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

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I can fully understand how a lifetime of bitter hate against the poor is undone in one evening, thanks to three life-changing ghosts. However, with Mark Waters’ terrible Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, I find it extremely hard to believe that Matthew McConaughey will change his never-ending pussy-pooling ways, thanks to an extremely similar haunting.

Basically what passed as a romantic comedy before the era of #MeToo, the muscular Matthew plays Connor Mead, a womanizing photographer speaking dialogue totally filled with nothing but the sleaziest of come-ons that, if not being delivered by McConaughey, would easily venture into sexual harassment and, quite possibly, date-rape territory. It seems that he turned out this way because his parents died when he was 7 and left him with elder whore Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas); do you have ample-enough pity for him yet?

Turns out that this weekend, his grating brother, Paul (the grating Breckin Meyer), is getting married to the irritating Sandra (the irritating Lacey Chabert). Connor shows up already erect and ready to plow through a few drunken bridesmaids, unaware that his childhood sweetheart, Jenny (Jennifer Garner), is there — with whom he had already pumped and dumped — but who cares, because she secretly loves the scamp.

As you can probably imagine, that night he’s visited by three girlfriends, all of whom he attempts multiple times to sleep with, including a 16-year-old Emma Stone. Condoms full of semen drop from the sky at one point, among one of the more grotesque ideas of “romantic” humor in this dreadfully painful flick.

Director Waters, by the way, made other bad films like Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Vampire Academy and Just Like Heaven, wherein a ghostly Reese Witherspoon haunts a forlorn Mark Ruffalo. I haven’t seen it, but judging from the trailer, I’m sure it’s sexually horrific as well. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Although a copycat of AIP’s Beach Party series that AIP eventually scooped up for distribution, It’s a Bikini World stands out for another reason: being the only movie of its kind to be directed by a woman — for the record, Roger Corman protege Stephanie Rothman (Terminal Island). She also co-wrote the screenplay with the producer, Charles S. Swartz, who happened to be her husband.

Pinch-hitting in the Frankie and Annette roles are teen-pic staples Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley, reteamed from the previous year’s The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. On the beach, Mike (Kirk) is instantly attracted to the new-in-town Delilah (Walley), but she’s just as quickly put off by his braggadocio vibe of entitled swordsman. Overhearing Delilah tell pal Pebbles (Suzie Kaye, Women of the Prehistoric Planet) she prefers men to have brains, Mike dons a disguise of glasses and bowtie to pass himself off as his nonexistent nerdy brother, Herbert.

By gum, it works! Delilah starts falling for Herbert while challenging Mike to races in hopes of chipping away at his massive alpha-male ego. Meanwhile, Herbert — er, I mean, Mike — is faced with the dilemma fueling so many sitcom reruns in perpetual syndication: how to show up to one place as two people! It culminates in a 12-event, battle-of-the-sexes competition that finds Delilah and Mike racing one another using various vehicles (skateboards, boats, camels) and driving a motorcycle through an automated car wash. Each event is introduced with smilin’ Sid Haig (Spider Baby) twirling semaphore flags.

While Bikini World is built upon the subgenre’s tried-and-true teen themes, it also doesn’t quite have the off-the-shelf interchangeability of other beachsploitation efforts. The first giveaway comes in the first scene, as a trio of sunglasses in close-up relays frames (no pun intended) composed with true forethought. Oh, the flick is still frothy, but Rothman has infused it with an artfulness — pop and otherwise — and a feminist attitude among all the pulchitrude. If only she didn’t have to ditch the uniqueness in the film’s final seconds!

Possibly because the film came out in the trough of the beach-movie cycle, it boasts arguably the least square music performances from today’s vantage point — in particular The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and The Castaways’ “Liar Liar.” Not even the sight of Bobby “Boris” Pickett (as in “Monster Mash”) dancing to tunes while wearing a comically oversized hat can kill the good taste. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.