The original The Longest Yard was a landmark of ’70s-era, anti-establishment sentiment. It was violent, savagely funny, mean and an unapologetic spit in the face of authority. As directed by the gifted Robert Aldrich, The Longest Yard of 1974 was about as cutting-edge as mainstream comedy got at the time.

Fade in to 2005 and an ill-conceived remake, with Adam Sandler in the Burt Reynolds role of Paul Crewe, a fallen NFL quarterback rotting in a Texas prison when he is tapped to organize a football team of convicts to play the guards. What is deemed cutting-edge a generation later? Hollywood doesn’t have the cojones to focus too much on the sociopathic tendencies of convicts. 

Nope, nowadays cutting-edge means anti-gay. And The Longest Yard of 2005 is chock full o’ backwards, redneck, stereotype-embracing, queer-is-ha-ha-funny gay-bashing:
• We’ve got a prissy fella who develops an instant crush on Sandler because our hero is boorish and has crashed his girlfriend’s Bentley after going on a drunken joyride. (Gay people love brutes, don’cha know).
• We have a gaggle of flamer convicts who make up cheers like, “Gimme a D! Gimme an I! Gimme a C! Gimme …” (Get it? They want, well, you know …)
• We have two inmates caught making out over a surveillance camera.
• We have Rob Schneider in a cameo (reason enough to avoid the picture) as an overzealous convict all aflutter over the possibility of a group hug in the showers.
 
It appears that gay-bashing is the one remaining widely accepted form of bigotry left in America. —Phil Bacharach

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Pick the worst Hercules movie among the 19 the Italians made from 1957 to 1965. Hell, you can even include the Ursus, Samson, Goliath and Maciste adventures if you like. Whatever your choice, it’s better than 1969’s tiresome Hercules in New York, starring a 22-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger, second-billed as Arnold Strong in his film debut. It’s a wonder he was asked back for another.

Not an adventure, but a family comedy with the production values of a porn, the unfunny film cast Arnie as the half-mortal Hercules, who seeks permission to leave Mount Olympus, but his dad, Zeus (soap actor Ernest Graves), won’t let him, yet throws a thunderbolt at him anyway, thus sending Herc to New York City, where he’s befriended by a waterfront pretzel salesman, Pretzi (comedian Arnold Stang, neither comic nor relief), and romanced by a professor’s daughter (Deborah Loomis, 1976’s Blood Bath).

In the Big Apple, Hercules tips over a taxi, wows collegians with his discus skills, does that bodybuilder thing where he flexes his boobies individually, throws a guy into a river, participates in a televised barbell contest, wrestles a guy in a bear suit 600-pound escaped grizzly bear and, finally, drives a chariot down through Central Park. Isn’t that just a fucking riot?

What little fun the flick offers is witnessing Schwarzenegger face his greatest foe: dialogue. He can’t properly pronounce Zeus or Athens, let alone his own character’s name, and rarely does a shot include him saying more than one line at a time. Still, some of those are unintentional gems as he:
• sees a forklift: “Fine chariot! But where are ze horses?”
• is told he better watch his mouth: “I can hear my talk, I cannot vatch it.”
• marvels at an automat: “This fine food for only a few small coins?”
• is asked whether his mother dropped him on his head as a baby: “Once I strangled two serpents in the cradle.” —Rod Lott

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In a fairer world, Will Forte would be a household name alongside fellow Saturday Night Live alum Adam Sandler. Of course, in that world, Sandler would have continued to produce Punch-Drunk Love-like films that pushed at his talents, rather than sink to the sub-Norbit depths of Jack and Jill.

But alas, the world is hardly fair, so while we drown in a morass of Sandler-related comedies so poor they make Eddie Murphy blush with shame, Forte is relegated to the sidelines. Never mind that MacGruber is funnier than anything Sandler has done — it’s the funniest movie from the SNL canon since The Blues Brothers.

A riff on the legendary mullet-and-brains TV series MacGyver, MacGruber surpasses its comedy-sketch beginnings by becoming not only an extension of the character, but a rousing and gleefully profane send-up of 1980s action films. To those who don’t know Mac, he’s the ultimate bad-ass: “former Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, Green Beret, served six tours in Desert Storm, four in Bosnia, three each in Angola, Somalia, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Sierra Leone.” Yet in the grand tradition of cinematic Homer Simpsons, MacGruber succeeds despite idiocy. And such glorious idiocy it is; watching him beg for a second chance by offering to fuck anything in the room is wondrously funny.

There are other highlights: Ryan Phillippe is a surprisingly strong straight man, Kristen Wiig is game for anything, and Val Kilmer reminds us why he needs better roles. But it’s Forte’s show: He never mugs, never winks; his commitment to being an absolute ass is heartening. MacGruber is a textbook example of the smart-stupid, the type of stupid only very smart people can create. Thank God that Sandler and Dennis Dugan never got their paws anywhere near this one. —Corey Redekop

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Sporting the tagline “The Story of Bigfoot: North America’s Greatest Lover,” Ape Canyon opens with Darcy, a Hooters waitress, reading a magazine in a tent. Bigfoot appears and starts to have sex with rape her. However, since Bigfoot is such a good lover, she falls in love with him. Her husband, Bill, a redneck who wears fake goofy teeth and sits on the toilet a lot, discovers a strange smell on her underwear and becomes suspicious. When he finds secret drawings that she has made of Bigfoot, he goes into a jealous rage and hunts down his rival, only to be sodomized by Bigfoot, Deliverance-style. As with all of Bigfoot’s “victims,” he, too, falls in love.

The rest of the movie involves Bigfoot attacking women and dry-humping them to orgasm. He also spears an effeminate runner in the butt with a stick and beats up a few guys. Some of his other victims involve a pair of environmentalists who have tied themselves to a tree. They believe that he is a nature spirit. The tied-down chick only makes the monkey love easier for our hairy friend. Bigfoot also likes to urinate on people and masturbate a lot.

A subplot involves a whiny young nerd who enjoys pleasuring himself to Britney Spears magazines. However, Bigfoot beats up the young man in order to get some masturbation material of his very own. The young man collapses into a quivering mess, crying “Why? Why?” Later, he gets another magazine and is pleasuring himself in his own room when Bigfoot reaches in through the window and steals the new magazine. “Fucking Bigfoot!” the boy cries. This is pure comic gold.

While Ape Canyon is funny at times, in the end, it is really not very good. Perhaps if it had been condensed into a short film, its poor production values could be overlooked. However, the muddy, handheld video footage gets tiresome at feature-length. Plus, the Bigfoot suit is not convincing at all — in fact, it seems to be a cheap gorilla suit picked up from a Halloween costume shop. Most importantly, for a B movie, there is a sad lack of nudity and gore. In a movie like this, I simply cannot excuse a lack of breasts. —Ed Donovan

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Remember when Eddie Murphy used to be funny and he did that routine about how Hollywood doesn’t make horror movies with black people because they’d leave a haunted house at the first sign of suspicious goings-on? Well, now that Murphy is no longer funny, they made that movie. And he must no longer be black, either, because he goes in and stays in that haunted house.

Based on the Disneyland ride, The Haunted Mansion casts Murphy as a real-estate salesman hoping to score big when the opportunity arises to put a multimillion Louisiana mansion on the market. En route to their vacation, Murphy and his clan check the place out. It’s inhabited by butler Terence Stamp and — zikes! — ghosts!

Skeletons come alive, apparitions appear everywhere, Jennifer Tilly’s disembodied head resides in a crystal ball, and yet nothing of significance happens in the entire hour and a half. Nothing but ass-numbing, migraine-inducing pain. This one makes any of the nonsensical Pirates of the Caribbean look like Best Picture material. This also makes Murphy look like the world’s biggest sellout.

Poorly written and utterly soulless, it’s not fun, not funny and not worth a single minute of your time. —Rod Lott

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