But they couldn’t just release the Jackman/Winslet neck scrotum sketch. Relativity gave them $6 million to make a feature film. So they had to recruit more directors to make shorts for the compilation, and more A-list actors willing to have their dignity systematically stripped away. Infamously, they got an astonishing number of A-list actors to do so.
Movie 43 was, almost literally, a hostage situation. You think that’s a tasteless joke on my part, but it’s not: stars that Wessler had recruited would try to back out of the film by claiming other commitments, and he would just wait patiently until they had breaks in their busy schedule. John Hodgman was tricked into appearing in it. A few potential stars, like George Clooney and Colin Farrell, managed to flee the grasp of Wessler’s claws before filming started, but most rolled their eyes and gave in, because they liked Wessler and the shoot only required a few days.
And then it was released. And then the denouncements, and the distancings, and the refusals to do publicity began. Because, you see, people did not care for Movie 43. It made an abysmal $1.8 million in its opening weekend, and provoked a swarm of critics from Richard Roeper to Elizabeth Weitzman to declare it one of the worst movies they’d ever seen. The Razzies did their dutiful Razzie thing, bestowing gold-sprayed golf balls upon all the filmmakers, all the directors, and all the writers. Today, Movie 43 languishes in the corner of the trash bin for largely forgotten movies, struggling to the top of the pile only occasionally when someone says “hey, remember that movie where Hugh Jackman had balls on his neck?”
Is this its deserved fate? Does Movie 43 have more to offer us than its terrible reputation would suggest?
THE STORY
Only in the sense that many, many people over the years have warned me how bad Movie 43 is, and I was still quite surprised by exactly how bad Movie 43 is.
Two versions of the frame narrative for Movie 43 exist. The one I did not watch is the one you saw if you (for some reason) saw it in an American theater, in which a lunatic screenwriter played by Charles B. Wessler is pitching the sketches to a hapless producer. Instead, I saw the alternate version, the one you get on Amazon Prime:
Two teenagers, Calvin (Mark L. Young) and J.J. (Adam Cagley), are uploading a video of themselves performing Jackass stunts to YouTube, and they are such caricatures of caricatures of teenage boy losers that all of teenage boydom should sue Charles B. Wessler for defamation.
What did stoner dipshits ever do to you, Charlie?
Their video appears to rack up millions of views in seconds, but that turns out to be an exceedingly lame prank by Calvin’s nerdy younger brother Baxter (Devin Eash).
To get revenge on Baxter, Calvin and J.J. decide to steal his laptop and fill it with viruses, but they need to distract him first. So J.J. enlists Baxter’s help in locating a movie called “Movie 43,” a film supposedly so dangerous that it could annihilate existence. They cannot find it on Zwoogle (ZWOOGLE), but when Baxter heads into the darker and deadlier corners of the Internet, snippets of the legendary Movie 43 – which Calvin and J.J. thought they had made up – begin to appear. As they delve deeper and deeper into Movie 43 and its lore, the story that exists only to hold the rest of the movie together makes less and less sense, and at some point the world has in fact been destroyed and the only two things left in it are Calvin and Baxter’s laptop, which contains all the remaining Movie 43 sketches.
I could summarize the sketches that comprise the bulk of the movie’s runtime now, but let’s just be efficient about this and move along to the Bad section.
Strap in, Richie, this is gonna suck for both of us.
THE BAD
Recently, I took my four-year-old son to a local playground where another boy of around his age decided that it would be an absolute laugh riot for him to walk around saying “poo-poo penis.” Every so often, his mother would hear him and would make him stop whatever he was doing until he could stop saying “poo-poo penis,” but as soon as he thought she was out of earshot, he would start up again. This eventually escalated to the point where the boy, in a final beach-storming act of defiance, escaped from his mother and ran across the entire playground shouting “POO-POO PENIS!!!” at the top of his lungs.
That’s basically the experience of watching Movie 43, except it was better because it only took about fifteen minutes and the kid in question had a neat Batman t-shirt.
And Gerard Butler played zero leprechauns.
To simply describe the movie in detail and slap the word “BAD” on it would not necessarily be inaccurate, but it would be boring and painful for both me and you, and if we wanted boring and painful, we’d just rewatch Movie 43. So in a fun Alternate Ending-style throwback, I’m going to present my bottom five Movie 43 moments, one representative in each category that I have arbitrarily created:
***The Actors Who Can Muster The Least Pretend Enthusiasm For Anything They Are Doing: You would think this award would go to Richard Gere, who famously tried (and failed) to escape the movie by demanding the shoot be moved across the country to accommodate him, fondling a sex doll with a fan inside its vagina. But even Gere’s haunted eyes cannot compete with the blank, dour expressions on the faces of Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone as they pretend to be charisma- and chemistry-free exes inadvertently broadcasting their lovers’ quarrel to an entire department story. It’s one of the less offensive sketches on paper, and yet manages to be one of the most unpleasant due to the self-loathing that oozes from Culkin and Stone like oil from a teenager’s pores.
***The (Ab)Use of IP That Somehow Did Not Get Anyone Dragged Into Court, a “superhero speed dating” sketch perpetrated by director James Duffy and writer Will Carlough, in which Robin (Justin Long) attends a speed dating event with Lois Lane (Uma Thurman), Wonder Woman (Leslie Bibb), and Supergirl (Kristen Bell). There’s technically a fairly complicated plot in this one wherein Supergirl is actually the Riddler in disguise, but about eighty percent of the actual runtime of the skit consists of Batman (Jason Sudeikis) remarking on the volume of Supergirl’s pubic hair. DC must have wisely decided that the “keep quiet and hope no one notices” approach would work best.
Will you decapitate Jason Sudeikis for me?
***The Sketch Most Powerfully Demonstrating The Fine Line Between Comedy and Horror, in which Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts play parents who emotionally, physically, and sexually abuse their son (Jeremy Allen White, already perfecting the thousand-yard stare he will wear for the remainder of his acting career) while their neighbors (Alex Cranmer and Julie Ann Emery) watch. Let us remember that this movie is being marketed to us as a comedy.
Will you cast me as a neurotic haute-cuisine chef and give me 37 Emmys?
***The Tacked-On Ending of an Already Bad Sketch That Somehow Makes What Came Before a Thousand Times Worse, in which Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott, having already mutilated two incarnations of Midget Leprechaun Gerard Butler in order to steal his treasure, discover a hooker fairy (Esti Ginzburg) who gives head in return for leprechaun gold.
Will you strip this dime-store Halloween costume from my body?
And finally, The Horrors Inflicted Just As You Think It’s Over By People Who Have Absolutely Shown You They Have Functioning Comedic Sensibilities, namely the repulsive “Beezel” sketch directed by James “Guardians of the Galaxy” Gunn and starring Elizabeth Banks, and the less that is said about this one, the better.
You can look at this instead. You’re welcome.
Of course, I’d have believed you if you told me the whole movie was written and directed by the Farrelly brothers. Or Chris Columbus. Or an escaped asylum patient. Or a cocaine-snorting kangaroo. Because not one of these sketches has any noticeable stylistic distinctions from any other (what a silly notion, style in a project like Movie 43). Wessler and his team of fourteen editors threw all their footage into a sewage lift station and what came out was Movie 43.
This is all profoundly depressing to experience. Fucks-n-farts gross-out is on record as my very least favorite brand of “humor,” but all genres and forms, regardless of how inherently hateful they are, have better and worse ends of their spectra. At the very least, in Freddy Got Fingered, Tom Green was constantly coming up with original ways to be juvenile and gross. I had never seen anything quite like the elephant semen shower, nor do I ever want to see anything like it again. (If I’m not careful, writing this column is going to trick me into thinking I have any respect or affection at all for Freddy Got Fingered, and that is a dangerous cliff to be wandering along.)
Movie 43, on the other hand, is happy to coast along yukking at boilerplate potty humor that the writers of Foodfight! would consider beneath them. Poop! Periods! Balls! Dicks! Animated cat dicks! Hee hee! Those are all funny, right!?
Okay, this one’s a little bit original.
This is not clever. It’s not cute. It’s not entertaining. It’s not even edgy or potent enough to have a lasting effect on anyone involved, participant or audience. It’s a trip back in time to an unsupervised middle school locker room that happens to be full of adult celebrities, giving each other wedgies and telling the sort of “jokes” most functional people outgrow alongside cartoon character underpants. Wessler claims that the Relativity Media guys told him he “(had) a lot of balls” for “mak(ing) something that is not conventional.” Well, here’s a radical idea that y’all ain’t ready for: sometimes conventions are good. It is a good thing that we live in a society that shuns people who get turned on by explosive diarrhea, or at least insists that they keep that literal and figurative shit off of movie theater screens. Have your fetish movies if you must, but be honest about what they are and don’t try to convince me they are funny.
THE GOOD
God help me, I am trying. I am trying to meet this movie on its terms, to understand anything, no matter how small, that it attempts to achieve. I am writing this paragraph now in the style of a teenager writing an overdue English paper, writing until I discover an idea, silently begging for an idea to come to me. It shouldn’t be this hard, should it?
In the b…in the be…in the bes…in the least wretched segment of the film, Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant are enjoying themselves enough that they even manage to wring some charm from the charmless premise they’re stuck with: they are on a blind date that escalates into the world’s most intense game of truth or dare, culminating in tattoos, plastic surgery, and Berry mashing avocados with her boobs. Merchant seems to recognize that, famous actor or not, no matter the circumstances, he is a blessed man for getting to spend any time in the company of Berry’s naked breasts, and he’s determined to make the experience a good memory.
First of all, I never said it was good, and second, he looks better than Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The second-least-wretched sketch, the one directed by Elizabeth Banks instead of starring her, comes shockingly close to making a salient point about men regressing into little boys when faced with the nightmare of female corporeality. In this sketch, a girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) starts her period while awkwardly making out with her sort-of middle school boyfriend (Jimmy Bennett), which causes both the boyfriend and his other brother (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to have hysterical meltdowns. I even chuckled a little bit at Bennett’s agonized delivery of “911! My friend is bleeding out of her vagina!” And when their father (Patrick Warburton, always a welcome sight) shows up to calm things down by farting at his two sons, you get the sense that Banks and writer Elizabeth Wright Shapiro might have almost been onto something? It would feel more that way if they didn’t seem to expect you to laugh in earnest at the sketch, but hey, let’s not complain when something goes right, even if it’s an accident.
“And then you did what with the cartoon cat, Elizabeth?”
The closest I can get to the movie’s side, though, comes from the frame narrative. Please don’t misunderstand, I don’t like the frame narrative: it has the very worst acting and some of the worst writing in the whole movie. At the same time, I cannot possibly believe that a movie featuring a search engine called “Zwoogle” and a torrent site called “Tourbillon Kack” and a search engine called “Falcontron” that is “the most elite search engine on the Internet” intends for me to take this entire project as anything other than a $6 million joke. They had to know how dumb this was. They had to have been intentional about it. Their goal was clearly to hang out in the back of the premier theatre and giggle – not at the movie but at themselves – until they choked on popcorn and soda came out their nostrils, ideally with someone filming it so they could begin work on the sequel. The frame narrative invites the viewer to laugh at, not merely with, the creators themselves, and even though I do not accept the invitation, I can’t pretend I the thought doesn’t touch me a little bit.
And that is why, even though Movie 43 absolutely belongs in the deepest circle of my hate, it does not quite reach the very deepest part of the circle. Unlike An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, which was Joe Eszterhas’s tantrum disguised as a movie, or The Love Guru, which was Satan’s pinworm-infested asshole disguised as a movie, Movie 43 manages to be stupid and vile in a mostly inconsequential way. It has the atmosphere of a fraternity rager that no one will remember the morning after. I get the sense that, even if this is not what happened, Wessler and the Farrellys and their collaborators really did want the people involved and the people who watched it to have fun. There’s a freewheeling hangout-movie spirit buried underneath the manure pile that occasionally manages to poke its fingers out (and then insist that you pull them). And I suppose it is heartwarming to know that, given the right incentives or the right blackmail threats, this collection of well-regarded movie stars are willing to subject themselves to very public humiliation for someone else’s project. We should all be so giving with our art.
So I hated Movie 43 a lot. But I don’t hate that it exists. I would tell Charles B. Wessler to take that as a victory, but he doesn’t need to, because Charles B. Wessler won an Oscar. Best Picture. For Green Book. Which Peter Farrelly directed.
That’s all.
Quality of Movie: 1 / 5. As much as it pains me, the absolute bottom is still reserved for the swimming pool on Anthony Quinn’s face.
Quality of Experience: ½ /5. Like its brethren at the bottom, gross and unfunny with a generous side helping of boring.
Did the Razzies Get it Right? Yes, though I will not be watching Grown-Ups 2 merely to check whether it gives Movie 43 a run for its money. After Earth and The Lone Ranger are both unremarkably bad, and A Madea Christmas is a Tyler Perry movie by Tyler Perry for Tyler Perry fans. Not even nominated were InAPPropriate Comedy, which escaped Movie 43-style ire by starring Adrien Brody and failing spectacularly at the box office, and Scary Movie V, which the world quietly agreed to pretend didn’t exist.
*I know it’s September now, but who’s checking?
You can read Tim’s review of Movie 43 here!
Want to pick more Raspberries? Check out the rest of the columns in this series!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.
