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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Sextette is the cruelest motion picture I’ve seen, both to its leading lady and to its audience, neither of whom come away unscathed. In retrospect, the entire movie feels like a pre-cursor to Bobcat Goldthwait’s Windy City Heat, in which the victim is a poor, deluded old woman too feeble to understand how foolish she is being made to seem. It’s a massive assault on our collective dignity that could have been avoided if only one person at the time had the balls to speak the plain truth.

Based on a play she wrote decades earlier, the legendary Mae West portrays Marlo Manners, the world’s most celebrated movie star, who has famously married every man she slept with. Her latest hubby is a pre-007 Timothy Dalton, who has taken her to a very prestigious hotel to celebrate their honeymoon. Before they can consummate their marriage, the two are constantly interrupted by terrible musical numbers (including one with Alice Cooper!) and a legion of Marlo’s ex-husbands, all of whom are desperate to have her back.

Looking at least two decades older than her 84 years, neither West, her castmates nor the filmmakers ever acknowledge the absurdity of the film’s premise, which only makes it that much more pathetic and sad. It also doesn’t help that the thought of she and Dalton actually fucking is so repellent, the viewer cannot help but get anxious every time they embrace — making the film scarier and more tension-provoking than any horror movie ever made. —Allan Mott

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For all of its cultural infamy, Allan Carr’s disco fiasco Can’t Stop the Music reminds us of one important thing: Valerie Perrine really hated to wear clothes. I say this because even though the film was rated PG and she spends most of her onscreen time surrounded by gay dudes, she still manages to somehow flash her moneymakers in front of the camera.

For many heterosexual male viewers, this probably amounts to the film’s lone highlight, but count me amongst the minority who are willing to defend Carr’s folly. For all of its faults (supreme tackiness, nonsensical scripting, Bruce Jenner in cut-offs and a half-shirt, the fact that none of the gay dudes are actually portrayed as being gay dudes, Steve Guttenberg), the film has a cheerful innocence and lack of cynicism that harks back to the old “Let’s put on a show in the barn!” musicals of the ’30s and ’40s.

A fictional look at the creation of The Village People, the film features Perrine as a retired supermodel who decides to use her industry connections to propel her composer roommate, Guttenberg, to the top of the charts. The two of them decide to throw together a group of colorful locals — a collection of “village people,” if you will — and happily discover that they combine to make sweet, if bland, danceable pop.

And somehow the future stepfather of those Kardashian babes gets involved. I’m still not sure why, but it probably has something to do with those cut-offs. —Allan Mott

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Despite spending much of the ’70s at the top of Hollywood’s A-list, you don’t hear much about Ryan O’Neal these days. His great work in such films as What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon and Barry Lyndon seems to have been completely undone by the string of lackluster failures that followed them, as well the fact that all evidence points to his being an utterly worthless human being.

Yet as big of a hitting-on-his-own-daughter-at-his-famous-girlfriend’s-funeral sleazeball he may be, there’s no denying that he once possessed a certain charm that made him a compelling and likeable onscreen presence. Evidence of which can be found in So Fine, one of the early ’80s flops that marked the beginning of his slow decline into tabloid obscurity. The directorial debut of once-promising comedy director/screenwriter Andrew Bergman (whose own career was sidelined by the one-two disasters of Striptease and Isn’t She Great), So Fine is an often funny contemporary evocation of ’40s screwball comedy.

O’Neal plays Bobby Fine, an English professor at a stuffy New England college who is literally kidnapped to work for his father’s (a hilarious Jack Warden) struggling clothing company at the behest of a behemoth loan shark named Big Eddie (Richard Kiel). When Bobby is introduced to Eddie’s hot Italian wife (Lina Wertmüller regular Mariangela Melato), it’s lust at first sight and many amusing complications — including the invention of a revolutionary new fashion style — ensue.

While nowhere up to the level of His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby, So Fine is a fun, refreshing return to the screwball formula that promises the sight of Jaws in blackface singing Verdi’s Otello, a brilliantly droll performance by Ed Gwynne as O’Neal’s stuffy academic boss, and lots of pretty girl in assless jeans. What’s not to like? Besides O’Neal being such an epic douchebag offscreen, of course. —Allan Mott

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