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This mock-schlock raunch isn't even worth 2 cents

Eloquent and elegant, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim practice the kind of subtle, refined comedy that one doesn't often encounter these days. Alumni of Temple University's film program and well known for their sophisticated Adult Swim series, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, the gents now have released a feature film. What a treat.

Writer/directors Tim Heidecker, left, and Eric Wareheim, from the film "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," pose for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. (Victoria Will / Associated Press)
Writer/directors Tim Heidecker, left, and Eric Wareheim, from the film "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," pose for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. (Victoria Will / Associated Press)Read moreAP
    by By Steven Rea, Inquirer Movie Critic | Columnist
    Published 

Eloquent and elegant, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim practice the kind of subtle, refined comedy that one doesn't often encounter these days. Alumni of Temple University's film program and well known for their sophisticated Adult Swim series, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, the gents now have released a feature film. What a treat.

Well, maybe if you're totally fried on hash brownies, bong hits, and beer, that is. A jaw-droppingly dumb waste of time and money ("ironically" dumb, of course), Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is a lazy assemblage of sketch- comedy raunch, mock-schlock TV ads, and ideas that even the writers of Mall Cop and Observe and Report would have tossed.

Yes, what passes for a premise finds the blinged-out, Hollywood Tanned duo trying desperately to revive a run-down, bankrupt shopping complex, the Swallow Valley Shopping Mall and Pizza Court. They've squandered a fortune making a Johnny Depp movie, Diamond Jim, shot in France - only their star turned out to be an impostor and most of the production budget went to a New Age-y adviser and the rental on a Bel-Air manse.

So the movie's backers - headed by a mobbed-up mogul (Robert Loggia) - are threatening to kill the witless twosome if they don't return the money, and then they get an offer to revive this ghost-town mall, where the homeless are encamped and a leprous village idiot (John C. Reilly) skulks around.

Body parts you wouldn't want pierced are pierced - on camera. There are unsightly couplings in a sex shop, and a terribly bloody, cheesy shootout that leaves many a cast member without his head.

Tim and Eric, however, get to keep theirs, which is a crime.EndText