For a few years — or thousands, if you choose to look at it that way — besties Ruth and Megan have stocked their London thrift store with antiques and antiquities purloined with the help of a time machine. It looks like a pimped-out bumper car. They didn’t invent the gizmo; they found it outside discarded near the trash bins. 

What they don’t know — but soon learn — is time travel is dangerous. (It’s even the name of the movie, look: Time Travel Is Dangerous! See?) In actuality, they don’t know much. “We’re not scientifically minded,” says Ruth (Ruth Syratt), attempting to explain their find and how it works. “I’d say it’s a wormhole, but I don’t know what a wormhole is.”

Shot handheld, The Office-style, as a mockumentary, Chris Reading’s film resists doing the expected to forge its own whacked path. Any other comedy with this premise would follow Ruth and Megan (Megan Stevenson) on their unusual shopping trips through an entire history book’s worth of countries and eras, but Reading relegates that to a montage or two. The real story is how their ruse is discovered by its gobsmacked inventor (Brian Bovell of Robert Zemeckis’ The Witches), how they manage to function when banned from using the machine (they don’t) and the consequences of breaking their promise. 

In British comedy tradition, humor is sandpaper-dry and droll in a manner so confident in itself, it verges on cozy. These things usually do not click with me — see (or don’t, really) 2005’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, also narrated by Stephen Fry, incidentally — yet I was bought-in by the first scene. That’s all due to the winning duo of Stevenson and Syratt.

In real life, they actually run the ChaChaCha vintage store serving as Time Travel’s home base. Neither woman appears to be an actress, yet both are funny and indelibly deadpan, with a chemistry so potent, it can’t be manufactured. Reading really struck gold with this pair, so naturally, when the third act separates the characters, the movie’s juice starts to sour. I’d watch a TV series of them just hanging out in their shop, no sci-fi (or any type of fi) necessary. —Rod Lott

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Happy birthday, Bunny! To celebrate, your boo, Bobbie, has bought you a threesome and some Molly. But that’s a package you don’t have time to open, what with the one you’re trying to keep closed around the cops: that suitcase packed with a bad guy’s folded corpse.

Played by a heretofore unknown Mo Stark, Bunny is a hustler in New York’s East Village. And Bunny is a shaggy comedy of errors that captures 12 hot and hectic hours in a melting-pot microcosm of a tenement. The film is a streetwise farce of slamming doors and unforgiving stairwells among potheads and sex workers, like if Sean Baker adapted Noises Off.

In his directorial debut, the person actually behind the camera is in front of it, too: Ben Jacobson (Blink Twice), who plays Bunny’s fast-talking best bud — so close, they sport matching promotional Basketball Diaries jerseys. Plus, this is the first feature screenplay for Jacobson, Stark and Stefan Marolachakis, making it all the more remarkable the film is able to sustain a relentless pace and impeccable comic timing.

Their jokes aren’t setup/punchline — just so sharp and knowing, they take you by surprise. For example, to an ultra-orthodox room renter (scene stealer Genevieve Hudson-Price, HBO’s The Deuce), Bunny assures her of his Jewish bona fides: “Yeah, my mother was, Bobbie’s father [is], I love Albert Brooks …” Several other lines seem destined for immortality due to their quotability, none more launch-ready than “I do love a good Smashburger!” (Trust me: It works wonders in context.)

None of Bunny would work if the characters weren’t believably authentic. Essentially, Jacobson and Stark have made a Real Movie with all their friends, and it shows. Not in the usual way of, “Well, at least it looks like they had fun” — although that, too, is true — but in they understood how to use nearly everyone in just the right part, at just the right moments, for just the right dose. (It all feels so genuine, I didn’t even recognize Mission: Impossible’s Henry Czerny in his brief role as a rabbi making house calls.) I’d say Jacobson and Stark delight in moving the many characters around a chessboard, but it’s evident they prefer to mischievously tip said chessboard to watch all the pieces slide and struggle and smooth-talk their way back into good graces.

So their ending is a bit too quick, too pat, too easily resolved. To echo a character’s statement in those closing moments, haven’t they earned it? —Rod Lott

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“So go ahead, put us down /
One of these days, we’ll turn it around“

So goes The Rubinoos’ common-cold-catchy theme song to 1983’s Revenge of the Nerds. At the time, we believed it.

Yeah, that didn’t last long. By the time the series became a belated trilogy via a toothless made-for-TV movie, turning it around was no longer an option. You know you’re in trouble when the title card visually resembles a local pizzeria’s TV commercial seen on UHF channels.

As the subtitle says, this sad sequel centers ’round the new kids — specifically, best buds/total geeks Harold (Gregg Binkley, Dracula: Dead and Loving It) and Ira (Richard Israel, Police Academy: Mission to Moscow) headed to their freshman year at Adams College, where they plan to pledge the famed nerd-ternity of Lambda Lambda Lambda and finally lose their V-cards.

Don’t think original Nerds writers Jeff Buhai and Steve Zacharias ignore the nerds of the first two films (minus Anthony Edwards, who had better things to do by now). After all, Lewis Skolnick (Robert Carradine) heads Adams’ computer science department in addition to being Harold’s uncle. However, Lewis also is no longer a nerd, but a cool dude with a ponytail! For these indiscretions, Booger (Curtis Armstrong) dismisses Lewis as “the nerd Benedict Arnold.”

But some things never change: The Tri-Lambs remain at war with Alpha Beta. In fact, the jock frat’s BMOC alum, Stan (Ted McGinley), is now dean. He’s still schemin’, currently to weasel his weasel’s way back into the labia of ex-girlfriend Betty (Julia Montgomery), now married to her rapist Lewis.

Don’t worry, Mom: This Nerd-venture has no bush, being made for prime time and all. Betty has gone from appearing starkers to a modest one-piece swimsuit from Kohl’s Soccer Mom collection. Fox’s Standards and Practices appears to have dulled every edge belonging to Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation, because the Greek system’s Hell Week is now called Heck Week.

Pranks are pulled, accordingly PG. No liquid heat in jockstraps this time. You get a pimple cream switcheroo, a double head shaving and a shower spigot half-filled with red dye. In staunch defiance of the laws of physics, the latter puts perfect stripes on the body of former shock-talker Morton Downey Jr., making him look like a human candy cane or barbershop pole — your choice.

Believe it or not, Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love marks an improvement. —Rod Lott

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I can think of few ways more enjoyable to prep for Halloween than revisiting the 1995 cable special Trick or Treat with Reed Richmond. After all, it’s not like the cult icon from such B-horror faves as Beverly Hills Graverobber and 1-900-Frankenstein hosted many of these things for Monster Planet’s airwaves.

If you’ve seen the 2022 release of the Out There Halloween Mega Tape, you’re already in on the joke: Richmond, his cheapo movies and Monster Planet don’t exist. They live only where it counts: inside Chris LaMartina’s WNUF Halloween Special universe.

LaMartina’s golden touch with faux artifacts continues. The hourlong Trick or Treat looks, sounds and feels like it could’ve, would’ve and should’ve filled a bar the Sci-Fi Channel programming grid several times a week.

In Richmond’s inimitable fashion — alliterative, pun-happy and oblivious — the aged actor (in reality, John Waters regular George Stover) dons orange sweater to take “boys and gargoyles” through mini-histories of such All Hallows’ Eve stalwarts as pumpkins, witches and werewolves (supplemented by judicious clips from horror flicks in the public domain). In between each factoid package is a “trick” or a “treat,” like a scene from Richmond’s Mooniac or a cooking segment on hot dog mummies.

And because a WNUF project would be nothing without generous commercial breaks, LaMartina fills those with more deadpan and dead-on ads of questionable (read: local) production value. They shill everything from taco joints and nursing homes to movies like Alien Seance and Moonshine Frankenstein, with a phony AIDS PSA for good measure. The only trick to this treat is how LaMartina keeps knocking them outta the park. —Rod Lott

Get it at WNUF.

Even though I might lose credibility, I liked the 1990s comedy team of the Jerky Boys. Crafting a whole mythology that seduced young men with their Howard Stern-era humor, the duo (Johnny B. and Kamal, to the educated) and their prank calls were actually pretty funny when my younger brother played their tapes for me on the way to school.

Complete with their “Hey, jerky!” salutation, we amateurishly taped our own calls from friends’ bedrooms, dialing in to a momentary glimpse of cult stardom we thought we could have, too.

I recall our enthusiasm at the promo screening for The Jerky Boys movie at Oklahoma City’s Penn Square 8 in 1995, where copies of the soundtrack CD (featuring Collective Soul’s minor alt-radio hit “Gel”) were handed out.

But the movie was, in a word, terrible. I realized the Boys’ careers were done, and so was my fandom. These jerks had no more yuks to give. I gave my brother the soundtrack.

Yet 30 years later, my Amazon Prime menu has practically begged me to stream The Jerky Boys, pleading on its scabby knees. After a month, I could no longer resist.

Now, while it’s not the worst cinema of the ’90s as many claim, The Jerky Boys is definitely one of the laziest comedies I’ve ever seen. It even makes hemorrhoids jokes in the first few frames. Johnny B. and Kamal play two unemployed good-for-nothings in Queens. As you might have guessed, they make prank phone calls that are truly scatological in tone and volume.

While trying to look for a job, they create the character of Frank Rizzo, a mob enforcer who fucks with half of the cast of The Sopranos, to great comedic effect. Of course, this gets them in trouble with real mafioso Alan Arkin — let that settle a bit — who orders a hit on them.

In the 81-minute running time, the boys mimic anal sex in a public bathroom, Tom Jones performs “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” Paul Bartel discusses “piss clams” with Kamal’s “Egyptian Magician,” and Ozzy Osbourne manages alt-rockers Helmet. As you probably expected, the climax finds the boys pranking President Bill Clinton.

Oh, to be alive again!

In the hands of The Stoned Age (another of my brother’s favorite films) director James Melkonian, The Jerky Boys was too much, too soon, and he never directed again. Did he kill himself?

While I’ll always snort when I hear the phrases “silly ass,” “milky licker” and “lamby nipple chops,” the movie is so episodic that, if it were made today, it’d be a prestige-format limited series on Netflix and get canceled halfway though, prompting a re-evaluation on TikTok, leading a renaissance of prank calls.

Or maybe The Jerky Boys will be lost to time. —Louis Fowler

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