My recent throat surgeon was from New Zealand, and even though he was completely no-nonsense, I kept waiting for him to crack a simplistic joke, mostly because the night before my pre-op, I watched the guffaw-getting Mega Time Squad, the new temporal-twisting flick from Tim van Dammen, the director of the trailer-park musical Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song.

Low-level neighborhood criminal John (Anton Tennet) wreaks polite havoc in the small town of Thames, New Zealand, famous for its tourist-trap outdoor toilet. When he’s politely betrayed by his best friend over a few dollars worth of stolen Chinese money, he uses an ancient Asian amulet, politely stolen in the same robbery, to go back in time, a few minutes at a time.

Much like the far more serious Timecrimes, various incarnations of John run into each other, eventually teaming up to become the titular Mega Time Squad, despite that fact it could resurrect an infernal demon hellbent on destroying the time-space continuum unless all the replicas themselves are killed in outlandishly gory ways.

With help from his polite, suicide bomb vest-making girlfriend, Kelly (Hetty Gaskell-Hahn), John has to not only defeat the area crime team made up of locals working their way through night school, but also the so-called Triads and an army of increasingly irritated Johns, as piss-poor shots from .22s injures eyes, well-aimed slingshots cause major welts and explosions galore, all done in very dry, very clever and very polite ways, all with absolutely no meaning.

Come to think of it, my throat surgeon — a qualified man of medicine — was also very polite. —Louis Fowler

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Take one middle-aged misanthrope with a block of ice where a heart should be. Mix in one child with unconventional social skills. Shake lightly. Let simmer for 90 minutes, give or take.

That’s hardly a new recipe for the movies (see: The Bad News Bears, Bad Santa, St. Vincent, et al.), yet one good reason exists for its refusal to fade away: When made correctly, the end result can be most satisfying.

Laura Steinel’s Family is most satisfying. Its initially loathsome, crusty center is Kate (Taylor Schilling, The Prodigy), so career-driven she apparently has never met — nor knows the name of — her only niece, Maddie (Bryn Vale, TV’s Red Band Society). While that’s hard to believe in real life, it’s the stuff of cringe comedy, which kicks into high gear when heretofore-absent Aunt Kate is forced to babysit the tween Maddie for a few long days and longer nights. Naturally, the two have little have in common; Kate likes her 401(k) and perceived superiority, while Maddie is more into, oh, chicken parmesan and magic swords.

Wise beyond her years and awkward as a three-dollar cryptocurrency, Maddie desperately seeks a familial connection that neither her parents nor Kate can provide. Mom and Dad (Krampus’ Allison Tolman and Jurassic World’s Eric Edelstein), while loving and well-meaning, don’t understand her; Kate simply doesn’t give a fuck. Well, at least not at first. She starts to turn around once Maddie entertains becoming a disciple of the hip-hop act Insane Clown Posse — you know, a Juggalo.

Having only seen Schilling in dramas, I found her to be revelatory. She is not afraid to go deep on portraying the hateful Kate, and that devotion is key to making her character’s arc work. She’s even funnier than the film’s real Kate, as in McKinnon (Office Christmas Party), who plays the nosy next-door neighbor. However, both ladies have Family stolen right out from under them by 20-year-old Fabrizio Zacharee Guido (World War Z) as Dennis, the convenience store worker who introduces Maddie to Insane Clown Posse and, accordingly, calls himself Baby Joker. Family is never more hilarious — and it is often that — than when he’s onscreen.

You’ll be glad this Family isn’t yours, but grateful of the time spent together. —Rod Lott

Whether they are accepting or denying, giving in or holding back, every teen struggles with their sexuality in the same beautiful way: begrudgingly perverted.

This plaintive shamefulness is the style that Eugene Jerome deals with his outright horniness, far more than I originally remembered, in this adaptation of Neil Simon’s Broadway play of the same name. Starring the usually irritating Jonathan Silverman as said Eugene, we follow the fourth-wall-breaking nebbish teen over a couple of weeks as he devises different ways to leer progressively at old-time broads and get himself off subsequently.

Eugene is supposedly 15 or so, but looks to be about a solid 25. Still, his life primarily consists of running to the store for his mom for sugar or playing stickball in the street while, in the background, his pre-WWII family is facing real problems: His brother tells off his racist boss, his father has a heart attack and a boatload of European relatives escaping Hitler is coming to stay.

These are things that would affect many people, but not Eugene — instead, he’s either looking up his dancer cousin’s skirt or fantasizing about his aunt in the shower, which is refreshingly disgusting and, saddest of all, woefully honest. Maybe one day I’ll write my own youthful remembrance entitled Blooming Grove Boners because, believe me, there were many.

In retrospect, Brighton Beach Memoirs should probably be remembered as one the dirtiest teen movies of the 1980s, a horndog flick with nostalgia for the old folks, family values for the parents and undergarments galore for the inquisitive kids who’ll wonder for years what the “Golden Palace of the Himalayas” is — a viewing party without any true shame because it’s got the guy who wrote The Odd Couple’s name attached to it.

It was followed up a few years later with Biloxi Blues starring the equally grating Matthew Broderick, but I never saw it. I heard it’s got a prostitute, though. —Louis Fowler

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According to producer Robert Walterscheid, King Kung Fu lost all but 20% of its roughly $200,000 investment. For regional indies, them’s the breaks; in this case, it is also totally deserved. Good job, American moviegoing public!

However, I discovered one good reason to see the massive turd that is King Kung Fu: You live or have lived in Wichita, the Kansas city in which this miserable monstrosity was made, and are curious about recognizing the local landmarks. Everyone else should be spared the agony by avoiding the film as they have avoided, well, Wichita.

As if the title failed to tell all, this movie thinks itself a spoof of King Kong by way of TV’s Kung Fu,* insomuch that a gorilla has been trained in the martial arts. Just as Kong was trotted out from Skull Island to big, bad New York City, Jungle Jumper (John Ballee, who should be thankful the gorilla costume hides his face) is shipped from the Orient, and set to make a promotional stop in Wichita. There, wannabe TV reporter Bo (Billy Schwartz) and camera operator Herman (the Michael Jeter-ish Tim McGill, Three for the Road) live in an attic and plot to leverage the ape’s appearance to jump-start their nonexistent careers, starting with renaming him King Kung Fu, which they have no legal right to do.

Bo and Herman’s scheme strikes the viewer as illogical for several reasons, not the least of which is it appears Walterscheid and writer/director Lance D. Hayes struggled to wrangle more than maybe two dozen people to show up at the Sedgwick County Zoo for KKF’s big unveiling scene. Said plans require the assistance of a shapely Pizza Hut employee (Maxine Gray) named Rae Fey.*

Other than Rae nicely filling out a bikini, things do not go according to plan. Herman loses his britches due to spilt banana oil on them. KKF escapes and the authorities follow. The police captain (Stephen S. Sisley), who acts like John Wayne, is named Officer Pilgrim.* KKF uses his karate on flag-helmeted cops while he wears an old lady’s fruit hat. KKF dons cowboy hat and neckerchief during a gunfight show. KKF disrupts a baseball game and frightens grocery store patrons. KKF kidnaps Rae and scales the downtown Holiday Inn, giving Bo a chance to play hero with a helicopter — and Hayes to play with dolls for “special” effects.

Every scene of King Kung Fu is a joke, yet not a single line coaxes a laugh. I suppose a preschooler might find fleeting delight in its feeble attempts at slapstick, but why purposely expose a child to pain? Hayes and his cast of nonprofessional, never-before/never-since actors try so hard … just at the wrong thing. Rather than aim for witty or funny, they want to be wacky and zany. In doing so, King Kung Fu stands (albeit in a hovering squat) as the screen’s equivalent of a clown in oversized red shoes, dancing a jig as it honks a handheld horn.

John Landis (speaking of helicopters*) already had unleashed the similarly themed, yet legitimately creative and amusing gorilla-amok comedy Schlock on a mere $60,000 in 1973. While both movies are equally inoffensive, King Kung Fu is infinitely more inept. —Rod Lott

*GET IT?

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