When Amy Schumer walks in Trainwreck, her ponytail draws the eye as it swings back and forth with the impressive reach and precision of a metronome. Turns out, that look stands as a symbol for the film itself: cute on the surface, deeper underneath.

Graduating from comedian to movie star in one fell swoop — thanks in large part to a smart and highly personal script of her own doing — Schumer plays a young New Yorker named Amy, which is to say a near-Xerox version of the drunken slut she inhabits in her acidic, wildly funny (and funnier) stand-up act. Instead of telling jokes, this fictional Amy tells stories, as a writer for a too-hip city magazine run by a crazy woman (Snowpiercer’s Tilda Swinton, glammed up to a point of nonrecognition). Whereas her fellow staffers work on pieces like a guide to workplace masturbation, Amy is assigned to profile Aaron (Saturday Night Live vet Bill Hader), a sports-medicine physician. Among his roster of superstar patients is basketball’s LeBron James, who is better than expected in a supporting role as himself. James is one-upped in the department of scene-stealing by WWE champ John Cena (The Marine), not playing himself, but Amy’s steroidal, sexually confused suitor.

Aaron is as buttoned-up as Amy is fucked-up, so, as romantic comedies demand, these opposites must attract. But Trainwreck is not your average rom-com, as anyone familiar with Schumer’s 50 shades of blue humor (so blue, it’s the warmest color) knows before frame one. Given that and a ratio more “com” than “rom,” the material is a natural for Judd Apatow. Although this marks the first movie he’s directed that he didn’t also write, Trainwreck works as a gender-flipped and experience-flipped variant of his 40-Year-Old Virgin. Schumer’s work bears those Apatow touchstones — awkward sex, pot smoking, riff-o-matic exchanges that wear out their welcome — yet the collaborators still manage to exploit the old Hollywood template (musical number included!) as they imbue it with pain and a vulnerability most leading ladies are not allowed to exhibit, much less possess.

More goes on in Trainwreck than meets the eye — not a ton, but enough to notice a difference; you’ll feel it first in your funny bone, then your heart. You’ll also feel it in your butt, because Apatow needlessly takes his movies to the two-hour mark and blows past it. Unlike 2012’s This Is 40 — and thank God for that! — at least this time he’s spared us from casting his two daughters. This one is Schumer’s turn in the spotlight, and she takes it and she makes it. Now, whether she can do it again … —Rod Lott

At the peak of the DVD market, I hatched a great idea about making a film called Public Domain: The Movie, which would assemble footage from dozens of the copyright-free titles populating every bargain-bin box set into an overdubbed comedy. As with all my grand visions, I never proceeded past the thinking stage. Mike Davis essentially beat me to it anyway, first with 2008’s sci-fi romp Sex Galaxy and then 2012’s President Wolfman.

Using the 1973 B-horror cheapie The Werewolf of Washington as its base — and Lord knows how many other flicks for frames here and there — President Wolfman rejiggers the Dean Stockwell vehicle into a rollicking tale about POTUS John Wolfman (voiced by Marc Evan Jackson, 22 Jump Street) making good on his last name by becoming a real werewolf after acquiring a Native American curse during a hunting trip. This occurs in the midst of Congressional shenanigans involving a Chinese buyout of good ol’ America and all its waving wheat.

This story is thin and messy, as it should be; Davis knows he needs only just enough spit to hold the disparate pieces together. From there, it’s all about firing the jokes quickly and persistently, and that he does with R-rated glee, sticking the landing not with consistency but regularity. Little footage matches from one scene to the next — or even within the same scene — which is not only part of the fun, but part of the point. If the experiment were polished, it would fail.

Instead, President Wolfman is infinitely creative, leaving no stock footage unsqueezed for potential laughter, from a crudely animated Smokey the Bear PSA to a surprisingly graphic educational reel on childbirth. Only a gyrating go-go girl during the opening credits appears to account for original footage … and who’s going to complain about such sights? (Don’t answer that.) —Rod Lott

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While watching, I had planned to write that Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again must have made Robert Louis Stevenson turn over in his grave, but Jerry Belson’s goof on the 19th-century author’s arguably most famous tale takes care of that in its final scene. It’s one of many unashamedly dopey gags in this unheralded R-rated gem.

Bug-eyed Mark Blankfield (Dracula: Dead and Loving It) is Dr. Daniel Jekyll, resident superstar surgeon at Our Lady of Pain & Suffering. Despite having it all, including an engagement to the hospital boss’ conceited daughter (Bess Armstrong, Jaws 3-D), Jekyll announces his retirement from surgery to dedicate his brilliant mind to drug research. This being the early ’80s, that includes the recreational kind — namely, cocaine … and lots of it.

Falling asleep with a straw up his nose, Jekyll accidentally snorts a sparkling white powder in the lab that transforms him into a spastic sex maniac, an unleashed id with disco duds, animal instincts and a lone gold tooth. While in this unruly state of Hyde, he couples with a prostitute named Ivy (Krista Errickson, Mortal Passions) and snorts more lines than can be found in a geometry textbook. Such hedonistic activities threaten to derail his professional and personal lives — all three of them.

To my off-guard surprise, Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again is very funny — often laugh-out-loud hilarious, such as Jekyll’s meet-and-treat cute with Ivy, who checks into the emergency room due to a “foreign object” lodged in her vagina. (Trust me.) Working as a broad parody, Jekyll bears more of the National Lampoon stamp than the humor magazine’s official movie that same year, Class Reunion. (The Lampoon staff had to be envious of Jekyll‘s breast-enlargement scene in particular. Speaking of, Elvira alter ego Cassandra Peterson and her right “gazonga” have supporting roles as a surgical nurse and her right “gazonga,” respectively.)

Belson (vet of many a classic sitcom, most notably The Odd Couple) and his three co-writers deserve credit for putting laughs on the page, especially in the tricky realm of drug humor. They realize — as so few of today’s filmmakers do (*cough* Seth Rogen *cough*) — that getting high can’t be the beginning and the end of the joke; something more has to be done with it, and they do. But Blankfield is the largest reason the movie works as well as it does. He’s a terrific physical comedian, and his dual performance here can’t be experienced without seeing a lot of Jim Carrey at the peak of his Ace Ventura/The Mask commercial ascent. Based on this film alone, Blankfield should have been every bit the star. —Rod Lott

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Indie zomcom The Walking Deceased has a couple of things working in its favor: Writer and star Tim Ogletree (Supernatural Activity) nails the neurotic delivery of Jesse Eisenberg, while A Haunted House resident Dave Sheridan, here spoofing the sheriff protagonist of TV’s The Walking Dead, channels Andrew Lincoln’s drawl-call of “Carrrrrlllll!” so well, it makes up for the forced visual intimacy of the man’s taint.

But two rights doth not a movie make. As a comedy, Deceased comes perilously close to being just that. Only every 20th joke making some kind of landing keeps the toe tag from being knotted. As a spoof movie, it’s awfully grim in tone, which sticks out all the more since the gags fail to fly at a rat-a-tat-tat pace. In their day, Airplane! pilots Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker would know how to wring laughs from an apocalypse without the result feeling dreary itself. So where’s the levity? An extended sequence of the cast cutting loose with bong hits doesn’t cut it — not here, not ever.

As if you didn’t surmise already, first-time director Scott Dow’s The Walking Deceased is a parody of zombie films, by way of television’s enormously popular The Walking Dead as the primary template. Dow and Ogletree have added characters who allow them to crib from Zombieland and Warm Bodies (both essentially comedies at rotting-face value), but strangely lets the mammoth target World War Z off the hook, despite that blockbuster outgrossing both those source titles combined … and then tens of millions beyond that. Smidgens of Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead make their way into a scene or two without positive impact.

In The Walking Deceased, the event of mass extinction already has occurred, and the main story kicks off 29 days later. Get it? Do or don’t, that throwaway wink is indicative of the low level at which the flick strives to operate, and is too content to stay. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Aren’t you sick of those half-assed, would-be creature features in which the entire experience is the title? You know the ones: Pick one animal from Column A, then another from Column B, and pat ourselves on the back for our “best thing ever” hipsterism, i.e. Sharknado, Sharktopus, Dinoshark, Dinocroc, Pteracuda, Piranhaconda, Sharknado 2, et al.

Me, too. Well, Zombeavers is nothing like that. Zombeavers is a tool of goodness. For 85 minutes, I felt pure joy. And upon a second viewing, I felt that all over again. It’s a real-deal motion picture — not a time-slot filler that aims no higher than to be a Twitter trending topic. I loved it.

Three sorority sisters (headed by Dumb and Dumber To standout Rachel Melvin) head to a cabin in the woods for a weekend escape. Their respective boyfriends crash the party. And so does a colony of beavers, rendered radiated and mutated by an errant barrel of toxic waste. Leave it to the beavers to spoil the collegians’ trip of tanning bods and guzzling booze and swappin’ spit.

Several aspects keep Zombeavers blissfully afloat, including scene-stealing supporting turns from Rex Linn (TV’s CSI: Miami) and — believe it — white-bread pop singer John Mayer.

But the main reason is that the horror comedy is like a PB&J: It sells both sides. It earns its “Ewww”s for every lost limb and spewed fluid, and yet it never loses sight of being a joke-delivery vehicle — a screamingly funny one at that. No winking at the camera, no has-been cameos, no self-referential BS; following in the muddy, bloody footsteps of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, director/co-scripter Jordan Rubin (a writing vet of several years’ worth of MTV Movie Awards) strikes that delicate balance of tone that allows the film to be deliberately campy without becoming a joke itself. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.