For being Natural Born Pranksters, “professional idiots” Rowan Atwood, Dennis Roady and Vitaly Zdorovetskiy could stand for more training. Strictly from the basis of this, their first feature, the collective exploits of the popular YouTube rogues are not quite in line with their videos’ phenomenal viewing numbers.

The bits that make up this movie exhibit a gangliness in pacing, editing and sometimes even execution. Most segments either go on too long or call it quits before a true punch line can stick the landing; a few aren’t funny in the least. By contrast, your appreciation for the Jackass crew’s big-screen shenanigans will undergo an exponential increase.

In a guest appearance, Jackass alum Dave Englund is tapped to do what he does best: Defecate on camera for the sake of a joke. In this case, his fecal matter serves as the “paint” for an abstract work of art on canvas to be raffled at a hoity-toity gallery opening. While making viewers grateful that the Smell-O-Vision gimmick failed to catch fire, this piece emerges as one of Pranksters’ better and more memorable ones, given that the target of snobbery deserves a good-natured poke. (That does not always hold true, especially when an earlier prank takes aim at a someone who doesn’t deserve the cruelty: a brand-new dad, whose mind appears to vacillate — before Atwood et al. reveal it’s just a joke, brah — between processing the life-shattering news foisted upon him and contemplating immediate suicide.)

Falling into the pro-Pranksters category are harmless hidden-camera premises of a campsite alien abduction and a gore-soaked human cannonball stunt gone awry. Respectively, citizens scared to the point of pants-wetting and witnessing sick humor on a grand scale are two elements of which the movie could use more. Less-effective antics include a faked mid-massage boner, a faked liquor store robbery and a faked death by truck-through-porta-potty. As far as franchise prospects go, this is a deeply flawed fair start. —Rod Lott

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Although I laughed a lot while watching Winners Tape All: The Henderson Brothers Story, I cannot recommend it outright.

No, first you have to instinctively know the meaning of the acronym “SOV” — without Googling, without pausing to think. For those whose gifted with a synapse that instantly retrieves “shot on video,” then yes, unequivocally I recommend this inspired mockumentary. Viewers familiar with those negative-budget, positive-enthusiasm DIY horror shows of the VHS era will recognize certain patent components — the awkward pacing, the amateurish performances, the kitchen-conjured gore effects — and smile in respect. Grins give way to guffaws.

And if you don’t know your “SOV” from “SUV”? Go experience David A. Prior’s Sledgehammer and Christopher Lewis’ Blood Cult — because “watch” is not a strong enough word for it — and get back to me.

The subtitular stepsiblings of Winners Tape All: The Henderson Brothers Story are the slobby Michael and uptight Richard (respectively played by co-writers and Faces of Schlock co-stars Zane Crosby and Josh Lively), being profiled on a public-access cable station in West Virginia. With Chris LaMartina (director of the equally faux and fabulous WNUF Halloween Special) acting as Henry, their No. 1 fan, the newsmagazine reunites the boys, who reminisce about their pioneering ways in the 1980s. In a nutshell, it was inevitable they take a stab at shooting their own slasher movies after renting so many of them in their formative years. Particularly influential was I Piss on Your Guts: “Wanna know what the best part of that movie was? When he pisses on his guts.”

Their big-box career may have been brief, but their efforts live immortal, as we witness via prodigious clips of both Michael’s directorial debut, The Curse of Stabberman, and its sophomore slump of a follow-up, Cannibal Swim Club. Unsurprisingly, these bits combine for much of Winners’ 67 minutes of running time and nearly as many earned laughs. It is more difficult to make authentic “bad” footage than it looks, but director/co-writer Justin Channell (Die and Let Live) possesses just the right touch to have his characters convey earnestness and delusion. In love with its own losers, Winners Tape All starts and finishes as a winner itself. —Rod Lott

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Because we only live once, you may think you shouldn’t deny yourself the opportunity to see what a movie about a genetically mutated rabbit-human hybrid might be like. If that’s the case, you may as well just get it over with now, via Bunny the Killer Thing.

The Finnish film depicts what happens when a writer (Gareth Lawrence) arriving at a remote cabin in the snowy wild for seclusion and inspiration instead is kidnapped and subjected to an injection that turns him into a bunny monster with a murderous streak and an oversized penis. Much to the misfortune of the young party people on holiday nearby, he longs to utilize both.

Expanded from a 2011 short, Bunny the Killer Thing comes courtesy jack-of-all-trades filmmaker Joonas Makkonen. With some two dozen shorts under this directorial belt, he makes his first feature here, which shows in how repetitive the picture quickly becomes as Makkonen struggles to reach a passable running time. His single idea is stretched past the point of breaking. It’s not even that good an idea to begin with — the creature is, yes, but not the misogynist madness exhibited as it hits women and slaps them unconscious with its engorged member, all the while exclaiming either “Pussy!” or “Fresh pussy!” or, one presumes for the sake of coining a culture-penetrative catchphrase, “Who’s gotta bigger digga?”

This infantile approach to splatter comedy squanders Bunny’s initial promise — one that hints at becoming another cult favorite on the level of Dead Snow or Rare Exports. It looks fantastic, yet feels written by two middle schoolers giggling at their own juvenile jokes in the back row of math class. Sorry, Bunny, but you’ve earned no carrot. —Rod Lott

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In this politically overcorrect age, can one pan a Marlon Wayans project without being pegged a racist? No? Allow me to try anyway: Somehow, A Haunted House 2 is even worse than 2013’s A Haunted House, a parody so generic, its title perfectly matched. That a mere 15 months passed between the release of each suggests that “rushed” and “half-assed” were intentional. Give Wayans and director Michael Tiddes (Fifty Shades of Black) 15 months more and the sequel would fare no better; it might even play worse.

Wayans’ character of Malcolm has married — gasp! — a white woman (Jaime Pressly, DOA: Dead or Alive), thereby affording Wayans and frequent co-writer Rick Alvarez the single domino they need to push in order for the couple to move into a new home, which also is haunted. Cue the spoofs of The Possession (an evil box), Sinister (evil home movies) and whichever Paranormal Activity chapter happened to be around then.

But mostly it depends upon The Conjuring, because its creepy Annabelle doll shows up and — I hope you’re sitting down! — she won’t leave after Malcolm has sex with her. That bit stands for everything wrong with this sequel and Wayans’ one-track shtick in general: It’s not enough to let a few thrusts tell the joke; instead, we get to see Wayans hump (and perhaps rape) it in position after position, until the gag is beaten as lifeless as the damn doll. Elongating such a imagination-free joke doesn’t make it funnier — just more desperate.

If Wayans isn’t obsessing over penile whereabouts, he’s reinforcing stereotypes that smart comedies would break down. And if he’s not doing that, he’s going for the even easier laugh by shrieking. Those are his three moves and, over and over, they constitute one worthless movie. —Rod Lott

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From 1983, the Jerry Lewis comedy Cracking Up is not to be confused with this other comedy titled Cracking Up. Whereas Lewis’ picture centers on a man with a plan to commit suicide, this 1977 sketch movie merely places all suicidal thoughts in the viewer.

Distributed by AIP, the Rowby Goren/Chuck Staley joint finds Channel 8 news reporters Walter Concrete and Barbara Halters (Firesign Theatre co-founders Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman, respectively) reporting live from the scene of what’s left after the world’s worst quake, measuring 9.7 on the Richter scale, levels California. They interview the people they encounter on the decimated city streets, allowing the movie to segue into unrelated sketches transferred from videotape and having nothing to do with the disaster. Starring in these ugly bits are members of such improv troupes as The Credibility Gap and The Ace Trucking Company, whose rosters included such now-familiar, then-unknown faces as Fred Willard, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and David L. Lander.

Judging solely by the skits, each measuring 0.0 on the laughter scale, no one would predict actual showbiz careers were in store for any of the performers. Although for years, McKean and Lander made for a popular duo as Lenny and Squiggy on TV’s Laverne & Shirley, they stun the viewer into silence with a humorless Polish talk-show parody. Lander and Shearer attempt to update Abbott and Costello’s legendary “Who’s on First?” routine with discussion of a concert lineup featuring The Who, The Guess Who and Yes. One can see Willard trying in vain to liven up shit scripts (if scripts existed) on an overenthusiastic diner staff and an office full of execs with exaggerated tics, but to no avail.

Same goes for The Tubes singer Fee Waybill, utterly grating as a scientist; future Cheers barfly Paul Wilson, coaching guys on the care and hygiene of the penis; and especially Edie McClurg (eventual school secretary of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), unmemorable both as a televangelist and a rootin’-tootin’ cowgirl who, for a dime, showers men with positive comments about their genitalia as they urinate. (Don’t get me started on the fake — but truly racist — commercial for “N****r Boppers.”) Everything about the material, the delivery, the presentation and so on suggests that lines of cocaine were the whole of craft services’ offerings.

Like Tunnel Vision, The Groove Tube, Loose Shoes and other counterculture-minded sketch films of the era, the contents are as such that if something doesn’t gel, you can wait a few moments in hopes that the next segment will. However, in the case of Cracking Up, none does. The project is so aggressively unfunny, it accidentally becomes an enemy of comedy. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.