Featured DVD Review: National Lampoon's Dirty Movie

February 14, 2011

National Lampoon's Dirty Movie - Buy from Amazon

I thought National Lampoon went bankrupt. At the time I was relieved; although the company has made some amazing movies over the years, their recent output has been atrocious. Will National Lampoon's Dirty Movie represent an improvement, or continue the recent failures?

The Movie

Christopher Meloni stars as Charlie LaRue, whose goal in life is to make a movie, and not just any movie, but a movie filled with nothing but jokes. No plot, just jokes. Dirty Movie is a movie about the creation of that movie. So you get some behind-the-scenes of the movie making process, meetings with the studio, casting actors, dealing with writers, etc. But it is mostly just people acting out dirty jokes. Really old dirty jokes.

Oh, and random breasts.

Now if you are the kind of person who loves dirty jokes, but thinks the only way they could be better is if bad actors acted them out, then this movie is still pretty bad, but at least there are a few laughs here and there. Very few laughs. Most of these jokes are so old that the vast majority of the people watching the movie will have heard them before and the delivery ranges from painfully inept to mugging for the camera. (Adam Ferrara was guilty of the latter, but at least you could tell he was having fun and that made his performance one of the best in the movie.) For most jokes, you would have a better chance of finding a gem doing a search on YouTube.

The Extras

There is an audio commentary track with the writer and the director, plus seven minutes of deleted jokes. Also, there's a laugh track, which only makes the movie more depressing.

The Verdict

National Lampoon's Dirty Movie is not the worst movie from National Lampoon that I've seen, but it's in the bottom three. It's not quite as bad as Stoned Age, but for the vast majority of people, the DVD is skippable.


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