By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs: Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie
TIM & ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (Also Blu-ray/DVD Combo, with Digital Copy) (One Half Star)
U.S.: Tim Heidecker-Eric Wareheim, 2012 (Magnolia)
I have just one thing to say about this sorry excuse for a movie — this nauseatingly taste-challenged, almost putrefyingly preposterous goulash of scatological gags, failed nonsense, barf jokes, poop jokes, piddle jokes, and jokes that make you want to barf, poop and piddle — one thing to say about this inanely unfunny, deliberately misdirected or undirected farce about two nincompoops named Tim and Eric (played with zero zest by the cult comedy writer-directors Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, of the prize-winning, well-regarded web series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”), who blow a billion dollars of mob money (the Schlaaang Mob, run by Robert Loggia as demented gangster Tommy Schlaaang and William Atherton as right-hand crook Earle Swinter) spending it all on a moronic movie, starring an inept Johnny Depp impersonator (Ronnie Rodriguez), and are consequently marked for either full psyment of the squandered billion or a double-whack by the Schlaaang gang… but who manage to escape to the heartland and the sleazily ramshackle and falling-apart-at-the-seams Swallow Valley Shopping Mall –a bankrupt commercial “mecca” whose gallery of failing schlock shops are a sure cure for shopaholics — a hellhole inhabited by more idiots and a wolf or two, including the uncredited John C. Reilly as the affably deranged halfwit Taquito, the uncredited Will Ferrell as the stomach-churning con guy Damien Weebs, the uncredited Zach Galifianakis as the rustic simpleton Jim Joe Kelly (at least I think he was a rustic simpleton), Jeff Goldblum as “Chef” Goldblum, Twink Caplan as the strong-stomached love interest Katie, some poor shmo who owns a boutique that sells used toilet paper (this is not a joke), and the uncredited Bozo McWhizzy, in a cameo appearance as a talking hemorrhoid (this is) — all of whom should have refused credit but all of whom nonetheless take part courageously in this less than socko if mind-bogglingly daring entertainment in a series of quasi-comedy scenes so lacking in comedy that they seemed to have been dreamed up by the Society for the Prevention of Laughter for a semi-annual telethon on stamping out humor — a mind-boggling fiasco that sometimes made me feel as I’d been shrunk to the size of The Incredible Shrinking Man and dropped into a spittoon… in any case, I have zero stars and, as I said a while back, one word for the flabbergasting dreck that is Bill & Ted’s Billion Dollar Movie (excuse me, Tim and Eric’s Excellent Adventure, er Billion Dollar Movie).
Awful.
At some point you just need to realize that all the stuff you actually DO like, the same stuff everyone else agrees with you on, is just a thick protean slop keeping you sedated.
Your hostile reaction to the ridiculous and your sense entitlement as the “audience” is exactly why they do what they do… it’s good for you.
“*BOOM* Laugh” Watch that scene again. The explanation was for you.