More thought went into titling this movie than went into scripting it. I picture the latter happening this way: Writer/director Craig Moss (whose previous turd, aptly titled Breaking Wind, spoofed the Twilight franchise with a kindergartener’s wit) writes the names of dozens of currently popular films, TV shows, TV commercials, celebrities and other pop-culture items on pieces of paper. Then he puts them in a paper bag and pulls out about two dozen at random. Moss then shoehorns awful parodies of each in about 80 minutes’ time.

Among his many “targets” are the Subway ad for $5 footlong subs, a dead Steve Jobs and the pottery scene from Ghost. Yes, Ghost, the movie from 1990.

As if you needed to be told, the results are either painfully awful or awfully painful. Also as if you needed to be told, 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — by and large, and in theory — exists to make fun of a batch of recent horror films, primarily of the found-footage nature. But in order to make fun of something, jokes are needed, which Moss forever confuses with his two obsessions: anal and genital activity.

In the latter department — and this list by no means approaches being comprehensive — 30 Nights features:
• a garden gnome being humped;
• a pool heater being penetrated;
• a dog performing fellatio on his owner;
• an infant performing cunnilingus on a teen girl;
• a ghost having sex with the lead actress (Reno 911!: Miami‘s Kathryn Fiore, for whom you will feel great sorrow and embarrassment); and
• every viewer being raped.

“It’s not even funny anymore!” complains a ghost at one point (with a British accent, because accents equal comedy?). He’s right … and also wrong: This movie never was funny to begin with. What Moss makes qualifies as an insult to lowbrow humor. —Rod Lott

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I can’t recall an A-list comedy that works so hard at being relentlessly offensive as Movie 43. Hugh Jackman dons not adamantium claws, but neck testicles. Anna Faris radiates not cluelessness, but coprophilia. Terrence Howard discusses not how hard it is for a pimp, but how long be the black man’s dick.

For a slight majority of the running time, however, Movie 43 forgets to attach jokes to those shocks.

A compilation of shorts bearing no connection to one another other than earning that R rating and pushing it as close to NC-17 as it can get, the film was long-delayed and then ignored. For all its many faults, it’s still watchable.

After all, where else can you see so many Oscar winners and nominees do things that would leave older members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences aghast? Things like:
• Kate Winslet with soup-drenched nuts pressed against her face?
• Naomi Watts making a move on her teenaged son?
• and certainly taking the cake — or avocado, as the case may be — Halle Berry mixing guacamole with her right breast?

In delivering sketch after sketch, Movie 43 is structured like Kentucky Fried Movie or Amazon Women on the Women, with one big difference: Not counting three commercials and a superhero speed-dating bit (stolen by Jason Sudeikis’ horndog Batman), it’s not parodying anything. It’s merely presenting gags (sometimes literal) without context or purpose.

Yet I enjoyed experiencing it; there’s something fascinating about seeing such star-studded material fail, landing with a cruel thud before your eyes. The final sequence, directed by Super‘s James Gunn and involving a profane cartoon cat, makes any pain worth the temporary suffering. —Rod Lott

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Because of Karen Black’s iconic role in the 1975 made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror, there’s an irony to Ooga Booga‘s casting of her opposite a killer doll. Any semblance of cleverness ceases thereafter.

The Full Moon Features production stands as yet another example of director Charles Band’s love for pint-sized puppets and demonic toys, this time in the tasteless African native of the title. Early in the story, the African-American protagonist Devin (earnest first-timer Wade F. Wilson) says to his friend, “Not the bad-ass dolls idea again?” The rhetorical question could be directed at Band himself, and should be.

Devin’s dreams of becoming a doctor are shattered when he’s shot dead by racist cops in a convenience store. But because his corpse is shocked by the slushie machine (his girlfriend requested “one rhubarb squirtie”), Devin’s soul is transferred into Ooga Booga — an action figure made by his pig-nosed pal, Hambo (Chance A. Rearden, Zombies vs. Strippers) — and, therefore, is able to exact revenge on the officers and the epithet-spewing Southern judge (Stacy Keach, The Bourne Legacy) who cleared them.

The spear-chucking, bone-through-the-nose Ooga Booga is just one of a series of offensive figurines Hambo hawks; the others include Joe Cracker, Crack Whore, The Gook and Butt Pirate. Any assumption that Band might be parodying racism is null and void, given that the market-savvy filmmaker sells limited-edition replicas on the Full Moon website at $39.99 each.

But back to the movie, which is a lamebrained, long 75 minutes. Not the motorboating kids’ show host, not the meth head named Boner, and not even the giant breasts of the hooker named Skank (porn star Siri, Gazongas 7) can mitigate the considerable tedium. —Rod Lott

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Absolutely fascinating in a car-wreck sort-of way, the clumsily titled Licensed to Love and Kill is the United Kingdom’s parody of its own James Bond.

Not 007, No. 1 is Britain’s top secret agent (Gareth Hunt, Bloodbath at the House of Death). In the opening scene, he says via narration, “I ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’” One wonders if this line was scripted or merely Hunt’s personal assessment of his role in this stinker, and either director Lindsay Shonteff (Devil Doll) didn’t have the budget to edit it out or just didn’t care.

The plot has No. 1 assigned to retrieve lost American diplomat Lord Dangerfield (Noel Johnson, Frenzy). Before jetting off to the U.S., he visits this flick’s version of Q for the requisite cool gadgets and supplies. This Q has little more to offer than the knock-your-socks-off technology of magnetic ball bearings.

Dangerfield is being blackmailed by the evil Sen. Lucifer Orchid (Gary Hope, Romeo Is Bleeding), who has commissioned a No. 1 doppelgänger to further his devious plan, exactly whatever that may be. Apparently, Orchid is trying to compensate for being saddled with such a girlie last name, because here’s how flat-out mean he is:
• He shoots skeet out on the beach using real, live human beings.
• He flame-broils his whip-slinging midget sidekick (who looks like an Indian Roger Ebert) for no apparent reason, leaving only his Kenney shoes.
• He knowingly allows one of his mansion whores to take a swim in a pool of acid.
• He even keeps a cageful of hussies out back, whom he fancies poking with sticks.
• He is aided by Jensen Fury (Nick Tate, TV’s Space: 1999), a throaty henchman with pointy metal fingernails.

When Orchid sends an all-purpose, leather-masked bad guy out to chase No. 1 on a motorcycle, our secret-agent man calmly reacts by using his car’s giant retractable saw blade to cut the fellow’s chopper in half. It is here where I call Shonteff’s morals into question: He’ll allow an innocent girl to have all the flesh stripped off her in a chemical plunge, but he shies away from dissecting an unlikable thick-necked tuffie?

No. 1 seems more interesting in bedding the various oft-topless women waltzing in and out of this picture (it doesn’t bear the alternate title of The Man from S.E.X. for nothing!), like the car rental clerk who wears (to use the term lightly) a short, tight T-shirt reading “RENT ME.”

And all the above is just the first 45 minutes. No. 1 is a steaming, must-see lump of No. 2. —Rod Lott

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If remembered at all today, Loose Shoes is done so not for the nudity of Hill Street Blues‘ Betty Thomas (trust me), but for marking the screen debut of Bill Murray. A scrappy, Kentucky Fried Movie-style comedy of faux coming attractions, it’s the very definition of “mixed bag,” which means it’s not without some laughs.

One of them arrives with the first trailer out of the gate, for a biopic of a Howard Hughes-like character; intones the narrator, “But his hobby … was watching planes fuck.” Blue humor reigns throughout, with such bits as The Invasion of the Penis Snatchers, 2069: A Space Orgy, The Bad News Bears in Getting Laid and the African-American musical Dark Town After Dark, featuring a catchy number whose chorus celebrates “tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit.”

The longer segments tend not to work as well. These include the prison drama Three Cheers for Lefty!, in which Murray’s death-row inmate incites a riot over quiche; Scuffed Shoes, a ballet-set murder mystery; and Billy Jerk Goes to Oz. In the latter, a snake bite sends the Billy Jack-esque rebel to the wonderful world; how many of today’s young viewers would know who Billy Jack is?

Other targets of parody are Woody Allen, nature documentaries, Walt Disney family films, the Ma & Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule franchises, Charlie Chaplin, spaghetti Westerns, Macon County Line, concession-stand commercials and Star Wars, which is rendered as a Jewish space opera with laser-shooting menorah. If Mel Brooks didn’t steal this idea from director/co-writer Ira Miller for History of the World: Part I, then … well, he totally stole it. —Rod Lott

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