Film critic Roger Ebert had a theory that any film featuring character actor M. Emmet Walsh can’t be all that bad. I posit a similar hypothesis in that any movie opening with the daughter of Hulk Hogan bandaged, bruised and bloodied can’t be all that bad. And yet L.A. Slasher is that bad and then increasingly worse.

Brooke Hogan is but one of the D-list “personalities” and/or tabloid fixtures cast in director/co-writer Martin Owen’s first feature and the targets of the titular, social media-savvy murderer. That he is played by NewsRadio alum Andy Dick, no stranger to the TMZ feed, is, one supposes, intended as chocolate-rich irony. The numbed narration he babbles throughout sounds like remedial Travis Bickle: “Reality TV: birthplace of the moron.”

Clad in a white suit and a mask reminiscent of the pigment-washed Michael Jackson, this L.A. Slasher is a mover and a shaker; he has places to be, self-absorbed people to kill. On his radar for victimization are a vapid actress (Mischa Barton, TV’s The O.C.), a pop star (Drake Bell, Superhero Movie), a snotty heiress (co-writer Elizabeth Morris) and so on. Their labels double as their characters’ “names” — a creative choice that subs for true edginess, no matter how Tarantinoian the dialogue has been jerry-rigged to sound.

Owen can spruce up any given frame with enough neon to make L.A. Slasher gleam with a spiffy distraction, but no amount can cover the awful whiff of a flick trying way too hard to hang with the cool kids. Too enamored with itself to achieve dark humor, the movie may think it’s pushing the envelope, but doesn’t even get close enough to lick it. Utterly boring in its empty shell of execution, it has all the satiric bite of a retirement home resident so feeble, she has to gum her supper of creamed corn. —Rod Lott

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If you have the short attention span of the average millennial, here’s a three-word review: Shit: The Movie.

If you have more patience: Smosh: The Movie is an extension of Smosh, the YouTube channel of comedy duo Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla. My 10-year-old son tells me — and the Internet confirms — that the two’s videos are among the site’s most popular. I haven’t seen any of their clips, so I can judge the Smosh brand only by this maiden feature. And in doing so, I can say three things with certainty:
1. I fail to see the appeal.
2. The bar on YouTube fame is set periously low.
3. I weep for the future of comedy.

Assumedly playing themselves since they’ve retained their real names, Ian and Anthony are roomies in Ian’s parents’ home. Ian’s a total slacker; Anthony at least has a job, albeit delivering piping-hot pizza pies. With their five-year high school reunion looming, Anthony hopes to reconnect with his unrequited crush, Anna (Jillian Nelson, 1313 Giant Killer Bees!), but he wishes he could remove a embarrassing senior-year video of him that someone posted to YouTube.

Toward that most noble of pursuits, they appeal to YouTube prez Steve YouTube (Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Ian Black, exerting more craft than the material requires), who sends them into the Internet — literally, via magic portal — to retrieve the offending file. This setup is all a silly, disposable comedy should need in order to take off running, poking fun at and deflating dozens of the web’s most infamous viral videos. It all but places the ball at the one-yard line on first down. A wealth of targets awaits the skewering … and stays that way, because the potential for Smosh: The Movie is roundly, soundly squandered.

Actor-turned-director Alex Winter (Freaked) is at a disadvantage from frame one, because the script by Steve Marmel and Eric Falconer (respective TV producers of Family Guy and Blue Mountain State) demonstrates an unwillingness to exercise imagination. Instead, the duo opts for least-common-denominator humor, with much of it depending on Ian’s recurring lust for the well-kneaded rear of Butt Massage Girl (Brittany Ross, TV’s The Middle) in his favorite vid, as well as your familiarity with the Smosh boys’ fellow YouTube celebrities (like Grace Helbig) who make cameo appearances. Let’s not even get into the atrocious opening animation, other to say it looks to have been the losing entry in a crowdsourced contest.

I only laughed once during Smosh: The Movie, and it arrived at the movie’s last line. I’m still amazed I was able to last that long. —Rod Lott

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True or false: The movie Saving Christmas begins with a three-minute lecture to the audience from Kirk Cameron.

The answer is “false.” It takes up four.

In that prologue — scooch, Alistair Cooke! — the erstwhile ’80s teen heartthrob of TV’s Growing Pains sits in front of a glorious fireplace next to a glorious Christmas tree in a glorious living room and, with awkward pauses to sip from a glorious prop mug, relays all that he appreciates about the most wonderful time of the year: “I love the cookies. I love the fire. I love the fudge. … And I love hot chocolate!” he exclaims. “But some people want to put a big, wet blanket on this.”

Yes, Virginia, Cameron’s talking about the nonexistent “war on Christmas.” And he’s here to narrate and star in a high-definition sermon all about it. Playing himself (and producing), Cameron attends a glorious Christmas party for wealthy people at the glorious home of his big sister (real-life sibling Bridgette Ridenour). The problem — other than Sis’ apparent addiction to Hobby Lobby kitchen decorations — is that Kirk’s brother-in-law with the punchable face (the movie’s writer/director, Darren Doane) isn’t feeling the spirit; he just can’t get over all the people partying because he’s too busy moping about how Christmas trees and Santa Claus aren’t in the Bible, for God’s sake.

True or false: The bro-in-law’s character name is Christian White. The answer is “true”; I’m guessing Christian Aryan was deemed too on-the-nose.

I won’t fault the Liberty University-funded Saving Christmas for its religious beliefs — not even the one justifying material things as being “right.” I fault Saving Christmas because it’s lazy and deceitful. Narrates Cameron toward the beginning, “Stories are tricky things,” which must be why Doane didn’t adorn his project with one. For an hour, Kirk and Christian sit in a car while the former reassures the latter that the Christmas symbols he worries about are indeed holy. Then they rejoin the party so a hip-hop musical montage (complete with Doane breakdancing) can extend the running time into a feature; Kirk jumps in to scream, “Let’s feast!”; the end.

That’s not a plot; that’s a commercial, essentially for itself. (Choir, you have been preached to!) I feel sorry for well-meaning people who paid good money to see “wholesome family entertainment” and soon realized they were hoodwinked into an audiovisual presentation, considerable stretches of which have no movement in them — just inanimate objects shot from rotating angles. If Doane’s digital camera and editing equipment didn’t allow for scenes in slow motion, Saving Christmas would be half the length, but interminable all the same.

Thou shalt not laugh, either, because Doane’s idea of comedy is summed up by an end-credit “blooper” in which the stereotypical black friend improvs, “I’m just gonna keep talking and move my hands until your camera gets what it needs.” Hell, even Cameron’s 2008 hit Fireproof is more accidentally funny.

True or false: I can achieve the same wonderful feeling that Saving Christmas wishes to espouse from Bill Murray’s epic monologue at the end of Scrooged. The answer is “true.” And I can get legitimate jokes with it! —Rod Lott

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Cop shows ruled the prime-time lineup in the late 1970s, and the Aaron Spelling-produced Murder Can Hurt You! poked fun at seven of them. Like a massive Mad magazine parody come to made-for-TV life, its sights were set on Ironside, Baretta, Starsky & Hutch, Kojak, McCloud, Police Woman and — oh, yeah, one more thing — Columbo.

The telepic boasts a cast that appears to have been drawn, lottery-style, from a complete series roster of The Love Boat (with which this movie shares director Roger Duchowny), because not only do we have Gavin MacLeod, but Victor Buono, Jimmie Walker, Tony Danza, Jamie Farr, John Byner, Buck Owens, Connie Stevens and Burt Young. These Los Angeles “defectives — I mean, detectives” (per the narrator, Get Smart star Don Adams) match their collective wits (which ain’t much) against the one-person crime wave known only as the Man in White (Mitch Kreindel, Modern Problems), so named because … hell, you figure it out. One by one, the cops are thwarted by such cartoon-ready devices as giant balloons, wet cement and magnetic beds.

The level of humor in this thing is every bit as low-aiming as you would expect from an ABC Wednesday-night movie. A recurring bit has flames shoot high every time Palumbo (Young, Paulie of the Rocky franchise) flicks his Bic to light a smoke. The climactic slapstick set piece atop — and hanging from — a ladder connecting two buildings is like the finale of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as if adapted by sixth graders.

What once was a laugh riot upon its broadcast premiere — hey, I was 9 — is largely an embarrassment now. One thing that hasn’t changed: how unbelievably sexy Connie Stevens is in this. Spoofing Angie Dickinson’s Sgt. Pepper Anderson, the bubble-voiced Grease 2 faculty member plays Sgt. Salty Sanderson by squeezing herself into one homina-homina-homina getup after another, from blue hot pants and, um, purple hot pants to a gold nightie. So what if the bra we glimpse as she plays Strip Go Fish is rather plain in its whiteness? It’s what I remembered most. —Rod Lott

After the unprecedented success of National Lampoon’s Animal House, it seemed only natural that the nation’s other most influential comedy magazine of the period would get into the movie game as well.

Unfortunately for the usual gang of idiots at Mad, the result wasn’t nearly as financially rewarding. In fact, the Mad men were so disappointed with the way Up the Academy turned out, they eventually took the Mad Magazine Presents out of the title and disavowed any association with the film — instantly turning Alfred E. Neuman’s cameo into a strange non sequitur.

In retrospect, though, you have to wonder how they ever thought hiring the iconoclastic filmmaker Robert Downey could have ever resulted in a successful mainstream comedy. Best known (aside from siring the future star of Iron Man) for his cult masterpiece, Putney Swope, Downey Sr. was an auteur whose gifts pretty obviously didn’t extend to the creation of a sophomoric teen comedy (or at least one that could actually be appreciated by its intended audience).

Sloppy, deliberately offensive (the film’s casual jokes about race and teen pregnancy seem especially shocking today) and almost angrily broad, the film plays less like an actual movie than a feature-length version of one of Swope’s infamous commercial satires. But then at the same time, it also feels strangely restrained for a film supposedly inspired by the anarchic spirit of Mad (a spirit much better exemplified onscreen that same year in Airplane!).

For this reason, Up the Academy is one of those films I personally find interesting even though it clearly fails on all of the levels by which it should be judged. An experiment gone hopelessly awry, it’s one of those strange projects that should be viewed if only because it somehow manages to exist even though it probably shouldn’t.

And it has an awesome soundtrack. —Allan Mott

Get it at Amazon.