So in You’re Invited to Mary-Kate & Ashley’s Hawaiian Beach Party, those little pug-nosed Olsen twins from TV’s Full House go to Hawaii and throw a beach party. Native island women dance the hula, so Mary-Kate and Ashley don grass skirts so they, too, can learn how to seductively sway their 8-year-old “hips.”

The girls are not fast learners, though! In fact, they accidentally rump-bump into the fire-eater, causing his hair to catch aflame. Panicky and disoriented, he runs toward the ocean to extinguish his burning mane, but due in part to his eyeballs already having melted, he instead slams into the wall of a boogie board rental shop and falls into the sand. Clutching their bellies and pineapple juice boxes, the twins just laugh and laugh at the human torch’s third-degree misfortune.

Things get more twisted as Mary-Kate and Ashley search for a pig to roast. This essentially being a short film, they quickly come across one, sleeping. “Is it alive?” asks Mary-Kate (or maybe it was Ashley). “I don’t know! Let’s see,” replies Ashley (or maybe Mary-Kate; it does not matter). A cartoon light bulb appears over her head and she spots — and then grabs — a nearby stick that conveniently ends in a pencil-sharp point, which she then jabs into the swine’s where-the-sun-don’t-shine hole. As the animal jolts awake and squeals in equal parts terror and pain, the girls again just laugh and laugh.

Then they bludgeon the poor thing to death with a comically large coconut, and the action cuts to the titular celebration, where the partygoers feast on handfuls of pork as Dishwalla and Gin Blossoms rock out live. Proving that birthday wishes do come true, the climax finds Mary-Kate and Ashley being lifted onstage to show off their newfound hula skills as Los del Río perform — what else? — “Macarena.” Okay, so not really, but, man, what if? —Rod Lott

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Easily one of the best flicks in the Troma Entertainment library, When Nature Calls looks like it was concepted, written and shot all within a day’s time. At any rate, it’s still fairly funny. Although it tries to be a scattershot spoof in the Airplane! vein, it works best when director and co-writer Charles Kaufman (1980’s Mother’s Day) doesn’t try to cram a jillion things into the frame.

No plot exists; the shell of the picture follows a suburban family as its members move from the big city to the great outdoors for no particular reason, other than to thumb its nose at many an outdoor family film, from Old Yeller to the Adventures of the Wilderness Family. For example, in one of its best sight gags, animals from the whole of both hemispheres reside together in the forest.

The daughter rapes a bear and becomes pregnant. Some four-legged friends are tortured. Stock footage of a vicious cougar threatens the family unit. C-level celebrities like Morey Amsterdam, Willie Mays, John Cameron Swayze and G. Gordon Liddy make pointless cameos. In an early-career role, future Oscar nominee and Bourne Identity franchise player David Strathairn plays Weejun, “the Kaopectate Indian,” who befriends the fam.

If you make it to the intermission sequence, you’ll be treated to a wickedly funny parody of that classic animated commercial that enticed drive-in patrons to hightail it to the lobby for sticky and/or sugary concessions. It begins with the usual dancing candy bars and soda cups, before a couple of frankfurters snort coke and commence bodily gratification. Although sloppier than a sloppy joe, When Nature Calls possesses enough good throwaway gags like that to merit a viewing. —Rod Lott

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As one of those Bush presidents famously said, we must stand up and demand that no Ghoulie is left behind. Ergo, Ghoulies Go to College. Sometimes this sequel is referred to as Ghoulies III, but to do so only minimizes the great strides they have made in higher education.

At Glazier College, school is in session … and everyone is majoring in wacky pratfalls! (Their minor? Three Stooges sound effects.) It’s Prank Week on campus, which means Beta Zeta Theta fraternity man Skip Carter (Evan MacKenzie, Scanner Cop II) has been busy setting the water fountains to spurt at crotch level and altering the benches to eject those who dare sit a spell! Don’t even get me started talking about the inflatable crocodile he’s hidden in the lectern of dean of students and humanities professor Ragnar (Kevin McCarthy, UHF), because I just might die of laughter!*

Not a prank, but certainly well-timed to the institution’s informal culture of zaniness, is the arrival of three Ghoulies — resembling a rat, cat and fish — through the pipes of the BZT toilet. Predictably, they like to party. They also exclaim, “Beer run!” and then burp and fart accordingly. One of them tricks another into chugging Drano: “Tastes great!” “Less filling.” Most uproarious.**

The creatures are denied further high jinks and sent back to the magic shitter from whence they came, once Skip and his girlfriend (Eva LaRue, Mirror Images II) utter the ancient spells found in an old comic book. Meanwhile, former Academy Award nominee McCarthy has to say, “Ghoulies have no dicks!” aloud and on camera, for all the world to (hypothetically) see, which may have been an ad lib requested by director John Carl Buechler (Cellar Dweller). Former Playboy centerfold/Andy Sidaris heroine Hope Marie Carlton (Hard Ticket to Hawaii) appears in a supporting role, but her ass might garner more screen time than her face, which — even with the franchise’s pivot from horror to comedy — definitely qualifies as Exploitation 101.*** —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

*Consider this a lesson in sarcasm.
**This, too.
***But this, students — this is true.

I’m picturing Thanksgiving dinner at the house of actor Martin Sheen in 1995. His wife, Janet, has cleared the table and is busy scrubbing plates in the kitchen, leaving the guys to loosen their belts and chat.

“We have a lot to be thankful for,” says the patriarch. “Our family has been blessed in so many ways. It was quite a year. I enjoyed working with Rob Reiner and Michael Douglas in The American President. And Emilio, I’m very honored and humbled to take part opposite Kathy Bates in your next directorial effort, The War at Home.”

“You said it, Pop,” says Emilio Estevez, Martin’s eldest. “Work isn’t work when I work alongside you. I’m celebrating two other things tonight: First, I’m going to be in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible movie adaptation coming out next summer with my old buddy Tom Cruise. And second, I’m celebrating a full year of no longer having to have sex with Paula Abdul.”

“Thank Christ! I was afraid you would contract the herp or something,” says Charlie Sheen, Martin’s youngest son. “Speaking of TV shows being made into movies, you know The Fugitive with Harrison Ford? Well, I just shot a sci-fi flick called The Arrival with the guy who wrote that, David Twohy. I have the lead role. But enough about me! What’ve you been up to, Uncle Joe?”

“Who, me?” says Joe Estevez, Martin’s little brother. “I just wrapped a shot-on-video feature in which me and the 18th-billed performer from Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space are chased around an office building by a baby ghost. It’s made by the guy me and Frank Stallone did all those roller-skating ninja pictures with.”

A hush falls over the room. Martin finally breaks the uncomfortable silence. “Janet!” he bellows. “Dig out the turkey scraps from the dog bowl and Ziploc ’em up for Joe, will ya, dear?”

Okay, so maybe it didn’t go that way; perhaps the Sheens are more of a Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil fam. But sure as shit, Joe Estevez did indeed reteam with Donald G. Jackson (Hell Comes to Frogtown) for the kiddietainment containment unit known as Baby Ghost, from a “screamplay” by Aliens effects artist Mark Williams.

The least Estevez dons bow tie as portrait photographer Winslow Cobblepott, working from an upper floor of an Los Angeles high-rise. One of his young subjects goes in search of a vending machine for a peanuts-packed Snickers bar and packs the peanuts of a nosy security guard (James D. Whitworth, Dragon Fury) with her wee fist. Instead of finding candy, she locates a chained and padlocked box in the basement. Out pops Baby Ghost, an anti-Casper creature with an annoying laugh, a fish face and hair made from a cheerleader’s poms. Giggling like a baby, the dog turd-shaped specter appears as an all-green chromakey transparency added in post … or whatever accounted for post in Jackson’s world.

Baby Ghost is pretty harmless, unless you happen to be a box of Entenmann’s baked goods. Attempting to get Baby Ghost back in the box, Cobblepott uses a trail of donuts as bait, followed by a handheld video game (Donkey Kong, judging from the sound effects). Amid these shenanigans, Cobblepott engages with the infantile building staffer (the aforementioned Plan 9’s Conrad Brooks) and full-time fortune teller Madame Zora (Erin O’Bryan, Playboy’s Erotic Fantasies IV: Forbidden Liaisons). Complicating matters are two bumbling robbers created in the “why I oughta” mold in hopes of conjuring good-time memories of Home Alone.

While it’s unkind to speak ill of the dead, thank your lucky stars Jackson passed away before he could make good on Baby Ghost’s end-credit threat of “Watch for Baby Ghost 2.” He was too busy honing his craft via Lingerie Kickboxer and Rollergator. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

An open challenge to Seth Rogen: Try to write a feature-length comedy that contains none of your three crutches. To reiterate the obvious, those are:
• the word “fuck” and all its variations/conjugations;
• references to the male member, especially being sucked and/or jerked;
• and pot-smoking.

He cannot do it. That trusty troika of fallbacks comprises his entire arsenal. Movie to movie, each and every one is trotted out incessantly for jokes — not to set up jokes, not to pay off jokes, but to be the jokes. More on that in one hot minute.

Sausage Party represents the worst offender of Rogen and co-scribe Evan Goldberg’s stoned bag of tricks. And because the film is animated, they’ve doubled down on their juvenile instincts in order to appear more subversive than the cartoon would be in sheer concept alone. That concept, in a nutshell (or a jar of Butt Nutter peanut butter, to borrow a Party-going character) is that, unbeknownst to us (unless you’re trippin’ on bath salts), all the food items in your local grocery store are sentient sexual beings.

The hot dog Frank (Rogen, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising) is particularly eager to wrangle free of his vacuum-packed packaging so he can slip inside a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig, this year’s Ghostbusters remake). Certainly you’re able to see through the subtlety (because it’s completely transparent) and know that means intercourse. Keeping them from doing that are two primary obstacles:
• the revelatory admission that being purchased by a customer leads to being eaten
• and a douchebag — literally, a douchebag (Nick Kroll, TV’s The League) seeking revenge for his bent nozzle, which he’s itching to jam into a vagina … but he’ll settle for a dude’s asshole.

Co-directed by Conrad Vernon (Monsters vs. Aliens) and Greg Tiernan (approximately 100 episodes and videos in the Thomas & Friends kiddie franchise!), the movie truly has a lot going for it technically, from ace character design to seamless computer animation. Spirited voice work gets delivered from the likes of Michael Cera, Craig Robinson, Salma Hayek and Edward Norton as, respectively, a malformed wiener, a gangsta box of grits, a lesbian taco and a bagel that may as well be named Woody Allen.

Too bad they’re ill-served by an elementary premise and a junior-high script that assumes the acts of copulation and bong-hitting are hee-larious, in and of themselves and entirely lacking context. It’s like that kid in the back of the class who would say things like “cunt” and “flappy fuck” in a bid for attention. The difference is that his remarks cost nothing; Rogen and company’s, about $30 million. Sausage Party is not clever enough to merit the markup. In fact, it’s rotten. —Rod Lott