I figure any movie that begins with a Pixies song can’t be all that bad. And Stuck on You isn’t. It’s another funny, sweet and politically uncorrect (but never demeaning) film from the Farrelly brothers, still best known for hanging semen from Ben Stiller’s ear in There’s Something About Mary.

The joke is that brothers Bob and Walt Tenor (Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear) are Siamese twins. They seem fairly well-adjusted and are popular around Martha’s Vineyard, where they make a living flipping burgers. But Walt is a budding thespian, currently putting on a one-man show about Truman Capote. When the acting bug bites hard — despite Bob’s penchant for on-stage panic attacks — the boys move to Hollywood so that Walt can chase his dream.

Unfortunately, the market for conjoined twins is limited in Tinseltown, and they’re the laughingstock of every agency they set their four feet in. Through luck and sneaky circumstances, Walt lands the male lead in a new detective series opposite Cher (playing herself), and although the director has difficulty keeping Bob out of frame, the series becomes a hit. Success has a price, however, taking a toll on Bob’s relationship with his Asian Internet girlfriend while limiting Walt’s acting opportunities. Eventually, Bob and Walt wonder if separation is the answer to their problems or just another problem to add to the list.

The Farrellys know how to mix outrageous humor with an endearing sweetness. Whereas most comedies just play mean, they can generate big laughs that often originate in the heart. They have a genuine love for their characters, whether they be conjoined twins, mentally handicapped busboys, sleazy Hollywood managers or — most frightening of all — Cher.

Damon is good, but Kinnear is terrific, with a semi-smarmy presence and expert comic timing. He’s really underrated as a comic actor. In the eye-candy role, Eva Mendes shows a real flair for playing a hot, dumb babe with a bosom with mesmeric powers. Seymour Cassell does an amusing turn as Walt’s two-bit agent, who lives in a retirement home, rides around on a motorized scooter and sports one of the lamest toupées ever seen onscreen. —Rod Lott

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In Club Dread, the once-promising comedy troupe Broken Lizard’s follow-up to the stoner-beloved Super Troopers, an island paradise turns into a blood-soaked nightmare when a machete-wielding killer interrupts a vacation of sun, sex and suds.

A game Bill Paxton stars as Coconut Pete, a drug-addled Jimmy Buffet-like singer who runs the getaway spot, with the unmemorable members of Broken Lizard serving as his staff, including a tennis pro, a DJ, the “fun police” and a fat masseuse who can give women orgasms just by touching a certain spot above their upper lip. One by one, members of the staff meet gruesome deaths at the hands (which hold a very sharp blade) of the unknown murderer.

It’s a spoof of splatter films, but by the second act, it threatens to become the very thing it parodies. By the third, it does. As with the overrated Super Troopers, it’s on-and-off fun, but highly flawed. A couple of the jokes are brilliant, while many more are absolutely infantile. There’s the same problem with flow and tone, but here, at least they try to make up for it by throwing in the bare breasts of Cabin Fever babe Jordan Ladd. There’s also a monkey. —Rod Lott

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The AIP teen/horror/comedy/racing quickie Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is barely over an hour, and yet the plot doesn’t kick in until the 40-minute mark, and then promptly hightails it 10 minutes later. It’s about — and maybe I should put that word in quotation marks — a group of drag-racing gearhead high schoolers with cool, souped-up cars, and they unwind at the local malt shoppe where they sing and dance.

Following this “big story” is a some old-guy reporter in a three-piece suit. He talks like he has chestnuts in his mouth, barely moves his lips and takes copious notes on a notebook no bigger than a Post-it. I’m not sure why hanging around kids who play with chassis (“I dreamt I was a 12-shaft drive motor! It was wonderful!”) and do the jitterbug qualifies as a scoop for any print outlet, but hey, that’s overthinking it. No wonder the newspaper industry is fucked.

After more dancing and a pajama party with even more dancing, the teens go to a house that’s supposedly haunted so they can do more dancing. (Hey, at least the film commits to something.) Plot: There’s a monster lurking around the rooms, causing all sorts of dust-ups. End plot.

At the end, the would-be creature is unmasked as AIP special-effects man Paul Blaisdell, playing himself, saying he did it because AIP didn’t hire him for such-and-such movie. It’s totally Scooby-Doo, with lots of dated dialogue like “She’s the ginchiest!” It’s also the kind of movie that’s not satisfied with having a talking parrot, so it has to throw in a talking car, too. Can’t blame it. —Rod Lott

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Not to date myself, but I remember a time when Joe Piscopo told punch lines instead of being one. He was great on Saturday Night Live, very funny in Johnny Dangerously and surprisingly endearing in Brian De Palma’s criminally ignored comedy, Wise Guys.

Dead Heat, however, provides ample evidence for the continued absence of Joe on the celebrity stage. If there is a prize for Comedian Who Should Be Least Allowed to Improvise One-Liners, Joe wins hands-down, besting even the immortally awful Pauly Shore. Every single line Piscopo grunts out falls to the ground and dies an ignoble death. As a cop who becomes a zombie, poor Treat Williams suffers death, rebirth and decomposition, but that’s nothing compared to having to smile at every ill-timed goddamned gag that slips out of the witless jokesack that is Piscopo. When Joe finally gets murdered, the feeling is not one of sadness, but utter relief.

The rest of Heat’s a mixed, low-rent bag. A routine tale of buddy zombie cops (seriously, why should that be routine?), it has some pleasingly goopy gore, wastes appearances by Darren McGavin and Vincent Price, and at least gave Williams a paycheck to feed him until Deep Rising.

Other than Piscopo, the main claim to fame for Heat is being written by Terry Black, brother of writer/director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). On the spectrum of movie people with more talented siblings, Terry is far from a Tony Scott, Beau Bridges or even Eric Roberts. He’s not even a Charlie O’Connell.

No, Terry’s a Stephen Baldwin. I didn’t want to go there, as there are just some things you can’t take back, but Dead Heat forced me to. —Corey Redekop

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A decade after a string of serial rapes and murders of men who are dads comes to a close, it appears to star back up again, in the film Father’s Day. The perpetrator is obese cannibal Chris Fuchman (Mackenzie Murdock), and as if that weren’t gruesome enough, themes of incest, suicide and genital mutilation also come into play.

Did I fail to mention it’s a comedy?

This delightfully demented flick comes from Astron-6, a five-member group of VHS-obsessed filmmakers from Canada responsible for heaps of genre-skewering shorts, almost every one a gem of ingenuity. Because the same year’s Manborg is only an hour, Father’s Day marks the troupe’s first full-fledged feature. Not abandoning its ’80s-movie sensibilities, Astron-6 has structured it as a late-night movie airing on ASTR-TV 6, complete with tracking troubles and a commercial break advertising the film to follow it, Star Raiders.

The latest victim of Father’s Day Killer Fuchman (pronounced “fuck man,” of course) is the dad of teenage trick-turner Twink (Conor Sweeney), who vows vengeance. Joining him on his mission of madness is Ahab (Adam Brooks), the one-eyed hunter who thought he defeated Fuchman all those years ago, and Father Sullivan (Matthew Kennedy), a priest who’s about to be corrupted to the nth power. There are also strippers.

While a revenge homage/parody on its surface, Father’s Day also dips its infected foot into cesspools of horror, action and fantasy. And yet, above all, it’s very, very funny … if you possess an open mind and a strong stomach. One of Astron-6’s calling cards is going over-the-top, and often with buckets of gore, but doing so with crack comic timing unholstered. As always, the guy use their microbudget to their advantage, and the end result is so creative, it looks like several million bucks’ worth. My one and only complaint: I wish it had more than one fake trailer sandwiched within. —Rod Lott

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