If man could talk to the animals, what conversations would we have? Personally, I’d like to engage my family’s nearly blind, nearly deaf Shih Tzu, Emmy, in a discussion of the hole she has scratched into the side of her neck. We didn’t notice it until the smell of death wafted from across the living room; upon closer examination, we discovered a nauseating, John F. Kennedy half-dollar-sized crater of flesh and blood and gunk of unspeakable coloring, with a newly burst abscess that screamed infection. Frankly, four rounds of antibiotics later, I’d like to ask her what the hell she was thinking.

To get metaphorical, that damn dog’s neck hole — reeking with an ungodly, unforgivable stench of nostrils-torn-asunder rot — is the Robert Downey Jr. vehicle Dolittle.

Remember how much Eddie Murphy’s cachet suffered by wallowing in family-friendly dreck like 1998’s Dr. Dolittle? Downey must have forgotten, in the process tainting the Iron-clad reputation he worked so hard over the last decade to rebuild. With Murphy now enjoying the crest of career resurgence, and Downey stuck chatting up and trading barbs with stunningly unfunny CGI animals, the two superstars appear to have switched places. Who saw that coming?

Downey’s venereal-looking veterinarian is called out of retirement to retrieve a faraway fruit to save the life of a comatose Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley, TV’s Chernobyl). Attempting to foil Dolittle at every turn, Boris Badenov-style, is Dr. Müdfly (Michael Sheen, 2016’s Passengers). Aiding Dolittle just as often are anthropomorphic members of his mobile menagerie, voiced by some supremely talented people — including John Cena, Emma Thompson, Kumail Nanjiani, Octavia Spencer, Ralph Fiennes and, immortally, “Rami Malek as Chee-Chee” — all of whom have the blessed fortune to be only heard and not seen, especially since their jokes land as neatly as elephant feces.

Who else to helm this artificially sunny, PG-rated ego project/confection of fauna, folly and fantasy? Almost any director but the one who got the job: Stephen Gaghan, he of the suicide bombers and electrocuted children of the political-corruption drama Syriana. His nonmusical remake of 1967’s Doctor Dolittle emerges as a soulless, artless, witless, “cash, please!” corporate enterprise — one in which no one had the guts to even suggest to Downey that his Jack Sparrow-style accent was not the least bit cute, but thoroughly repellent. In which computer rendering of the sometimes-disproportionate animals appears to have been halted around 65% completion and deemed “good enough.” In which poor Antonio Banderas is reduced to parading around in genie pants.

In the opening-weekend matinee I attended, an audience full of kids — kids, for chrissakes, comedy’s easiest lay! — could not be bothered to laugh, except when a dragon ripped a massive fart in Downey’s face. He deserved it.

Dolittle? Most certainly do not. But if you are forced? Do nap. —Rod Lott

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Many would say that, during his vaunted career, Richard Pryor never found the right filmic vehicle for his considerable talents; having recently viewed Brewster’s Millions for the first time in nearly 30 years, I have to say … they’re probably right.

Here, Pryor is Montgomery Brewster, a down-on-his-luck minor-league pitcher who, along with pal Spike (John Candy), spends most of his time humping groupies on the road, which is quite understandable. Sadly, that fun-living casual sex comes to an end when he inherits $300 million from his dead “honky” uncle (Hume Cronyn).

The plot-worthy catch? He has to spend $30 million in thirty days, with nothing to show for it but the shirt on his back by the end.

This leads to a mildly amusing 90 minutes as Pryor buys a bunch of people lunch, mails a rare postage stamp and runs as the anti-mayor of New York. And while that sounds like it’s a surefire laugh-getter, most of the jokes fall sideways and, even worse, are just plain unfunny. I guess we could throw most of the blame on director Walter Hill; straight comedy, it seems, isn’t really his forte.

With such a strong premise and an even stronger comedian, it’s kind of sad just how comedically bankrupt the whole outing is — but at least it ain’t The Toy.  —Louis Fowler

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After ill-fated summer gigs caddying, waiting tables and selling nuclear vacuum cleaners door to door, four guys join fellow frat bro Max (Paul Reiser) in the moving business, in Odd Jobs. In less than 15 minutes, the lowbrow ’80s comedy offers almost everything we’ve come to expect from a lowbrow ’80s comedy: racial stereotypes, drug references, homophobia, syrupy saxophone music, zany sound effects and that surefire laff-grabber we now call sexual assault.

Essentially a showcase for stand-up comedians Reiser, Robert Townshend, Paul Provenza and Rick Overton — plus teenpic second-stringer Scott McGinnis (Secret Admirer, Making the Grade, et al.) — the movie is initially shapeless as one-time director Mark Story presents what is essentially a meandering series of setups for jokes not worth setting up, from a sheep-fucking redneck to a Elvis-wannabe trucker from whose rearview mirror hangs a lucky rabbit’s dick. These come courtesy of first-time writers Robert Conte and Peter Wortmann (who didn’t fare much better with their next one, the painful John Candy vehicle Who’s Harry Crumb?), but they do score with two pretty decent golf gags, which, to be fair, is two more than the whole of Caddyshack II.

Only in the second half, when Max and the boys start Maximum Moving (get it?), does Odd Jobs begin flirting with a plot, however flimsy, with a rival moving company involved in a car-theft ring. As a charisma-free Reiser (the same year as Aliens) tries to regain the heart of his girlfriend (Fletch Lives’ Julianne Phillips) from a douche named Spud (Richard Dean Anderson, then seen weekly as TV’s MacGyver), we also get fitness guru Jake Steinfeld playing jacks, would-be second daughter Eleanor Mondale in a nudity-free sex scene, radio host Don Imus and future supermodel Jill Goodacre in don’t-blink cameos, Provenza doing a cringeworthy Ebonics bit — riffing on Rice Krispies and Roots — at the Townshend family’s dinner table, and in an uncredited supporting part in all the slapstick-driven moving sequences, gravity! The sofa stuck in the stairwell is a metaphor for any viewer subjected to such prolonged stupidity. —Rod Lott

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With just $6,257.34, Bad CGI Sharks does what the underwhelming fin-fronted film The Meg couldn’t do with $130 million: Be incredibly entertaining.

Matt (Matthew Ellsworth) loses his office job when he loses his cool, thanks to receiving after-the-fact news that Mom and Dad have shipped his no-good older brother to California to live with him. Embodying oil to Matt’s water, Jason (Jason Ellsworth) is a perpetually unemployed, possibly lobotomized man-child with a phallic man bun and a lofty dream on which, unlike his buttoned-up bro, he never gave up: to “make it” in Hollywood by finishing Sharks Outta Water, the 15-year-old screenplay they started writing — in longhand, of course — as kids.

Enter our Ricardo Montalban-sounding narrator, the mischievous Bernardo (a scene-stealing Matteo Molinari, The Silence of the Hams), whose magical director’s clapboard makes people’s movie ideas come to life. (Yeah, yeah — don’t ask. Just enjoy.) Suddenly, cheap-looking sharks are floating through Matt’s neighborhood and seeking human-sized snacks. So what if the creatures sometimes suffer rendering glitches while on the hunt?

Effectively writing, directing, producing and editing Bad CGI Sharks as a musketeer-thick trio, Molinari and the Ellsworth siblings turn many a shark flick’s deficiency into their primary selling point, and I’ve got to hand it to them: It’s kinda genius. The guys go so meta, they not only break the fourth wall, but ruin the soil around it so a fifth cannot be constructed. If you find the propulsive drum-and-bass score of the chase scenes self-aware, wait for the chat-show intermission at the one-hour mark.

Although not every actor in their unpaid cast is quite in lockstep, Ellsworth/Molinari/Ellsworth demonstrate a firm grasp on the rhythms of film comedy, both in camera and on the page, resulting in a knowing parody that earns each of its many laughs. Sharksploitation has never looked this good looking this bad. —Rod Lott

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Cinema of the ’70s gave us a whole litany of cool characters to cheer for, from John Shaft to Han Solo; for me, however, one of the coolest characters has always been a smart-mouthed teen who not only blew up her high school in the name of rock and roll, but got the Ramones to play while doing it.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard to top Riff Randall in Rock ’n’ Roll High School …

Riff Randall (P.J. Soles) is a punk-rocking teen — at least as punk rock as Roger Corman was probably willing to go in 1979 — who hates her school and loves the Ramones, regularly staging lunchtime rock riots as the jocks and the stoners and the nerds all groove together in a true rainbow coalition of high school unity, minus the freshmen, of course.

It’s a tenuous bond that only solidifies once totalitarian principal Ms. Togar (Mary Woronov) is put in charge of Vince Lombardi High, cracking down on any and all of the school’s mostly rebellious trouble-starters, including the music of Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky. This extends to the big Ramones concert where Riff publicly gives the “Hey-ho, let’s go!” to Togar’s fascistic rule of order.

Originally called Disco High — an idea that, truth be told, I would have loved to have seen as well — this Allan Arkush-directed production, while maybe not the best film of the time, it definitely is the coolest in a long time; the combo of Soles and the Ramones have a lot to do with that, but co-stars Woronov, Dey Young and, of course, Clint Howard, are the pepperoni on the pizza that makes it so damn tasty.

The soundtrack is tops as well, filled with plenty of blitzkrieging Ramones boppers — all the hits are here, kids — as well as tunes by artists as (somewhat) diverse as the Brownsville Station, Devo, Nick Lowe and Brian Eno, making appearances; Chuck Berry, the true king of rock and roll, is somewhere in their, too, as he really should be. Hail, hail, rock and roll!  —Louis Fowler

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