A Night at the Roxbury

Bomb Rating: 

With all the success of "It's Pat," "A Night at the Roxbury" takes a one-joke sketch and attempts to turn it into a ninety minute film.

My initial thought during this film, as I gnawed with increasing intensity on the tip of my pen, was that if I actually bit through that pen, I could smear war stripes on my face with the ink, then charge to the front of the theater and rip the screen to shreds with the remnants of my masticated Bic. This, of course, would force the theater manager to stop the film while they called the police, thus saving the other people in the theater a serious amount of pain due to my single selfless act. I'm pretty sure it's what Jesus would have done.

Although there's lots of comedy leading up to this film, there's none actually in it. The movie is based on a sketch on Saturday Night Live that usually lasts about a minute and few of the characters ever say anything. These two dumb-looking guys, the Butabi brothers, bob their heads to music. With all the success of "It's Pat," "A Night at the Roxbury" takes a one-joke sketch and attempts to turn it into a ninety minute film.

Among the most amazing things about the movie is that it took three guys to write the screenplay. Both Will Ferrell (Doug Butabi) and Chris Kattan (Steve Butabi) participated along with Steve Koren, bolstering my belief in the theory that one day a species of ape will indeed pen a film script and get it produced in Hollywood.

If you want to know how bad this film is, just watch the actors. Dan Hedaya, who's usually hired based on the need for a guy with back hair, walks through the film like he's trying to pass a kidney stone. Then there's Richard Grieco, who plays himself, and looks bloated and disgusting and like he's just made the worst career decision of his life -- and he doesn't even have a career. Imagine making a movie that's so bad that people actually wonder what Richard Grieco was thinking when he agreed to be in it.

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