After delivering a few sharp efforts right out of the gate, writer/director Kevin Smith became as lax, predictable and increasingly off-putting as those hockey jerseys he wears like a uniform. For more than a decade, the bar for his movies has been set awfully low, yet along comes the bonkers Tusk to clear it with air to spare. Accounting for much of its success is that, as with 2011’s Red State, Tusk bears next to none of that Kevin Smith feel — one of pot worship, infantile humor and fanboy-pandering in-jokes.

Ironically, Tusk’s most Smith-y element can be found in the arrogant, immature, insensitive lead character. He’s Wallace (Justin Long, Drag Me to Hell), a podcaster with a porn ’stache who makes bank by tracking down and interviewing weirdos. His latest target to exploit takes him o’er the border to Canada, until an unforeseen turn of events leaves Wallace high and dry and desperate for content.

One plot-convenient urination in a bar bathroom later, he’s pissed himself into a lucky break by learning via handbill of local retired seaman Howard Howe (Michael Parks, Django Unchained), a crusty coot who has many weird tales to share about his ocean voyages of yesteryear. Wallace takes the bait … and a cup of drugged tea, waking up to learn Howard’s true intentions: to turn him into a walrus. Let the body horror begin!

Tusk is essentially Smith’s entry in the Human Centipede sweepstakes, yet explicitly a comedy. And with Parks chewing the scenery and a surprise A-lister all but unrecognizable as an Inspector Clouseau type, it is funny … just not to all tastes; dark humor rarely is, which is why it’s so often misunderstood. While the film shows seams of padding in its expansion from a literal joke in Smith’s own podcast to a lark of a feature, it’s the scenes between those seams that count, and Tusk has several you not only haven’t seen before, but won’t be able to unsee ever. Not that I would try, given the flick’s unexpectedly high repeatability factor. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Comedies rarely come darker than Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, written by its lead actors, Alice Lowe and Steve Oram. Both can be seen in The World’s End by Edgar Wright, who lends his name here as stamp of approval with an executive-producer credit. The British film doesn’t need it — it’s funnier than any of his works, for starters — but if it attracts more eyeballs to Wheatley’s little picture, mission accomplished.

Lowe’s Tina is dumpy, dowdy, living with her woe-is-me mother (Eileen Davies, Bright Star) and, for the first time in her 34 years, has a boyfriend. He’s the bearded, burly Chris (Oram), with whom she’s going on holiday via RV, over Mum’s passive-aggressive protests. Chris’ meticulously planned agenda covers national parks to museums (separate) celebrating trains and pencils, all leading to the area he grew up.

What he has not planned for — but should have — is the selfish disrespect of fellow tourists, both to one another and the sites of varying sacredness. When Chris senses the proper reverence is not being shown, Chris snaps and Ellen follows.

Sightseers‘ trick is that our travelers turns out to be hypocrites, as much of an intrusion as everyone else. It asks, “What if Clark and Ellen Griswold were psychopaths?” and the answer takes unexpected turns — not out of course correction, but deliberate defilement of viewers’ expectations. As with his previous film, the highly recommended shocker Kill List, at no point does Wheatley shy away from the edge of the ledge. Luckily, he and his star scribes know just how to play terrible acts — from dog puncture to potpourri sex — so that they come off as awfully, wrongly funny. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

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.