroying Jo Jo’s (and Pryor’s) life.

While this would be a disastrous hour-and-a-half funeral dirge for many, Pryor makes sure there are just as many laughs as there are tears — a real feat, especially given the sensitive subject matter. Towing the dreamlike line between real life and real fantasy, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling was a remarkably entertaining way for Pryor to tell his tale of comedic woe, especially in the wake of his self-immolation.

The lone film directed by Pryor, from a screenplay co-written with comedian Paul Mooney, it’s a lost cult classic that will probably never receive the timely due it truly deserves; as a matter of fact, I had to pick up Time-Life’s Ultimate Richard Pryor Collection to find a good copy of it. To be fair, I was going to get that anyway. —Louis Fowler

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While many people look to 1990’s Home Alone as the height of John Hughes’ Hollywood power, I look to the next year, filled with unsung flicks like Only the Lonely, Dutch and, at the top of my list, Career Opportunities, directed by TV’s Bryan Gordon; don’t worry, I haven’t heard of him, either.

The ultimate hipster by today’s standards, Jim Dodge (Frank Whaley) is the ultimate loser: Although over 21 years of age, he lives as home, is the town liar and, worse, starts a job at Target as the overnight janitor. As expected in these studies of arrested development, he goofs off at work, mostly by roller-skating in his boxers while wearing a wedding veil.

This all changes when he meets the alarmingly beautiful Josie (the alarmingly beautiful Jennifer Connelly), an emotionally impoverished rich girl who, apparently, fell asleep in the dressing rooms. Against all rhyme and reason, they fall in love. (Hey, it was the ’90s.)

The movie kind of falls apart in the third act when we’re introduced to two redneck crooks who are there to rob (?) the Target. As annoying as that might be for those who missed the pristine Hughes of the ’80s, it’s easy to forget the coasting Hughes of the ’90s, when comical crooks were a must.

Regardless, I’ve always loved this movie; even though it proved to be a Home Alone for the Gen X crowd that, obviously, had no time for it. Still, much of it worked, mostly due to the likable presence of Connelly and the sheer hope that, if I worked at Target, too, maybe I’d meet a girl like her.

Sadly, I worked at the local library instead, missing my chance. —Louis Fowler

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As Snowy Peaks Lodge celebrates 40 years in business, greedy real estate maven Maris (Martin Mull, Clue), in full acquire-and-develop mode, does everything he can to ensure it won’t see a 41st. With the lodge’s lease agreement due, Maris schemes to plant a few violations in order to shut ‘er down. Cue the sabotaged snowmobile to crash through a women’s restroom!

So goes the plot of this slob comedy from Police Academy producer Paul Maslansky, clearly hoping for another franchise. That connection was literally Ski Patrol’s selling point.

Oh, yes: Snowy Peaks has a ski patrol, whose members band together to save the lodge and its owner, Pops (Ray Walston, Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Roger Rose (Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives) has the Steve Guttenberg role as the charming yet immature group leader, pining after a shapely ski instructor (Doctor Mordrid’s Yvette Nipar — or is that Whitesnake’s David Coverdale?) who happens to be Pops’ niece.

T.K. Carter (Doctor Detroit) is the Michael Winslow-esque Black guy with funny voices. Sean Sullivan (Wayne’s World) is the frazzled weirdo, à la Bobcat Goldthwait. Not large but in charge, the appeal-eluding Leslie Jordan (Barbie & Kendra Save the Tiger King) is the hard-assed G.W. Bailey of the bunch. And so on and so on. Most notable among the cast, however, is future A-list comedy director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) as a nerdy virgin with major dance game.

What begins with Airplane!-style parodic humor quickly becomes a mix of stand-up bits and low-bar slapstick gags, many involving a farting, belching bulldog named Dumpster. One running joke sees a couple knocked over and sliding down the slopes in positions from the Kama Sutra — fully clothed, of course, because Ski Patrol is PG-rated, with women in Day-Glo bikinis coming the closest to screen skin. In other words, if Hot Dog … the Movie were a hot dog, Ski Patrol is a Vienna sausage Mom sliced into teeny-tiny pieces so Baby doesn’t choke.

An avalanche of idiocy, the movie is packed with montages fueled by the combined energy of the era’s advertisements for wine coolers and chewing gum. If you think all this ends with Feig in Tina Turner drag to compete for $1,000 in a local bar’s talent show, followed by Mull stuck in a runaway wiener and shenanigans involving a giant rubber band, you’re correct, but please don’t write a sequel. —Rod Lott

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Even though I am not a pot smoker and more than likely never will be, I have to admit I find marijuana comedies pretty dang funny.

Growing up on the starter drug of Cheech and Chong movies when I was a toddler, I have found the predicaments and solutions by cinematic stoners and their kind bud to usually be one of the seven rings of true comedy, with 1997’s Half Baked fitting in there nicely, a truly stupid film packed with truly stupid laughs.

Thurgood Jenkins (Dave Chappelle) is the quintessential weed enthusiast with a janitorial job and a circle of bros who practically stay stoned. When one of his crew gets arrested for accidentally killing a police horse, they decide to become drug dealers themselves, thanks to a special strain of sativa they get from Thurgood’s job at a laboratory.

Becoming the hottest dope dealers in the New York City area, they soon gain the unwanted attention of notorious criminal Samson Simpson (Clarence Williams III), leading to an absolutely minor gang war — the kind that’s probably expected in a movie like this, i.e., the pot-influenced equivalent of a Three Stooges pie fight.

Produced by Robert Simonds (the money man behind SNL-related classics like Billy Madison, Joe Dirt, and, uh, Corky Romano), Half Baked is definitely a product of the illegal times. With legalization only blocks from my house now, it seems almost quaint; still, the scenarios, some 20 or so years later, bring the laughs.

Although, I imagine if I did smoke weed, I’d probably be one of the pot archetypes in the movie, finding all of this stupid — and not in a good way. —Louis Fowler

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