No movie ever should start with Eddie Deezen driving a pink jalopy, Tom Bosley wearing a cowboy hat, and/or three blondes with a burning need to urinate. (It’s in Cahiers du Cinéma. Look it up.) That’s Million Dollar Mystery in a nutshell — emphasis on the “nut,” waka waka waka! When people say, “You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to see that,” they mean this legendarily lethal Dino De Laurentiis/Glad Bag sinkhole, which offered viewers a chance to win just that with admission. It grossed $989,033. Oh, well!

At a roadside diner, Bosley keels over after eating chili, but not before telling fellow eaters that he’s hidden $4 million among four places, and it’s theirs if they can find it. Joining in this madcap rush for cash are Deezen, comedian Rick Overton, Playboy Playmate Penny Baker and no one else famous. At least they got Bill Murray to appear the mentally unstable Vietnam vet, Slaughter Buzzárd. Oh, my bad — they couldn’t afford him. That’s Rich Hall, he of “Sniglets” fame.

Like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; Scavenger Hunt; or Rat Race, it’s a cast-crowded, cross-country, comedic chase, wherein greed gets the best of everyone involved. Unlike It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; Scavenger Hunt; or Rat Race, it has not one genuine laugh. In fact — spoiler alert! — it’s fucking stupid. It gave my DVD player an extra chromosome.

Sadly, this was the last film of director Richard Fleischer (Fantastic Voyage) and stuntman Dar Robinson; the latter actually died for this junk. To add insult to injury, the filmmakers dedicate the work to him — but in quotes, as if insincere — while “comedy” duo Mack & Jamie, two of the least funny people on the planet, improv. The only thing more embarrassing is Kevin Pollak’s constant, cringe-worthy celebrity impressions. Scratch that: Worse is that this represents proof I watched the damn thing. —Rod Lott

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Based on its title and its inclusion of Revenge of the Nerds’ Donald “Ogre” Gibb in its cast of protagonists, you might think that Jocks represents an attempt to subvert the ’80s teen-comedy genre by making heroes out of the characters who were typically portrayed as villains in these films.

It doesn’t. Yes, its main characters just happen to be a group of asshole athletes, but they’re a group of poor misfit asshole athletes who like to party and have a good time, and their program faces cancellation if they can’t beat the group of rich douchebag asshole athletes who only care about winning at any cost.

Our nominal hero here is “The Kid” (Scott Strader), who’s supposed to be a wildly charismatic party animal, but more closely resembles a crude, lazy, narcissistic prick with severe emotional problems. We’re led to believe he’s the glue required to keep his ragtag tennis team on their improbable winning streak, but all we actually see him do is take them out to a series of increasingly sleazier bars. At some point, future Emmy/Golden Globe-winner Mariska Hargitay shows up in order to be his love interest, but you’ll be too pre-occupied trying to figure out if she’s had any plastic surgery between then and now to notice how superfluous her character actually is.

That said, if you’re on the lookout for a desperately unfunny comedy that features a lot of poorly shot tennis; really bad acting; slumming guest stars on the level of Christopher Lee, Richard Roundtree and R.G. Armstrong; and some very dated and offensive gay jokes, you probably could still do better than Jocks. I’ll let you know if I find anything. —Allan Mott

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Isn’t statutory rape hilarious? No? Agreed. Tell that to Lola, an odd collaboration between director Richard Donner and star Charles Bronson, but this ain’t no action movie.

Instead, the comedy depicts a May-December romance between cusp-of-40 porno-novel writer Scott (Bronson) and 16-year-old Lola (Susan George). They meet in swingin’ London, where she lives with her parents, then get hitched to avoid him getting thrown in the pokey for poking an underage girl, and move back to his stomping grounds in New York City. There, he gets tossed in jail, anyway, but for a throwing punches at a protest.

Although they both proclaim to love one another deeply, their time apart is the beginning of the end. And good for him, because no sex would be worth being hitched to someone as brick-stupid as Lola. As Jim Dale’s theme song goes, she’s “pretty crazy, dizzy as a daisy,” with a squeaky voice that makes Teresa Ganzel seem like a Rhodes Scholar by comparison. “Darling, what’s a Puerto Rican?” asks Lola, who literally can’t remember how to look before crossing the street.

Helmed with that awfully dated, hippy-dippy, “now generation” feel, where skipped frames and slow-motion scenes equate to punchlines, Lola falls flat. Its original title was Twinky, changed for American distribution to avoid confusion with the tasty sponge cakes, I’m guessing, or to remind moviegoers of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. It should be so lucky. —Rod Lott

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Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are best known for their trifecta of oddball biopic scripts: Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon. Occasionally they stray from true stories into straight comedies, like Screwed. Despite being one of the lowest-grossing studio films of the decade, it’s not half-bad.

Easily improving upon his starring vehicle, Dirty Work, Norm Macdonald stars as a chauffeur and indentured servant for a rich old hag (Elaine Stritch) who’s made her millions in baked goods. Tired of being unappreciated, he kidnaps her beloved dog in hopes of making off with a seven-digit ransom.

But she mistakenly believes that he has been kidnapped, and refuses to pay. The plot gets more convoluted with twists and turns that eventually involve Sherman Helmsley and Danny DeVito as a morgue attendant with a hard-on for saving things removed from people’s rectums and Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord.

Screwed’s mean streak suggests that earlier Alexander/Karaszewski mainstram fare like Problem Child and That Darn Cat may have been watered down — okay, hosed down — by studio interference. But the less credible it gets, the less funny it gets. If you like Macdonald, you’ll probably enjoy this, even if you won’t remember much of it. —Rod Lott

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Back in 1987, Teller, the famously taciturn member of Penn & Teller, co-starred in a forgotten HBO period baseball flick called Long Gone. This is significant only because, cast as Henry Gibson’s obnoxious son (a role he was seemingly born to play), it offered up an opportunity to hear him speak two years before he again broke his silence in the duo’s first (and, thus far, only) attempt to carry a feature film.

Which means hearing his surprisingly childlike voice isn’t the biggest surprise Penn & Teller Get Killed has to offer. No, that comes in the opening credits when we read the words “Directed by Arthur Penn.” How is it possible, you may wonder, that the man who gave us such classics as Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man and Night Moves came to direct what was essentially a vanity project for the so-called “Bad Boys of Magic”?

The answer: Because Arthur Penn was awesome.

People forget that following the enormous success of Bonnie and Clyde, he made the whimsical, draft-dodger comedy Alice’s Restaurant, starring Arlo Guthrie, on whose famous 20-minute story-song it was based. It’s a small, occasionally haphazard film that plays more as a collection of funny scenes than as a satisfying overall narrative, which just happens to be the exact same way to describe Penn & Teller Get Killed.

Written by the two stars, the film essentially consists of a series of increasingly mean and elaborate practical jokes P&T play on each other until karma conspires to make good on the movie’s titular promise. While there is the occasional rough spot, they are more than matched with genuine laughs, a great supporting performance by the late Caitlyn Clarke as their manager, and an ending that makes you reconsider the meaning of “dark comedy.” —Allan Mott

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