SCREWED A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2000 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): *
The name says it all. SCREWED is exactly what people will feel like if they make the mistake of wasting their hard-earned dollars on this turkey.
Amateurishly acted, with one exception (Danny DeVito who manages to have a high old time chewing up the scenery), and crudely written and directed by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, SCREWED will have many viewers wanting to head for the exits well before the end of the first reel.
The story involves the dognapping of a pooch owned by a pie mogul named Miss Crock (Elaine Stritch). If funny names are all that it takes to make you laugh, then you might get a kick out of SCREWED, which also likes to give its characters names that are humorously based on past presidents and presidential candidates.
Willard Fillmore (Norm Macdonald) is a decade-long servant of Miss Crock. A heartless woman, Miss Crock plans on firing him on Christmas Day and burning his possessions. Overhearing his fate, Willard hatches a plan to steal her dog, Muffin, and demand a million dollar ransom for its return.
When he and his cohort in crime, Rusty P. Hayes (Dave Chappelle), botch the job, Miss Crock ends up thinking that Willard has been kidnapped and that the ransom is for his life. Refusing to pay, she becomes such a pariah in the news reports that it affects her company's stock price, so she quite reluctantly agrees to pay up.
As a diabolically comedic mad-scientist type, DeVito plays Grover Cleaver (gosh, aren't these names funny?), who is a disreputable worker at the local morgue. Willard and Rusty visit Grover in order to hire him to get a body to fake Willard's death after they collect the ransom. Before taking on the assignment, Grover wants to show the lads his prized collection of goodies that he has found in bodies which he has cut open. These include a pet rock, a "perfectly good comb," a "clicker" (television remote control), and other bloody remnants of his deceased clients. Grover loves to get corpses' blood all over himself and put filthy things in his mouth in order to gross out the audience.
Without a genuine moment or character and with an uncountable number of scenes that will have you looking away from the screen, SCREWED tries hard to be awful and succeeds. Finally, it hit me that this whole movie must be one long (bad) inside joke. The writers and directors of SCREWED collaborated on the scripts of many other successful pictures -- I know that's hard to believe. One of them was ED WOOD, the biography of the director of some of the worst films ever made. SCREWED must be their homage to him. If Ed Wood were alive today, SCREWED would be exactly the type of movie that he would be making.
SCREWED runs 1:30. It is rated PG-13 for crude and sex-related humor, nudity, language, some violence and brief drug content and would be acceptable for older teenagers.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
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