Splitsider

In case the picture to the left hasn’t made it abundantly clear yet, you are skimming reading an entreaty on behalf of the underrated Derrick Comedy movie, Mystery Team, which bears no resemblance or relation to Ben Stiller’s misfit superheroes flick, Mystery Men. Still with me? Great. Mystery Team is a gem that earned a limited release in 2009 in just about the scrappiest way imaginable. It was a success that the movie managed to sneak into theatres at all, but up until now it’s mostly been seen by just the group’s core fan base. Let’s change that!

The Saturday Night Live adaptation is one of the most maligned of all movie genres, and not without justification. Excepting Wayne’s World, it’s been a mostly fruitless enterprise. The 1990s churned out would-be film franchises like an assembly line, whether warranted or not, and these struggled to connect with viewers. Watching something like Coneheads, for instance, one can only be left with the question: Why, Coneheads, why? In any case, it didn’t take long for audiences to grow disenchanted with the string of one-note jokes built on shaky premises, and after a while Lorne Michaels stopped financing them. Any SNL movie made in the post-Ladies Man era, then, would [...]

It was supposed to be an underdog success stories everyone could get behind. Advance hype had Hamlet 2 pegged to be the 2008 model of Little Miss Sunshine and, more importantly, it had Steve Coogan positioned to finally break through as a bankable star of American comedy. He’d already cracked the mainstream that year with a brief but memorable turn in Tropic Thunder and a killer role in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but Hamlet 2 was set to be both his victory lap and a major crossing of the transom a la Sacha Baron Cohen. Unfortunately, this is not what happened at all. Instead, the movie bombed atomically, greeted by [...]

The Will Ferrell Sports Movie craze spanned just four features, although it seems like there were so many more of them. Between 2005 and 2008, each year saw a new release right on schedule, like high school sports seasons. First came soccer (Kicking and Screaming), and then car racing (Talladega Nights), followed by figure skating (Blades of Glory), and finally basketball (Semi-Pro). By the time the last one had come and gone, though, the idea of Will Ferrell playing in organized competition couldn’t have been more groaningly familiar. An end had to be near, if for no other reason than the fact that he was running out of sports. [...]