I silently told the DVD cover as I popped out the unremarkable disc that ‘you have 90 minutes, make me laugh twice’. Failing that don’t piss me off.
I was pissed off twice before the main opening credits, and even if I wanted to this film simply refused to grant me a chuckle.
I had literally zero expectations for this film, lent to me recently by my mate Negligence, and let me assure you that this film very much lived down to them…
Telling a joke well is a skill, even if you aren’t creative enough to put together your own gassers you can still crack up your mates with a well delivered story and a pithy obscene punchline. In fact half of the fun of telling jokes is watching your mates laugh afterwards.
So when I realised a few minutes in that the entire premise of this craptacular revolved around a pathetic low rent movie director producing and creating an entire film revolving around people telling jokes I cringed immediately.
(Can I say at the outset that one of the two points (from a possible 10) that I gave this shitfest was that the singular plot device made it easy to fast forward without worrying about continuity.)
And when I say a film about ‘people telling jokes’ I mean exactly that. Imagine some random idiot walks up to you and starts blurting out any old joke. Badly. At first you are surprised, then curious, then puzzled as to why they would bother. Jokes are best when a mate or colleague tells them to you, as you know they think it amusing and have handpicked it to cause you momentary amusement. When a never ending swarm of over-acting gits on a TV screen do the same thing the appeal lessens exponentially. I don’t care if they are topless or not, and here they frequently are.
Nevertheless that’s what is expected to crack you up here. For nearly 90 minutes. We have joke after joke poorly delivered by inanely grinning improv-comedy show rejects, including several that are remarkably similar and two that were EXACTLY THE SAME delivered only a few minutes apart. Jokes about sexuality, race and religion, where the first line tells you where the so called punchline will go. And then it does.
And you as the viewer are expected to laugh. Uproariously. Yep National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie is a film that you can’t walk away from, even for a minute, lest you miss not laughing two or three times in quick, painful succession.
Final Rating – 2 / 10. I hated this film more than generic thing hates equally generic other thing. It was all so disappointing and unnecessary.
The best thing about it is that now I have seen it, I never have to see it again.