I have warned my kids that whatever pieces of popular culture they like today, they’re bound to wonder what they were thinking, 20 years from now. I speak from experience, having revisited Super Fuzz, the Italian superhero spoof I saw in theaters for David Huckabay’s 10th birthday party. There wasn’t a kid among our fourth-grade group who didn’t find it hysterical, both then and multiple HBO and VHS viewings later.

Fresh from the police academy, Officer Dave Speed (Terence Hill, My Name Is Nobody) gets his first solo assignment of tracking down a parking violator, but accidentally explodes an experimental rocket with one bullet while trying to frighten an alligator. (Don’t ask.)

On the plus side, he gains super powers from the fallout to which he’s exposed. Dave can see through walls, run really fast, walk on water, move things with his mind, catch speeding bullets in his teeth, make a stadium disappear — basically anything and everything, as long as he doesn’t see the color red. These feats of strength irk his tubby partner (Ernest Borgnine, Escape from New York) to no end. Why? Comedy, I guess.

While Hill remains affable as ever, Super Fuzz is no longer funny, assuming it ever truly was. As slapsticky as a Three Stooges marathon in the middle of a Keystone Kops retrospective, the movie suffers from an overall shoddiness of belabored gags, bad dubbing and a theme song that burrows into your being like a tapeworm. It’s disorienting to think that Sergio Corbucci, the director responsible for Django and other violent spaghetti Westerns, is also responsible for a movie that ends with a hero chewing enough gum to make a giant bubble on which he can float away. Where’s a badass gunslinger to shoot such a thing down when you need him? —Rod Lott

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I get why Showgirls 2 exists. What I don’t get is why it has to run for an utterly unbearable two and a half hours. Full of sequins and glitter and fake tits, the movie is so intentionally camp, prepare to be asked to write your name in your underwear.

An unofficial sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 flop, Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven focuses on the minor Showgirls character of Penny Slot (get it?), played by Rena Riffel, who also serves as writer, director, producer and editor of this mess. Just because it is in on its own joke doesn’t mean its creative chaos can be overlooked.

After a testy exchange will a fellow dancer/stripper (“You stole my customer!” “You stole my G-string!”), Penny flees Vegas for Hollywood to chase her dream of being the gooey center of the Star Dance television show. But first, she has to pour hot sauce on her bare chest, become an escort, learn ballet, have a lesbian relationship, consider taking part in a snuff film, and so on and so on.

I’m guessing that maybe the underfunded but overstuffed movie plays better for those who have turned the original Showgirls into a contemporary cult classic, since I don’t remember Riffel even being in Showgirls. (She wrangled three other actors into reprising their roles; I remember only one.) Nonetheless, when it comes to matching the original’s atrocious dialogue, Riffel strikes the right chord. Example: “I don’t know what’s worse: your dancing or your camel toe.” Another: “You know, there’s an art to a good wiener.”

See, Showgirls 2 doesn’t even try to be a glitzy melodrama as Verhoeven did and failed; instead, Riffel goes straight for the self-aware comedy. In Penny, Riffle has the ditzy-sex-bomb thing down pat, and for the movie’s first several minutes — 15, 20 at the most, maybe? — I laughed along with her as she brushed her teeth with cocaine or tried to think of how she old she is. But even the best joke gets old when you keep telling it, and that’s what Riffel does, ultimately dooming its prospects. Something like this should be 75 minutes, tops, especially for projects with porno production values. —Rod Lott

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Donnie Darko, The Breakfast Club, Scream, Back to the Future, Freaky Friday, Heathers, Christine, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (I think), She’s All That (probably), The Fly (?!?) — it’s probably easier to name the movies not referenced by Detention.

Luckily, this ain’t a parody à la the Seltzer/Friedberg “Insert Word Here” Movie production line of films which rank among humanity’s most awful crimes. Detention, rather, is barmy genius, an aggressive meta-mash of preposterous proportions that actually manages through vigor, intelligence and breakneck lunacy to be one of the most original teen movies of recent years. Think John Hughes via Crank, or an evil twin of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

You’ll likely require a master’s in film studies to catch every pop-culture reference hurled at the audience at lightning speed. This is a Twitter generation film, tailor-made for an ADHD-esque attention span, so there are no pauses for reflection, only forward momentum that could grow tiresome for some (or trigger epileptic seizures from the frenetic editing), but which I found a blast and three-quarters.

Plotwise, none of it makes much sense. There’s a Bueller-style character (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games), a beautiful wallflower klutz (Shanley Caswell, The Conjuring), a spaz, a hottie, a football star devolving into a mutant flyboy, a student who has been in detention for decades and a principal who both out-evils Breakfast Club’s Paul Gleason and proves that “comedian” Dane Cook plays an unlikable douchebag far more effectively than he does likable ones. There’s also body-switching, time travel, psychotic killers … it’s almost all films ever made in one gloriously messy craze-rave of awesome.

I cannot say all will love it; if you aren’t at least somewhat versed in the language of the genre, you’ll find it well-nigh incomprehensible. If you get it, however, you’ll see the movie beneath the artifice, and the love behind the camera. To put it weirdly, the cynicism on display is infused with a remarkable lack of cynicism. If you can parse the paradox within that Möbius sentence, you’re the right audience for this. —Corey Redekop

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Look, either you find an infant with his head aflame funny, or you don’t. Same goes for a ghost sticking a toothbrush up a German Shepherd’s butt, drunken pool vacuums playing beer pong, and Ashley Tisdale humping a microwave oven. Against my better judgment, I do.

I cannot tell a lie: I like all of the entries in the Scary Movie series, even Scary Movie V. Admittedly, like the four previous chapters, it’s spotty fare, but fair enough to entertain. Taking over the lead ditz role for Anna Faris, High School Musical grad Tisdale stars as Jody. She and her husband, well-meaning dufus Dan (Simon Rex, playing a different character than he did in SMs 3 and 4), become guardians to his two nieces and one nephew, found living feral in the woods yet raised by a malevolent spirit that follows them to their new home.

Thus, the comedy gets to parody the then-recent horror hits of Mama and the Paranormal Activity franchise all at once, and to a lesser degree, The Cabin in the Woods, Evil Dead, Insidious, Sinister and The Devil Inside. Also spoofed? Those utterly terrifying fright flicks known as Inception, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Help; it also leans heavily on Black Swan — an odd choice since Scary Movie V‘s target audience isn’t likely to have seen it.

In no way am I suggesting Scary Movie V is up to the level of co-writer David Zucker’s classics (primarily Airplane! and The Naked Gun) — or even to director Malcolm D. Lee’s Undercover Brother, for that matter — but I did laugh out loud a couple of times, and smiled pretty much throughout the rapid-fire delivery, strewn as it is with foul balls and strikes. I can’t say the same of SM vet Marlon Wayans’ near-simultaneous release of A Haunted House, which takes aim at several of the same targets.

Caveat emptor: This fifth Scary Movie barely qualifies as a feature film; the 15-minute crawl of end credits begins at the 73-minute mark. —Rod Lott

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Rules of garlic and sunlight rules still apply, but Modern Vampires, from Forbidden Zone director Richard Elfman, is an unconventional vampire film, both fresh and funny.

Here, the bloodsuckers take residence in the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel and visit a nightclub where humans are kept in cages until feeding time. Looking like he finally comprehends the words in a script, Starship Troopers‘ Casper Van Dien stars as Dallas, a cigar-smoking vampire who takes a trailer-trash vamp (Natasha Gregson Wagner, Urban Legend) under his, um, wing.

But the subplot is what really makes this comedy fly: Vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing (a crazed Rod Steiger, Mars Attacks!) comes to L.A. and is forced to take out an ad to find an assistant. The only applicant is gang member Time Bomb (Gabriel Casseus, Black Dog), a Crip who is at first reluctant to complete the duties of his job: namely, driving a stake through a vampire’s heart. “Man, I’m on probation!” he protests. “I don’t wanna fuck that up!”

Count Dracula himself is played by Robert Pastorelli (TV’s Murphy Brown), while other creatures of the night are Udo Kier and Kim Cattrall. Yep, she’s slutty in this one, too, and when she’s raped by gang members, they turn into the world’s first black vampires — a distinction of which they’re awfully proud. This humorous take on the vampire legend was written by the talented Matthew Bright, who infused equal amounts of humor and horror into his wicked Little Red Riding Hood update, 1996’s Freeway. —Rod Lott

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