This Week’s Worst Movie Ever: Underground Comedy Movie

Posted by Dr. Cole Abaius (cole.abaius@filmschoolrejects.com) on May 13, 2009

Every week, we find a new Worst Film Ever and deliver it to you as a public service. These films should be avoided at all costs, but if you absolutely have to see them, strap on your rosary beads and prepare to lose your faith in film! This week’s Worst Movie Ever is:

Underground Comedy Movie (1999)

Synopsis: Ill-conceived sketches meant to insult and offend – including, but not limited to, fetus sales, Boobwatch, Bag Lady Beauty Contest, Musical Parody “I Hate L.A.,” spoofs on Dirty Harry, and Michael Clark Duncan losing his gay virginity.

Offensiveness at its worst!

What you may not realize, dear reader, is that a long discussion (almost thirteen minutes) went into shaping this feature – questioning over what films would be off-limits and which ones would be rife for hatred. There’s something seemingly unfair about including a movie like this amongst the ranks of the Worst Ever simply because it’s such an indie film. It even has the word Underground in the title if you needed more of a hint. However, it wasn’t so indie that it couldn’t get legitimate actor Michael Clark Duncan involved or several C-list celebrities on board. Do you know how to get a hold of Joey Buttafuoco? Didn’t think so.

Plus, ShamWow Vince opened the door to ridicule by 1) running human feces through an editing bay and calling it a movie and 2) suing the Farrelly Brothers in order to gain publicity for said movie.

Double plus, it’s a cautionary tale, so it stands as a lesson if nothing else. The most important lesson is that being offensive simply to offend is basically meaningless. A middle schooler who sends Goat.se to his grandmother could have written this movie, and I’m not totally convinced that that wasn’t the case. The jokes are the easiest possible – and it’s mostly because Vince Offer (writer/director/purveyor of fine vegetable choppers) made the goal of his sketches to offend instead of, you know, make people laugh. Which has its own merit in a way – the CKY crew made a living out of offending – but Underground Comedy Movie is done so joylessly that it plays like the desperate attempt from a young guy to get his mother to finally pay attention to him by mocking the gays. Offer would have done better to take out a billboard. And I’m not against gay jokes, I just want them innovative. As it turns out, someone trying to offend is more boring than anything else.

Writing/Directing at its worst!

As if the focus and intent of the film were bad enough, the execution is done with the skill of a million monkeys on typewriters. It turns out the result isn’t Shakespeare. Changing the song “I Love L.A.” into “I Hate L.A.” as a parody? This is the kind of shit that loses talent shows. Hell, this is the kind of shit that makes you have to lie when a friend asks you what you thought of his performance.

Sorry, but mocking “Baywatch” by calling it “Boobwatch” wasn’t even funny in ‘93.

Sadly, even the few concepts that move beyond the obvious are destroyed by what seems like a complete lack of effort. A mock talk show featuring a guy who likes to rape babies (because it’s offensive) turns out to be ten minutes of the host asking “So you like to rape babies?” followed by the guest insisting that, yes, in fact, he loves to rape babies. Are you offended yet? Didn’t think so. Yet, the concept of a baby-rapist does have some potential to it – both for comedic effect and as a means to offend. But, ironically, Vince and company manage to take something horribly offensive and make it dull and shrug-worthy. It’s like if Eli Roth somehow managed to shoot Hostel in such a way that made people yawn when someone’s eye got burned out of her skull. Maybe that in and of itself is an achievement.

Acting at its worst!

Remember those friends you had freshman year of high school that got together with a handicam, bought twelve dollars worth of public access time, and filmed themselves pantsing each other outside the Sonic? They all deserve to be on Inside the Actor’s Studio compared to the talent in Underground Comedy Movie. Somehow, the people involved manage to be worst than the guy you grabbed from your fourth floor dorm for that student film you made. How that’s statistically possible, I don’t know.

It’s a great reminder of why some of the personnel never made it above the regional theater level of fame. Comedian Ant plays an aggressive gay man so poorly that it boggles the mind how someone who is an aggressive gay man can’t figure out how to play one in a movie. Michael Clark Duncan might be decent, but it’s impossible to tell through the writing. Joey Buttafuoco is exactly at good at acting as you’d imagine he’d be, and Slash pretends to be drunk (a towering feat) while judging the bag ladies in swimsuits.

But the overall standout is Vince Offer himself. He’s the Carrot Top of acting. The Sanjaya of acting. The William Shatner of acting. Even as the originator of the writing and the man pushing his vision for the film, Vince can barely commit to getting full sentences out of his mouth, leading anyone pitiable enough to see this cinematic abortion believe that it would have worked better if the monkeys that wrote it also starred in it. Somehow, Offer is unable to do a Dirty Harry impression. Seriously. Who on this earth above the age of 9 can’t do a solid, at least passable Dirty Harry impression? Vince Offer and the guy who pulled me over for speeding last week are the only two that come to mind.

The Worst of the Worst!

I honestly thought about punting on this portion this week. The movie is a string of terrible sketches, one after the other, and it’s difficult to figure out which is more boring/senseless/tragically unfunny. I may be called out for this, but since it all rambles on mindlessly, it seems like the only way to pick a scene is to choose one that people actually try to defend as funny (apparently).

Vince plays “Batman” (A baseball player. With a bat. That he swings. Get it?) and his brother/villain which looks eerily like Vince in make-up sabotages a game (read: grabs the ball from the pitcher who appears to be the only other player on a field in a game being watched by no one). You realize that the villain’s schtick is that he rhymes things right around the time he says, “I’m not cryin’/I’m rhymin’.” That’s right. As soon as you realize that he’s a villain who rhymes, he fails at rhyming. The villain pitches to Batman, for some reason, then catches the ball in the face. Then a woman whose presence is never explained hits Batman over the head. I’m not purposely trying to make the sequence of events sound convoluted. It’s just that they are. It’s just – I have no explanation for it. It’s completely baffling.

Final Thoughts

You may be fooled into thinking that watching this movie is some sort of interesting cultural experiment. After all, it did start the “____ Movie” theme long before Friedberg and Seltzer – so maybe it’s the work of a prescient idiot savant. Do not be fooled. Avoid this movie at all costs unless your friends put $1,000 on the table to see if you can sit through it. Financial gain is the only reason to even think about renting it or stealing it from the one friend you know who bought it after seeing the infomercial for it one too many times after 3am reruns of South Park. The jokes are about two decades too old to be topical (even at the time of its release), the offensive material is presented too tamely, and the whole endeavor reeks of a sick kind of failure – the kind of failure that probably sets in before the script gets written, yet the writer presses on. Then the writer finances his bad idea himself and has to go back to selling super absorbent towels with a headset and beating hookers.

Read more articles by Dr. Cole Abaius