Originally titled Lame Ducks until it was changed (likely to avoid planting the seed of negativity), Brain Donors is both a tribute to the Marx Brothers and an unofficial remake of the boys’ beloved 1935 classic, A Night at the Opera. One wouldn’t know it from the original theatrical poster, which name-checks seemingly every other legendary act of the era except the Marx siblings. Barely released in 1992, the well-meaning farce since has found a small cult following.

John Turturro (Barton Fink) is front and center as our ersatz Groucho, Roland T. Flakfizer, a part-time ambulance-chasing attorney and full-time man-whore who woos an elderly widow (Nancy Marchand, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!) in hopes of sucking up her millions. The departed’s will, however, makes Roland’s best bet at big bucks to vie for the $500,000 salary of whoever will head a yet-to-be-established ballet company.

For some reason, agreeing to assist Roland are an overweight cabbie (Mel Smith, National Lampoon’s European Vacation) and a Dodo of a man-child (stand-up comedian Bob Nelson) whose clothes conceal a closet’s worth of all-purpose props. Rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, groan-worthy puns and slamming doors ensue, but the filmmakers’ enthusiasm and intent for the bygone style often do not hit their Marx.

Either Brain Donors is hopelessly too old-fashioned or Dennis Dugan (Adam Sandler’s director of choice) exhibits wretched timing, or both. However wrong he is for the project, Turturro is worthy of commendation for giving it his all, while Teri Copley (Transylvania Twist) makes a sexy impression as the PG picture’s sole punch of eye candy. The animated opening credits offer more verve and invention than most of what follows, although intermittent bits of amusement are there for the picking. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Warner Archive.

Indie film’s other Quentin — as in Dupieux, the French one — returns to Rubber form with Wrong Cops. The uniformed comedy rights the wrongs of Wrong, Dupieux’s similarly titled effort of 2012. That lost-dog story extended the auteur’s absurdist bent well past the axis marked “tolerability” and into the realm of the near-unwatchable; tangentially tied to it, this movie is much better.

Wrong Cops‘ title more or less doubles as plot description, as Dupieux’s loose, aimless narrative leaps with the whims of a short-attention span from one boneheaded officer of the law to the next. We meet, among others:
• De Luca (Eric Wareheim of anti-comedy duo Tim and Eric), who misuses his position of authority to get women to expose their breasts;
• Holmes (Arden Myrin, Bachelorette), who is less interested investigating an apartment’s murder scene than leftovers in the fridge;
• Sunshine (Steve Little, TV’s Eastbound & Down), who spends his days behind the desk, except this day, spent trying to repay a debut to his pot dealer and suppress evidence of his gay-porn past;
• and Duke (Mark Burnham, a Wrong vet), who is that dealer, storing inventory in his police cruiser’s trunk and utilizing rat corpses as a delivery system for the goods.

Their encounters with one another run second to their dealings to those with the public, most notably shock rocker Marilyn Manson, out of makeup as a cop-harassed dweeb. No matter the scenario, each of which I assume relies heavily on improv, the style of humor at work is the kind that reads pancake-flat on the page, and thus dependent upon the performers to take it to any degree of laughter — even if only internal.

The men and women in blue rise to the challenge in Wrong Cops‘ establishing scenes and those directly afterward. The initial fizz dissipates when Dupieux force-connects all his jesters through a musical thread that seems less about advancing toward a conclusion and more about pushing digital downloads of the soundtrack by Mr. Oizo, Dupieux’s electro nom de plume. From there, laughs are spotty.

Definitely not everyone’s idea of a police farce, the divisive Wrong Cops will hit most with those predisposed to the art of the non sequitur. Whether that’s you, Burnham is a real comedic find, like the lost love child of Bill Murray and David Koechner. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Opening with an elaborate, extended Raiders of the Lost Ark spoof, UHF is never as funny as it wishes it were, but is too darn likable to knock it for the gap. In essence, the movie is like that one guy at the office who always wears short-sleeved button-down shirts: You’ll never vacation with him, but hey — dude brings donuts!

The first and final big-screen showcase of polka-leaning parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic, UHF casts the Grammy-winning chart clown as George, a minimum-wage loser whose sole hope for redemption is also a long shot: making a success of his uncle’s penny-ante TV station, channel 62.

Through a mix of sheer luck and sheer stupidity, rating skyrocket under George’s watch. Turns out viewers can’t get enough of watching a game show where contestants win fish, or a nature series in which the hosts hurls poodles out an apartment window. Channel 62’s smash, however, is a live kids’ program starring station janitor Stanley Spadowski (a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards), who isn’t all there mentally, but that’s no prerequisite for having children drink from a fire hose. All of their Nielsen fortune means squat if George and friends can’t raise $75,000 to settle his shyster uncle’s debt.

From Spatula City to Gandhi 2, the fake commercials strung throughout UHF provide more of a jolt to the funny bone than the actual story. Yankovic, who co-wrote the flick with his videos’ director Jay Levey, is a pleasant comic protagonist even when his lampooning finger isn’t exactly on the pop-culture pulse; the worst offender is a dreamt video that simultaneously pokes fun at Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and The Beverly Hillbillies — then a respective 4 and 27 years old. Yankovic and Levey’s collaboration falls short of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker vibe it tries to emulate, but respectfully so. It’s a shame that, unlike George, they never got another chance. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

With their previous movies, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have set the bar so low for themselves — if not film comedy in general — that all Best Night Ever had to do to emerge as their personal best was this: Tell one good joke. One.

Guess what? They succeeded! Good job, guys!

Actually, Best Night Ever turns out to have several good jokes up its sleeveless dress — so many that, unlike the team’s odious others (Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Vampires Suck, et al.), this romp can be viewed all the way through. It’s far better than suggested by its Ed Wood-ian IMDb score, whose votes I suspect were cast by vindictive viewers going off reputation and track record alone. I get it, but I don’t condone it. Maybe it helps that, for their first time in seven at-bats as co-directors and co-writers, the guys decided not to do a spoof, but something original. Well, take the word “original” with a gram of cocaine, because Best Night Ever is, after all, little more than a female version of The Hangover without the amnesia.

Economically built as a found-footage film, it chronicles one kuh-razy evening — and subsequent morning — in the life of bride-to-be Claire (Desiree Hall, Donner Pass) and three friends at her bachelorette party in Vegas. Of course their shindig starts on a shitty note and goes downhill from there; that’s the whole point. There’s hardly a story to be told there, but plenty of obstacles to send the ladies shrieking in horror from one raunchy setup to the next: fire, robbery, dildo chainsaw …

Don’t get me wrong: Best Night Ever is deserving of attention, not praise. With mostly grounded performances by the four game leads — two of whom I was ready to marry by the end — and more bases stolen than expected, it feels nothing like a Friedberg/Seltzer joint and everything like the first two episodes of a decent sitcom: mindless, certainly, but mindless fun. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Rated G for gawd-awful, The Wild World of Batwoman! may represent the most shameless cash-grab in the cinematic history of coattail-riding. I’m tempted to think even Roger Corman, King of the B-Movie Clone, would shake his head at writer/director/producer Jerry Warren’s transparent attempt at turning America’s Bat-mania into holy simoleons.

At the time of the mild Wild, ABC was cowl-deep in a ratings and cultural bonanza with the Pop Art-influenced Batman series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. Warren’s greedy response was to throw together this intentionally silly hour of no power, funded presumably with whatever change he found on the way to the office. The only way the huckster could appear more flagrant is if he had named his heroine Batgirl.

Batwoman (Katherine Victor, Warren’s Teenage Zombies) may sport the curves of TV’s Yvonne Craig, but bat-insignia aside, similarities screech to a halt. Her face hidden by a cheap party mask and her hair covered in a mess of feathers, Batwoman looks less like a superhero and every bit a drag queen — only her vacuum-packed bosom proves she is a she. In dreary monotone, she communicates via wrist radio (calling Dick Tracy!) with her coven of bikinied Batgirls. The obedient young women are vampires, “but only in the synthetic sense,” which means they drink yogurt instead of blood, whatever the fuck that means.

The tissue-thin plot involves numerous parties — namely, panty hose-faced Rat Fink (Richard Banks, Warren’s Frankenstein Island) — aching to get a hold of an “atomic hearing aid” capable of listening to any telephone conversation. Speaking of scientific discoveries, “happy pills” slipped to the girls makes them so lax, they go-go dance for what viewers will swear is days on end. Also starring in this incredibly boring oddity is no one of note, plus the equally talented chocolate milk and soup. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.