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

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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

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Granted, there aren’t that many movies in existence concerned with a monster born from a man’s anal tract, yet it’s finally nice to see one without Jeremy Piven. Rimshot! But seriously, folks …

Independently funded because of course it is, the dark comedy Bad Milo! casts Ken Marino (TV’s Childrens Hospital) as Duncan, a tightly wound company man with some serious intestinal issues. While the official medical diagnosis is polyps — “a trooper in your pooper,” says the doc — the real issue is that his intestines play home to a squatty creature with big, cute eyes that belie a carnivorous killer instinct.

Whenever Duncan gets stressed-out, which is often, out of his butt plops the beast, nicknamed Milo. While Duncan remains unconscious from the sheer exhaustion and pain of passing a toddler-sized critter, Milo turns one of Duncan’s co-workers into a bloody, poopy pulp. Authorities blame a rabid raccoon, which our protagonist is keen to go along with, because hey, who’s going to believe a story about an anus demon?

Director/co-writer Jacob Vaughan hopes we will, and Marino and company do their straight-faced damnedest to sell it. Because they take the silly story seriously, the admittedly erratic Bad Milo! works a sliver more often than not. Playing against type as Duncan’s dowdy wife, Gillian Jacobs (TV’s Community) is right in step with Marino (who deserves some kind of awards commendation for total commitment to his initial shitting-Milo scene), but the show is stolen by comedian Kumail Nanjiani (Hell Baby) in his small role as the too-young lover of Duncan’s oversexed mother (Mary Kay Place, The Big Chill).

Toilet humor isn’t for everyone, yet oddly, Bad Milo! seems cleaner than its raunchy, R-rated brothers, likely because the jokes are delivered as black as bile. —Rod Lott

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Some would argue that Jean-Claude Van Damme has been doing comedy his entire career — he just didn’t realize it. Whichever side of the argument you fall, there’s no denying Welcome to the Jungle is Van Damme’s first intentional comedy — not a bad step toward a redemption/comeback that started with 2008’s self-aware JCVD and enlisting in 2012’s The Expendables 2.

So what if his role is really just an extended cameo? In being open to poking fun at himself, he’s genuinely enjoyable as Storm Rothschild, a past attendee of web-design classes at DeVry University and current he-man leader of team-building corporate retreats. Storm’s latest clients are the dysfunctional denizens of an advertising agency where young pup Chris (Adam Brody, Scream 4) is constantly bullied — not to mention having his good ideas stolen — by douche-tastic senior VP Phil (Rob Huebel, Hell Baby).

Storm flies the gang via rickety aircraft to a jungle island, where they are stranded when the old coot of a pilot croaks. Phil is so power-mad that he practically wills a Lord of the Flies scenario into existence, while Chris tries to overcome his wimpy rep and keep the peace among his co-workers, particularly his über-luminous office crush (Megan Boone, TV’s The Blacklist).

A mix of tribal trouble and the more relatable office politics, Welcome to the Jungle never quite finds a stride with which director Rob Meltzer is comfortable. Laughs are present, albeit all front-loaded and operating only as internal chuckles. I suspect few were in freshman Jeff Kauffmann’s script, since so many land by Huebel’s sheer force of delivery alone. (If you dislike his Human Giant style of comedy, don’t even bother.) The large cast, which underuses Kristen Schaal (TV’s Flight of the Conchords), is nonetheless incredibly game and genial, making the mild disappointment at least pleasingly painless. Plus, there’s a tiger. —Rod Lott

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Social-issues auteur Stanley Kramer (Judgment at Nuremberg) really cut loose with It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a comedy that bears no agenda beyond driving its superficial plot. Perhaps feeling guilty that the project wasn’t Important Enough, the crusty Kramer couldn’t resist bloating the material into an epic 202 minutes that begin with one of those old-fashioned musical overtures that play against a blank screen. It’s about the only moment of respite.

The goofs get going when a crook (Jimmy Durante) accidentally drives off a cliff; coming to his aid are five fellow drivers (played by, in ascending order of irritation, Jonathan Winters, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney). Just before croaking, the dying man tells them that $350,000 — an amount that seems positively quaint today — is buried under “a big W” in a California state park. His news sets off a veritable rat race to snag the loot first; because the money is stolen, a bulldog-faced cop (Spencer Tracy) monitors their progress.

Problems and hangers-on pile up in equal numbers along the way, per rules of the slapstick subgenre. The sheer size of the cast is so big — and so loud, thanks to Ethel Merman — that Mad World‘s imitators curl like Shrinky Dinks in comparison. Had the adjective “zany” not existed beforehand, Kramer’s comedy would coin it — and likely concurrent with the occasion of a paint can landing atop someone’s noggin.

But is the film funny? Personally, if not for the final set piece that violently hurls the leading men off an uncontrollable fire ladder, I’d say no. I suppose that once upon a time in Hollywood, the sights of cars weaving, people yelling, objects falling, structures collapsing and Dick Shawn gyrating automatically translated into laughter. Ah, those were the days, weren’t they, Meemaw? —Rod Lott

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