Movie 43 (Bad Comedy Review)

This is horrific. This is the sort of thing so bad it makes Adam Sandler’s worst look like comedy gold. This is the sort of thing which isn’t the result of thinking of ideas, but watching every one Friedberg and Zeltzer’s creations and having someone declaring “challenge accepted”. This is the sort of thing so bad I cannot call it a film, for no such film could even hope to be this much of a bloated, disgusting mess. No, despite its title this is not a movie. It’s a hate crime directed against basic decency.

There isn’t even so much of a story to this as an on-going series of bad jokes, broken up and split into different sequences. Any semblance of coherency is lost within the first few minutes and the entire film caves in upon itself in some endless spiral of failure, piling miserable writing upon terrible jokes upon the worst in bad taste. Keith Lemon: The Movie, the worst film produced by British cinema in the last forty years, was coherent enough to have one plot running from beginning to end and this can’t even meet that standard expectation. What does it offer its audience instead? Offensively bad humour.

The jokes here? They’re almost bad enough to make me regret calling out films like Paul Blart Mall Cop. They make the average Family Guy sex/dead body joke look restrained and well delivered. It’s this endless parade of unfunny after unfunny after unfunny, broken up by horrifically bad humour. There are jokes involving turd fetishes, bodily re-positioning of men’s testicles, teabagging of infants, incest, shredding of genitals, all of which are beaten to death. All of which are beaten solidly into the ground, delivered to the point where even the most juvenile person cannot find one semblance of amusement to find in it. At times the sheer lack of effort and originality reaches the point where the jokes start to effectively be pillaged from one sketch and into the other. Let me make this clear - it’s so badly made that the film manages to find a way to plagiarise itself.

The desperation of the actors is clearly evident in each of these and quite how the hell any of them got involved in this is beyond me. Almost all of them seem to either be ashamed or trying to ignore how bad a script they’re working on, with a valiant few trying to actually make the script funny. Failing miserably but they tried. It becomes even worse when you start to look at the cinematography and editing. Every single last sketch has been directed or co-directed by someone else resulting in the film’s visuals being a jumbled mess of different visual styles. None of which are good. Some have such amateurish mistakes in them it doesn’t even reach the point where you’ve seen clothing commercials better made, it reaches the point where first year film students have shot better work.

How this even got into the pitching stage, let alone funded, is beyond me. To those few who are actually considering going to see this, don’t. If you have even begun to consider that this might be humorous to laugh at how bad it is, find something else. I don’t care if you have ignored every other thing I have written on this site – Do not see this. All you will be missing out is feeling your soul being slowly crushed for ninety minutes, the desperate desire for alcohol afterwards and refunding the worst film in decades. 

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Movie 43 and all related characters and media are owned by Virgin Produced.