As Snowy Peaks Lodge celebrates 40 years in business, greedy real estate maven Maris (Martin Mull, Clue), in full acquire-and-develop mode, does everything he can to ensure it won’t see a 41st. With the lodge’s lease agreement due, Maris schemes to plant a few violations in order to shut ‘er down. Cue the sabotaged snowmobile to crash through a women’s restroom!

So goes the plot of this slob comedy from Police Academy producer Paul Maslansky, clearly hoping for another franchise. That connection was literally Ski Patrol’s selling point.

Oh, yes: Snowy Peaks has a ski patrol, whose members band together to save the lodge and its owner, Pops (Ray Walston, Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Roger Rose (Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives) has the Steve Guttenberg role as the charming yet immature group leader, pining after a shapely ski instructor (Doctor Mordrid’s Yvette Nipar — or is that Whitesnake’s David Coverdale?) who happens to be Pops’ niece.

T.K. Carter (Doctor Detroit) is the Michael Winslow-esque Black guy with funny voices. Sean Sullivan (Wayne’s World) is the frazzled weirdo, à la Bobcat Goldthwait. Not large but in charge, the appeal-eluding Leslie Jordan (Barbie & Kendra Save the Tiger King) is the hard-assed G.W. Bailey of the bunch. And so on and so on. Most notable among the cast, however, is future A-list comedy director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) as a nerdy virgin with major dance game.

What begins with Airplane!-style parodic humor quickly becomes a mix of stand-up bits and low-bar slapstick gags, many involving a farting, belching bulldog named Dumpster. One running joke sees a couple knocked over and sliding down the slopes in positions from the Kama Sutra — fully clothed, of course, because Ski Patrol is PG-rated, with women in Day-Glo bikinis coming the closest to screen skin. In other words, if Hot Dog … the Movie were a hot dog, Ski Patrol is a Vienna sausage Mom sliced into teeny-tiny pieces so Baby doesn’t choke.

An avalanche of idiocy, the movie is packed with montages fueled by the combined energy of the era’s advertisements for wine coolers and chewing gum. If you think all this ends with Feig in Tina Turner drag to compete for $1,000 in a local bar’s talent show, followed by Mull stuck in a runaway wiener and shenanigans involving a giant rubber band, you’re correct, but please don’t write a sequel. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Even though I am not a pot smoker and more than likely never will be, I have to admit I find marijuana comedies pretty dang funny.

Growing up on the starter drug of Cheech and Chong movies when I was a toddler, I have found the predicaments and solutions by cinematic stoners and their kind bud to usually be one of the seven rings of true comedy, with 1997’s Half Baked fitting in there nicely, a truly stupid film packed with truly stupid laughs.

Thurgood Jenkins (Dave Chappelle) is the quintessential weed enthusiast with a janitorial job and a circle of bros who practically stay stoned. When one of his crew gets arrested for accidentally killing a police horse, they decide to become drug dealers themselves, thanks to a special strain of sativa they get from Thurgood’s job at a laboratory.

Becoming the hottest dope dealers in the New York City area, they soon gain the unwanted attention of notorious criminal Samson Simpson (Clarence Williams III), leading to an absolutely minor gang war — the kind that’s probably expected in a movie like this, i.e., the pot-influenced equivalent of a Three Stooges pie fight.

Produced by Robert Simonds (the money man behind SNL-related classics like Billy Madison, Joe Dirt, and, uh, Corky Romano), Half Baked is definitely a product of the illegal times. With legalization only blocks from my house now, it seems almost quaint; still, the scenarios, some 20 or so years later, bring the laughs.

Although, I imagine if I did smoke weed, I’d probably be one of the pot archetypes in the movie, finding all of this stupid — and not in a good way. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.