Inherent Vice has all the trappings of film noir. There’s a rumpled gumshoe who lives by a seemingly quaint moral code, a mysterious femme fatale and a hard-boiled cop with whom our protagonist has an ambivalent relationship. Los Angeles sizzles with corruption and sleaze, with the threat of violence simmering just below the sun-bleached surface. But the familiarity of these tropes allows masterful writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, adapting Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel — cinema’s first adaptation of the presumably unfilmable Pynchon, by the way — to explore more trippy, atmospheric stuff.

Set in 1970 L.A., Inherent Vice inhabits a dreamy space between the horror of the Manson Family murders and the imminently pervasive crookedness of Watergate. Joaquin Phoenix is Larry “Doc” Sportello, a hippie P.I. tipped off by his ex-old lady, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald), that her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), is in danger of being cheated out of his fortune by his wife and her lover. Faster than you can say “Zig-Zag papers,” however, the case digresses into a labyrinthine plot that makes Chinatown look like a game of Chutes and Ladders. A Black militant (Michael K. Williams, Lovecraft Country) asks Doc to track down a thug who works for Wolfmann, while a recovered heroin addict (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’s Jena Malone) enlists our intrepid private eye to find her missing husband, a sax player named Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson).

That these supposedly distinct cases wind up entwined is predictable, but less so is the shambling scope of it all. Hewing close to Pynchon’s text, Anderson packs in suspicious real estate deals, a heroin-smuggling cartel, the Aryan Brotherhood, dentists, a Ouija board, Richard Nixon, a mental asylum run by cultists, a running joke about cunnilingus and an acid-fueled house party in Topanga Canyon. The results are less madcap than fuzzily hallucinogenic, although the movie’s psychedelic vibe certainly has its funny moments. Doc is so consistently stoned, he can barely jot down detective notes to himself that convey anything more detailed than “something Spanish.”

Phoenix makes a terrific foil for the surrounding weirdness, but he receives able assistance from a cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short, Benicio del Toro, Maya Rudolph and musician Joanna Newsom. Best of all is Josh Brolin (of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thanos fame) as Doc’s LAPD nemesis, Lt. Det. Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. Sporting a crewcut and exhibiting a Freudian penchant for chocolate-covered bananas, Brolin’s perpetual rage prove a nice complement to Phoenix’s pot-addled befuddlement.

But the real standout is Los Angeles itself, or at least the one imagined by Anderson and his frequent cinematographer, Robert Elswit. Boasting saturated colors and drenched in nostalgia, Inherent Vice is sly about its visual magnificence, as typified by a brief flashback in which Doc and Shasta comb beachfront streets searching for dope as Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” plays over the soundtrack. The scene is gorgeous, sexy and just a bit sad. Few filmmakers can capture mood better than Paul Thomas Anderson. —Phil Bacharach

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Police Academy’s success was so huge, it predictably led to a glut of slob-comedy imitators that could be pitched — and likely were — with the sentence “It’s Police Academy, but [insert training scenario here].” The best of these was arguably the screenwriters’ own Moving Violations (“at a traffic school”); the worst is a distinction among many contenders, including the leaden Mortuary Academy, appropriately late to the game.

Brothers Max and Sam Grimm are due to inherit their deceased uncle’s Grimm Mortuary & Academy (“You kill ’em, we chill ’em”) on one only-in-the-movies condition: They first must graduate from it. Having no motivation, Sam (Jocks’ Perry Lang) has nothing to lose, but Max (The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins) dreams of becoming a doctor, not an embalmer. However, once he’s rejected in short order by med schools and his pretty-but-petty girlfriend (Megan Blake, Eyeborgs), Max suddenly has no other prospects. After all, a premise is a premise!

The hallowed institution is, per the film’s not-aged-well poster, “where the dearly departed meet the clearly retarded.” Per the demands of the subgenre, it’s chock full of misfits! They include Tracey Walter (Repo Man), who “revives” dead dogs with robot technology; Stoney Jackson (Angel 4: Undercover) as the token black character — rapping, no less; and Lynn Danielson (from director Michael Schroeder’s other 1988 movie, Out of the Dark) as a good-girl love interest for Max and superfan of Radio Werewolf, a band I didn’t realize was genuine until afterward. The group’s inclusion is tied to the movie’s “Special Appearance by Wolfman Jack” — the adjective is up for debate.

In charge of the academy are Eating Raoul power couple Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel as, respectively, the nymphomaniac professor and the necrophiliac owner with eyes on keeping the brothers Grimm from taking over. Bartel also co-wrote the script with William Kelman (Beach Babes from Beyond), but the satirically dark touch Bartel is known for (baby caskets, anyone?) isn’t employed nearly enough, drowned out by the easy-lay, low-hanging fruit of sophomoric and scatological jokes. The dialogue can be so clunky, it sounds like the work of an ESL student who hasn’t stuck to the lesson plan: “Your head’s swollen with baby vomit! You listen to me, you toxic vagina!”

At least Bartel presumably penned himself into Mortuary Academy’s one good bit, in which he falls hard for — and gets “engaged” to — a deceased cheerleader (Cheryl Starbuck, Pathology). After taking her corpse to a drive-in restaurant, they have a romantic encounter on the beach à la From Here to Eternity … if Deborah Kerr were dragged out to sea while Burt Lancaster zonked out in a post-coital snooze. —Rod Lott

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Rather famously, producer Dino De Laurentiis lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the late ’80s dropping bomb after bomb through his then-new De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Among DEG’s epic critical and commercial failures? The too-late sequel King Kong Lives, the James Clavell adaptation Tai-Pan and the garbage-bag gimmickry known as Million Dollar Mystery.

As bad as those movies are, what does it say about the ones DEG deemed unreleasable? In particular, I speak of the Pat Morita/Jay Leno vehicle Collision Course, which drove direct to video in the U.S. in 1992, after sitting on Dino’s shelf for what I now understand to be not nearly long enough. My guess is De Laurentiis thought he could make Leno, then a white-hot stand-up comic, into the next Tom Hanks. In one fell swoop, Leno went from killing it on Late Night with David Letterman to killing his chances at headlining further films.

As Detroit police detective Tony Costas, the skunk-haired Leno is objectively terrible in this buddy-cop disaster opposite Pat Morita as Fujitsuka Natsuo, Costas’ Tokyo counterpart. In Japan, a rogue engineer for an automotive giant has stolen a turbocharger prototype and made his way to the Motor City to sell it to an American rival; Natsuo follows. Inevitably, cultures clash — until they team up.

Leno is laughable at playing a tough guy (!), and not at all laugh-worthy with, one assumes, improvising his dialogue. For example, surprising Natsuo by emerging from behind a door with gun drawn, Costas offers the nonsensical greeting “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.” He may as well have just said, “Crunch all you want! We’ll make more,” because at least we have evidence Leno was comfortable with that.

In another scene, Natsuo is interrogated by Costas’ colleague (Al Waxman, Iron Eagle IV), who says, “I speak some Jap: Toyota, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, teriyaki,” which is clever and hilarious — or so say second graders on the playground at lunch. The line is not just indicative of how the script (by producer Frank Darius Namei and The First Power’s Robert Resnikoff) treats Morita’s race, but also the degree of humor at which said script simmers: the lowest possible setting.

Pity poor Morita, reduced from an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor to running around a hotel lobby with a plastic garment bag over his head. I mean, at least the guy found work between Karate Kid sequels, but ouch. Another actor who deserved better: Tom Noonan, here as a villain after embodying evil in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, one of the few DEG projects enjoying a life today. Did Dino weasel Noonan into some bad-guy twofer deal?

Appropriately opening with the sound of a car wreck, Collision Course marks an odd entry in the filmography of Lewis Teague, the Roger Corman protégé known for horror films (Alligator, Cujo and Cat’s Eye), not comedy. This dud bears no stamp of his previous proficiency. —Rod Lott

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Is Hollywood out of touch? In 1993, Fay Sommerfield investigated as much for the newsmagazine show she anchored, That Time of the Month. So goes Sex, Shock & Censorship in the 90’s, a made-for-Showtime parody of then-topical targets — mostly among the entertainment industry itself — and presented under the guise of a major network’s then-ubiquitous shows like PrimeTime Live and 20/20. Sommerfield is played by Shelley Long (The Brady Bunch Movie), which dates this special as much as its subjects.

Knowing it’s written by Michael Barrie and James Mulholland, the duo behind 1987’s hysterical sketch film Amazon Women on the Moon, I hoped for something of a satirical close sibling. Initially, I got just that from a pair of fake movie trailers spoofing yuppie-paranoia sex thrillers and killer-babysitter horrors, both cleverly featuring a shot of the great Dan Hedaya (Clueless) shouting through the phone. Occasional cutaways to movie critic Malcolm Maltved allow Paul Benedict (Waiting for Guffman) an impressive showcase for a simultaneous impersonation of Leonard Maltin and Michael Medved.

Faye’s visit to the producer of these pictures (Peter Jurasik, Problem Child), however, falls as flat as day-old Tab. The same goes for a cringeworthy, Ebonics-laden profile of Spike Lee-esque director Butch Jones (MADtv’s Phil LaMarr) of Kiss My Black Butt Productions, as well as a Last Temptation of Christ parody called The Last Supper. It’s flat-out awful, with Jesus (Murphy Brown’s Robert Pastorelli) and his apostles at a mob-style Italian restaurant, where they re-enact some of Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma’s greatest hits.

As Sex, Shock & Censorship shifts its eye and arrows to television, things don’t improve. The one exception is Thinkin’ About Tomorrow, an over-the-top politically correct sitcom about an über-liberal suburban nuclear family. For example, when her young son cheers John Wayne murdering Native Americans, Mom (Newhart’s Julia Duffy) turns off the tube and scolds, “No more pre-Lawrence Kasdan Westerns for you.”

Otherwise, The $49.95 Club, a mix of televangelism and QVC, holds potential, but never achieves it. Ratman & Frisky channels Ren & Stimpy’s cartoon vulgarity with a mouse basically played as a gay-baiting Howard Stern. The best that can be said about the Martin Mull-hosted game show Love Thy Neighbor is that it foretells ABC’s Wife Swap. And who thought a spoof of HBO’s sex-comedy series Dream On was a good idea? It’s not, but has one amusing touch, as a receptionist (Playboy model Lisa Boyle) dances topless, yet the nipple pixelation can’t keep up with her gyrations. The less said about the Vanilla Ice-esque music video by white rapper Stinx on Ice (Alex Winter, Bill & Ted Face the Music) … well, I’ve already said too much.

With National Lampoon’s Favorite Deadly Sins director David Jablin at the helm, Sex, Shock & Censorship moves at a surprisingly sluggish pace for an hour crammed with so many segments. Long makes a terrific host throughout, but her comedic gifts only go so far against weak material that wastes the talents of Robert Hays, Paul Bartel, Curtis Armstrong, Kenneth Mars, Nora Dunn, Tracey Walter, David Naughton, Chris Lemmon, Greg Evigan, Stacey Nelkin, Kimberly Beck, Prof. Irwin Corey and, debatably, Artie Lange. —Rod Lott

Originally intended by Hollywood to star Cyndi Lauper and Dan Aykroyd, the feature film Vibes instead stars Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Goldblum. While both Aykroyd and Goldblum are the quintessential movie nerds, each would have played the character of Nick Deezy very differently, with Goldblum’s being the perfect blend of lost and delirious that the movie needed.

Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with The Couch Trip instead.

After meeting in a New York University study on parapsychology — I think — psychics Nick and Sylvia (Lauper) become engrossed in the seemingly drunk Harry (Peter Falk) and his tall tales of mental riches in South America. But with Nick’s memory of objects and Sylvia’s ghost-whispering, they find out it’s just some get-rich-quick scheme, all the while somehow falling in love. Somehow.

Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with The Great Outdoors instead.

Once Nick and Sylvia, along with Harry, make it to Ecuador, so does a weird, chubby German guy with a real name made out of baby words I will not type here. As he tries various ways to assassinate them, including a strange sexual imposition from seductress Elizabeth Peña, it turns out to be a plot by an NYU professor (Julian Sands).

Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with Caddyshack II instead.

Directed with a heavy hand and a birdbrain toward the weird by Ken Kwapis as his follow-up to Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, this film is most famous as Lauper’s bid for silver-screen stardom crashed and burned; maybe a better film would be how being in such a mediocre movie would trap her on an Trivial Pursuit: Totally 80s card.

Aykroyd, on the other spectral hand, made a date with My Stepmother Is an Alien instead. —Louis Fowler

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