This week in local theaters
DISASTER MOVIE In the Adam Sandler vehicle Little Nicky, Hitler spends eternity in Hell in a frilly smock getting pineapples shoved up his butt. Compared to anyone watching Disaster Movie, he got off light. Rushed into production with no better drape for its threadbare gags than Cloverfield—unless you count such proud upholders of the Irwin Allen tradition as Juno, Enchanted and High School Musical—this carpet-fouling mongrel of a movie no more deserves release than do anthrax spores. Visually an eyesore, comically a much-lower-seated pain, it's the same as writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's other (fill in the blank) movie parodies, only somehow even uglier and lazier. Ugliness and laziness can sometimes work to comedy's advantage, but not here—not when the level of inspiration is someone answering a Get Smart shoe phone, only to smear his face with dog crap. Yes, there are nods to Hannah Montana and "I'm Fucking Matt Damon"; yes, Crista Flanagan does a spot-on Ellen Page—and yes, you can feel the dead air in the theater as joke after so-called joke falls splat on the pavement. The bastards couldn't even find the energy to put an exclamation point after the title. Best text message sent from my screening (it wasn't me, but I certainly sympathized): "I want to die." —Jim Ridley (Now playing, regrettably)
COLLEGE Film critics never come home stinking of their honest labor, but the nearest equivalent is covering something like College, which leaves its stain on one's very humanity. Three high-school bros on a college visit—a dork, a gelatinous loudmouth and a faintly sympathetic straight man with anime-character hair—run afoul of a frat marshaled by a smug Van Wilder/that-Sugar-Ray-guy amalgam who subjects the boys to Sadean hazing. (He also has the one funny line: "What the fuck do you know about welfare reform?") And so begins a morally numbing run through mechanical decadence, surpassing even the straight-to-DVD, soul-gangbanging American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile. "Queef," "tossed salad," Verne Troyer, and the ol' fist-pump, open-mouth, tongue-in-cheek blowjob pantomime are utilized just as though they were jokes. (What, kids—no "donkey punch"?) The overall mood is limply obligatory, as if everyone involved had been court-ordered to make a raunchfest party flick. (Director Deb Hagen only tunes in during her one tracking shot.) One can't imagine there's an actual screenplay behind this—somebody seems to think Fatty is so good you can just let him riff. Nearly justifies traveling back in time to pre-emptively kill Edison, Muybridge and the Lumière brothers. —Nick Pinkerton (Barely playing)
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