Sergeant Dead Head is what happens when American International Pictures forces the Beach Party formula to enlist in the military. With nary an Annette in sight, Frankie Avalon bumbles his way through the title role, pratfalling all over the U.S. Air Force’s Smedley Missile Base. It’s exactly the kind of locale you don’t want the accident-prone, where one might, say, plop his rear on the panic button sitting uncovered atop the general’s desk.

Despite never have expressing love for her, Dead Head is engaged to fellow enlistee Lucy (Deborah Walley, It’s a Bikini World). The nuptials are at risk when Dead Head catches a nap in a rocket, only to wake up as the spacecraft — commandeered by a chimpanzee in an astronaut suit and paid in bananas — lifts off (in black-and-white footage, mind you). It’s even stupider than it sounds …

… and gets stupider than that, because when he’s back on Earth, Dead Head and the chimp have somehow switched brains. Now he’s a stone-cold cad!

Avalon gives it his all, coming off like a cartoon character living in a cornball sitcom — purely on purpose, with frequent Jerry Lewis director Norman Taurog at the helm — even more so than the great Buster Keaton, who does his phys-com shtick! With lots of no-harm explosions and flowing water, Sergeant Dead Head hasn’t a mean bone in its body, but I’m afraid it doesn’t have much of a heart, either. Although every bit as colorful as its AIP brethren, the movie lacks that special something: unadulterated charm. And that’s with a cast that includes Eve Arden, Harvey Lembeck, Dwayne Hickman, John Ashley, Pat Buttram, Gale Gordon, Fred Clark and Cesar Romero, some of whom sing and dance.

Oh, did I mention this is also a musical? But its songs are lifeless and lackluster, plopped in like flung wall spackle to highlight how bereft of effort Louis M. Heyward’s script is. I can’t help but wonder if the movie was greenlighted just to get in the “JAMES BOND WILL RETURN”-style plug of the then-forthcoming Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine in the end credits, because Heyward and Academy Award-winning Taurog clearly saved the goods for that one. —Rod Lott

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It’s not like Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer is the only actress who could headline the Catholicism comedy Yes, God, Yes, but she’s perfect for the role. Dyer may be in the middle of her 20s, but her diminutive stature goes a long way in selling the illusion that her character, Alice, is stuck in the throes of her teen years — aches, angst and all — at the dawn of this new millennium, when “A/S/L” became the new “What’s your major?”

Appropriately mousy (church mousy, perhaps?), Alice is a good girl headed down what her parents, pastor and private school faculty no doubt would term a bad road — one paved straight to hell. When an afternoon AOL chat with a stranger suddenly turns saucy, the supremely naive virgin notices a feeling markedly distinct from her puppy love for Leo in Titanic: sexual arousal. With the scrunched face of the curious, she begins exploring those feelings at a church retreat, including masturbation with her cellphone — not by looking at pornographic material, but by enjoying the vibration that results from each wrong move in the built-in game of Snake.

Yes, God, Yes holds some precedent with 2004’s Saved!, starting with its female lead experiencing a crisis both cataclysmic and catechistic, but the satire here isn’t nearly as savage. Nor is it as sharp, best exemplified by a running joke that has Alice not understanding the crude meaning of “tossing salad.” As it’s played, the gag isn’t highly offensive, but also simply isn’t funny; writer/director Karen Maine so greatly misjudges its value — as both laugh line and story point — that her debut feature opens with a title card defining the sex act, like a big-screen adaptation of Urban Dictionary.

Maybe it was a move for pure padding; Yes, God, Yes is based on Maine’s 2017 short, and feels it. In all of 11 minutes, the same-named piece achieves near-greatness and a more consistent performance from Dyer, because the story doesn’t stray into tangents. In the expanded form of 78 minutes, tonal changes abound, with initial acidity all but neutralized by the addition of Alice delivering a patronizing speech more attuned to the pat rhythms of TV sitcoms. While I get Maine wanting to grant Alice an awakening of empowerment to go hand in hand with her sexual one, it rings false and unearned. Ten Hail Marys, please. —Rod Lott

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If you’ve ever been in a hospital — multiple times for me — you probably know there’s really nothing to do except watch the most basic of cable television for hours on end. But, it was there I discovered truTV and its nearly constant airings of the reality show Impractical Jokers, starring Long Island comedy team the Tenderloins.

With a premise of four friends who compete in various challenges to embarrass and humiliate each other, every laugh, guffaw and chortle was always one step closer to busting my surgery stitches, but it was always a hilarious way to pass the body-aching time.

In Impractical Jokers: The Movie, their film debut, the four jokers — Murr, Q, Joe and Sal — mix a mostly fictional story in between their nonfictional stunts, as the guys try to make their way to Miami to see a Paula Abdul show. I guess she fit perfectly in the truTV budget.

And while that part of the flick is somewhat weak, opposites attract, because the pranks are some of the funniest since Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, including a birthday party at a strip club where Murr’s entire family — including some children — shows up while he’s in the middle of a lapdance. It’s a disturbingly hilarious bit that hurts my gut just writing about.

Still, at an hour and a half, Impractical Jokers: The Movie eventually wears out its welcome with overkill, while any TV episode’s 22-minute running time is enough to keep you binge-watching. Regardless, this flick came out at the worst time possible — COVID, y’all! — with most people missing it during its short theatrical run.

So, I guess the joke’s on them? —Louis Fowler

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If Dazed and Confused had been made not by Richard Linklater, but by its most burned-out characters, the result would have to be Mag Wheels. It would just have to.

In reality, this scrubby, unfunny teen comedy was written and directed by softcore porn’s Bethel Buckalew (Below the Belt) in an attempt to go legit. Also released under the pre-Mark Harmon title of Summer School, it’s produced in part by Batmobile designer George Barris, who more or less cameos as himself, as he did the year before in Supervan, a more enjoyable vehicle of vansploitation.

Although the little-known Mag Wheels is largely meandering, its main concern after four-wheel fetishization is a love triangle so simple, its points are mapped on the movie’s poster. Expelled from school for truancy, pretty Anita (one-and-doner Shelly Horner) takes a waitress job at the local skate park’s concession stand. Through no fault of her own, she attracts the eye of cool dude Steve (John Laughlin, The Hills Have Eyes Part II), which irks his spoiled-brat girlfriend, Donna (Verkina Flower, The Capture of Bigfoot), who accuses, “You’re all horned up after that hoozit!” (Admit it: Horned-Up Hoozit is your favorite Dr. Seuss book, too.)

As Steve and Anita get cozy, Donna gets back at him in the most logical way: anonymously calling the police to bust him for dealing cocaine. He’s not. The resulting scene is played as hilarity. It’s not.

But the barely watchable Mag Wheels isn’t really about that. Other things it’s not really about, yet features in large measure: gang initiations, lesbian truckers, beach Frisbee, sexual assault, joint toking and cube gleaming. Eventually, the ladies square off against the men in a life-or-death game of tug o’ war using trucks against vans atop a cliff. It’s not really about that, either, given their cavalier attitude toward death. It’s about attracting young audiences with the promise of seeing flashed tits and sweet paneling; viewers get both and yet nothing at the same time. —Rod Lott

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Based on the Sega Genesis video game that I watched my brother play throughout most of the ’90s, Sonic the Hedgehog is a blue rodent who spins, flips and, most of all, runs very fast. I guess that was all you needed for a successful gaming franchise back then.

In this feature-film outing, Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) is apparently an alien on a distant planet. When his owl caregiver is murdered by somewhat offensive savages, he comes to Earth and spends his years in a small town, wishing he had a family. When he gets angry, however, his supersonic speed causes a nationwide electrical blackout.

Thinking it’s a terrorist plot, the Army sends in Dr. Robotnik (a questionable Jim Carrey), sans his Mean Bean Machine. Using a wide variety of robots and drones, Sonic and small-town cop Tom (James Marsden) go on the lam, running into bikers and such on their way to San Francisco, where Sonic has to find a bag of magic rings.

Better late than never, Sonic barreled his way into theaters before the quarantine started, to impressive numbers, but it will mostly be remembered for being pushed back multiple times as digital artists desperately tried to erase the 1s and 0s that originally made up Sonic’s creepy teeth. Oh, the things we used to care about!

And while the redone Sonic is irritatingly adorable, Carrey’s shtick is somewhat dated; still, Robotnik is an interesting character, one I would like to see more of — preferably in the form of a solo flick I’d rent from Redbox — but, instead, it looks like we’re getting a sequel featuring Tails, a flying fox with the deformity of two tails. —Louis Fowler

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