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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Like a redneck version of American Graffiti, the relatively obscure comedy Drive-In chronicles one crazy day and night in the humdrum life of several residents, mostly high schoolers, of an unnamed rural Texas town. Beyond a ramshackle skating rink, the main source of entertainment appears to be the local Alamo Drive-In, where the movie takes place after roughly half an hour of setting up its characters.

Usually terrible director Rod Amateau (The Garbage Pail Kids Movie) constantly jumps between their stories. They include two lunkhead car-strippers (one of whom is Trey Wilson, Raising Arizona‘s unpainted furniture king) plotting to rob the drive-in manager, a senior planning to propose to his girlfriend, and a rivalry between the town’s “gangs.” The focus, however, is on cute Glowie (Lisa Lemole), who’s so tired of being treated like dirt that she dumps her abusive boyfriend to make moves on nice boy Orville (Glenn Morshower, TV’s 24), who thought she didn’t even know he existed.

If there’s a real star to Drive-In, it’s the nostalgic experience of going to the drive-in, most of which is captured in the opening montage, then lovingly spoofed for the remainder. Debuting on the Alamo’s single screen is Disaster ’76, an Irwin Allen-esque epic that allows Amateau to directly parody Airport, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure and Jaws in one fell swoop.

Quite the time capsule, Drive-In isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but loaded with such goodhearted charm that I didn’t want it to end after 96 minutes. I suspect what kept it from clicking with the public at large is its flyover setting. So wall-to-wall are the country radio tunes and thick hick dialects, it may strike coastal viewers as intruding on an alien land where everyone speaks in similes, from “trickier’n diaperin’ Siamese twins” to “busier’n a belly dancer with a case of the crabs.”

Trust me: No matter where you live on the map, it’s a movie for people who love the movies. —Rod Lott

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Having Botched a French diamond heist through no fault of his own, professional thief Ritchie (Blade’s Stephen Dorff) is given one more chance by his crime boss to square his debt. That chance is stealing a priceless artifact that once belonged to Russian czar Ivan IV, located in the penthouse suite of a high-rise building in Moscow.

That act goes off fine until the hotheaded thug Peter (Jamie Foreman, Layer Cake), one of Ritchie’s Tweedledum/Tweedledee Russian sibling accomplices, needlessly shoots a maid. Worse, the crowded elevator they attempt to make their escape in gets stuck on the 13th floor, unfinished and seemingly abandoned.

That number is not coincidental when one takes in the challenges that await the felons and their hostages. While I leave it to you to discover just what they’re up against, it spoils little to say that the floor is equipped with booby traps that quickly turn a lighthearted crime thriller into a lighthearted gore comedy.

If you can stomach the sight of blood, especially in the name of laughs, Botched offers gruesome and gruesomely funny rewards that verge on outright slapstick. One on hand, you have a urinating rat; on the other hand, you have … well, a chopped-off hand. Everyone — but especially Dorff, who’s a better actor than he gets credit for — plays these modestly budgeted proceedings with an arrow-straight face, which is what makes them work as well as they do. —Rod Lott

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Congratulations, 21st century: With Thunderstruck, you now have your very own Kazaam!

By that, I mean a family-oriented fantasy comedy featuring a current NBA superstar imbued with supernatural powers, playing second fiddle to an annoying kid, and saddled with a lazy script. (I’d expect nothing less from John Whitesell, director of such laff vacuums as Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, Deck the Halls, Malibu’s Most Wanted and See Spot Run.)

Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant plays himself, while Nickelodeon kidcom vet Taylor Gray essays the role of Brian, a 16-year-old high school student who loves shooting hoops, but has the aim of a postcoital penis. Through a crushingly stupid idea that the screenwriters make no attempt to unexplain, the Durantula’s mad b-ball skillz are switched with Brian’s lack of when the two simultaneously touch a basketball during their meet-cute off the court.

Therefore, Brian becomes a cocky and popular athlete, while his well-paid hero suffers “a slump.” Oh, if only the curse could be reversed! It can, of course, but how that comes to pass is an insult to viewers’ intelligence, making one long for the relative concrete logic of 18 Again! and Vice Versa.

Potentially more insulting is not that it perpetuates the myth that African-American youth are interested in World of Warcraft, but that Whitesell allows Durant to shill his Nike shoes with a commercial in the middle … and again at the end. Lord knows how talk-show host Conan O’Brien was corralled into a credibility-shattering cameo, but the casting of Jim Belushi is no mystery. He plays Brian’s coach, who screams to his team — or perhaps craft services? — “Put some jelly in that doughnut!”

Yes, Durant is perfectly affable, because he’s not really acting. And yes, Thunderstruck is wholesome and inoffensive, but if that’s all you ask of a family film, you’re settling, because they can be smart and funny, too. This one’s woefully wretched — the cinematic equivalent of an air ball. —Rod Lott

Spun off from the ever-popular humor website of fake news, The Onion Movie isn’t as bad as its five-year sit on the shelf would suggest. It’s just that with a couple of producers behind Airplane! and The Naked Gun series involved, you’d expect something funnier. Although unceremoniously dumped to DVD, it has its moments — enough to warrant a watch.

Using the Onion News Network as a loose wraparound, the sketch-filled satire has old-guard anchor Norm Archer (Len Cariou, 1408) deliver quick headlines and introduce on-the-scene reports. Some are so stupid in concept, you wonder how they survived the first draft, like neck belts in cars. Others are so dead-on, you wonder if they might not be seen as humor by half the viewing audience, such as a child’s accidental fatal shooting of himself being dubbed as an exercise of the Second Amendment, “hailed by gun-rights activists as a victory for America and the Constitution.”

Popping in here and there are a few repeat characters, most notably Melissa Cherry (sexy Sarah McElligott), a Britney Spears-esque pop tart who denies any sexual content in her songs, even when the videos for them feature such acts as her being taken doggy-style by a giant blue teddy bear. Steven Seagal plays himself in a faux trailer for the actioner Cockpuncher — his catchphrase: “I don’t think you have the balls” — and other cameos include Michael Bolton, Rodney Dangerfield and Meredith Baxter Birney, the latter cooking cats.

As with granddaddy Kentucky Fried Movie, the scattershot Onion Movie zooms through bits so fast, at least you can’t get bored: a terrorist training video, an ad for a celebrity roast, a film-review TV show that critiques The Onion Movie in progress, a commercial for a gay cruise, a show called Little-Known Racial Stereotypes (“Did you know blacks love taffy?”) and a group of friends who tire of playing a murder-mystery game, so they instead host a role-playing rape. Hey, I never said they were in good taste.

Something truly tasteless would open with … oh, say, a nun drinking from a jar labeled “APE CUM.” That’s saved until the end. —Rod Lott

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