I have no cinematic guilty pleasures, so when I like a movie such as the absurd James Bond burlesque Casino Royale, I don’t feel guilty about it. Stupid, yes, but not guilty.

Helmed by six directors, led by Val Guest, and with three credited and seven uncredited writers — including such heavyweights as Ben Hecht, Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern and Billy Wilder — there’s no way this could be anything but a train wreck, and that’s what it is. But who ever said train wrecks weren’t fun to watch?

Based on Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel — yeah, like The Origin of Species is based on the Book of Genesis — the comedic premise is that Sir James Bond is called out of retirement to best SMERSH’s financier, Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), at cards. To confuse the enemy — not to mention the audience — just about everyone on the side of the good guys is called “James Bond,” so David Niven, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen, among others, are all JBs. Sir James (Niven) also enlists the aid of his love-child daughter, Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet), and sexy spy Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress).

Hating each other, Welles and Sellers refused to be on set at the same time, so their scenes had to be shot separately and then welded together. It must have been pure hell. The enmity, at its core, seems to have been the result of people fawning over Welles and ignoring Sellers, who was finally fired before filming completed. He was replaced by a cardboard cutout.

If only the whole movie could have been welded together. It’s truly a near-incomprehensible catastrophe, but it’s saved by being so stupefyingly mid-1960s. Watch for a cartload of cameos, and the score by Burt Bacharach fits the idiocy perfectly. Maybe you had to be there, and if you were, you’ll probably have fun going back for a couple of hours. —Doug Bentin

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Twenty minutes into the Down Under superhero satire, you find out that the filmmakers weren’t content to merely make a failed comedy, but a failed musical as well. It’s a startling revelation that unnerves you immediately … and it only gets worse from there.

It’s a shame, because The Return of Captain Invincible has a worthwhile premise and could’ve been an entertaining effort if it weren’t for the filmmakers’ stubborn insistence on fucking the whole thing up every chance they get.

Alan Arkin plays the title character, a once-great superhero reduced to an alcoholic mess after being forced to testify in front of McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee. Now a bum living in Australia, he’s called back into service by the President of the United States to find and stop the mastermind behind the theft of a powerful hypno-ray. Said mastermind turns out to be Invincible’s arch-nemesis, Mr. Midnight, who — as performed by Christopher Lee — has the film’s only semi-successful musical number (and even here I’m probably being a bit too generous).

Beyond a lazy script, lackluster direction and horrible songwriting, the movie’s biggest flaw is the casting of Kate Fitzpatrick as the female detective who lures Invincible out of retirement. Not only is she a terrible actress, but she also has all of the sex appeal of a Maude-era Bea Arthur, which would be fine if the filmmakers weren’t constantly ripping her shirt off, having her walk around without pants on and generally portraying her as being far more attractive than she actually is.

Because of the subject matter, you might be tempted to watch this as a double feature with Hancock. Fight that temptation — with all of your will and might. —Allan Mott

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As I was painfully reliving the experience of watching National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Not because I remembered seeing it back when I was a wee child of the ’80s, but because it kept reminding me of another movie that really sucked.

“Hey,” I heard myself shout in my brain when the connection was finally made, “this is just like Slaughter High!”

A quick overview of the plots of the two films makes this clear as both are about a group of assholes whose class reunion at their closed-down high school is interrupted by a disgruntled former student whose life was ruined via a tasteless class prank. Space prevents me from listing the other ways the two films coincide, but at a certain point, I stopped keeping count.

The main difference between them is that Class Reunion was marketed as a straight comedy, which it constantly (and depressingly) attempts to be, while Slaughter High was marketed as a straight horror film, despite the fact that a combination of the filmmaker’s incompetence and contempt for the audience makes it play far more like an unsuccessful spoof than a typical slasher movie.

Made by what can charitably be described as the then-Lampoon’s B-company, the John Hughes-penned Class Reunion helps prove my two long-held beliefs that there is nothing worse than a bad slasher movie parody and that there is no such thing as a good slasher movie parody. Still, this is better than any National Lampoon movie that’s been made in the last decade. —Allan Mott

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Yes, Yankee Doodle in Berlin is silent, but don’t go away. Let me tell you about it. It’s different. Really.

The picture stars Bothwell Browne, who was Danish and a female impersonator. (Note that you don’t have to be Scandinavian to be a female impersonator, but it helps. Just look at Garbo.) Anyway, Browne is Capt. Bob White of the American Army who accepts the job of infiltrating the German high command during WWI in the guise of a sexy woman. He will then vamp the Kaiser (Ford Sterling) and his son, the Crown Prince (Mal St. Clair), and seduce from them all their military secrets. Think of him as Mata Harry.

The comedy comes from shameless slapstick and the conceit that the Kaiser is nothing but a henpecked husband who is constantly under the thumb of his frau (Eva Thatcher). Add that to the propagandistic notion that Germany was being ruled by numbnuts and idiots (played by silent comedy stalwarts Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin, Bert Roach and others) and you have a fast-paced 58 minutes of funhouse slapstick that makes Mel Brooks look like Alan Rickman.

The picture was directed by F. Richard Jones and is pure Mack Sennett, loaded with pratfalls, mistaken identities, domineering women, seltzer bottles, sexual innuendo, collapsing beds and more goofy facial hair than a barber shop full of adolescent werewolves. Settle back to laugh, kick off your shoes, lower your brow, and pop the cap off a beer. Keystone, of course. —Doug Bentin

Cloris Leachman has specialized in playing grotesques and weird old ladies for so long, it’s easy to forget that she originally came to Hollywood as just another blond beauty queen. For those of us who knew her first as Young Frankenstein’s Frau Blücher, it’s hard to reconcile her as the same actress who just five years earlier played the cute hooker in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Which is what makes watching her in the flawed comedy Crazy Mama — her first starring feature — such a strange experience, since it finds her right at the crossroads of what she once was and what she would eventually become. Playing a ’50s-era evicted beauty salon owner who decides to fund her return to her Arkansas hometown by committing a series of robberies along the way, she plays the role far too shrill and eccentrically to ever earn our sympathies, but remains compelling enough to keep you watching nonetheless.

Most of the film’s problems with volume and tone can be blamed on a young Jonathan Demme, who at this point in his career hadn’t developed the sure hand at comedy he would later show with Handle with Care, Melvin and Howard and Married to the Mob. Crazy Mama often feels like an early prototype of those films — the one he had to fuck up in order to know what not to do in the future.

Still, there are some definite bright spots in this low-budget New World production. Linda Purl (Visiting Hours) is about as cute as human beings come in the role of Leachman’s pregnant daughter, and she has great chemistry with her co-star, Happy Days’ Donny Most. And, like all of Demme’s comedies, the film has a tragic undercurrent lingering beneath its laughs, which gives it enough resonance to make sitting through the weaker moments worth the effort. —Allan Mott

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