Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Over the years I’ve been disseminating wisdom with my ‘rules of cinematic comedy’. I’ve never made a movie and if I did make one, chances are it would be terrible and any comedy in it would be unintentional, but is this going to stop me from dispensing sage wisdom? Of course its not. I can’t even remember most of these rules I’ve been giving the filmmaking community but I do remember one: Dookey isn’t funny. That I remember. If you’re writing your great movie script and you have a scene in which dookey is featured prominently, get rid of it. Dookey isn’t funny. If the dookey scene makes it past the script editor then it’s up to the director to excise it because dookey isn’t funny. Let’s say you have a movie like this movie ‘I Hope They Sever Beer in Hell’, to be shortened to simply ‘Hell’ for brevity’s sake, and this movie claims to be ‘based on a true story’ and thus the dookey situation actually happened… get rid of it. Filmmakers do this all the time to ‘true’ stories, removing or adding characters for creative license purposes and as such simply removing dookey from your movie is a minor thing. Get rid of it. Dookey isn’t funny. There are other rules out there but this is the only one that matters.

Our journey through ‘Hell’ begins as we observe the character of Tucker (Matt Czuchry) getting rousted by the cops after banging a deaf woman. This is merely a brief introduction to the character of Tucker, a compressed ball of complete and total assholery, as the movie gets to the business of what it is going to be about, which is a road trip to a gentlemen’s club to celebrate the impending wedding of Tucker’s best friend and all around great guy, Dan (Geoff Stults), to his lady Kristy (Keri Lynn Pratt). Also along for the ride is third buddy Drew (Jesse Bradford) a man who has been emotionally shattered after catching his fiancée delivering a passionate blow job to this particular universes version of Paul Wall, the Grillionaire, played by Paul Wall. Paul Wall was brilliant in this movie by the way. Because of this devastating heartbreak, Drew says awful things to everybody and threatens to kill people and stuff like that. Jesse Bradford was borderline brilliant in this movie, though he’s no Paul Wall.

It’s a bachelor party so things are required to go straight to hell. You see Dan lied to Kristy about this road trip. Actually he told her the truth to start but then Tucker intervened and lied. Nice guy Dan gets his lie exposed, gets beat-up, assaulted by cops, bloodied and broken… and has had the amazing revelation that Tucker is an asshole and now he hates him. Oh, and Drew meets a stripper and falls in love. Now… I’m not a woman but I’m thinking there’s nothing even remotely attractive about Drew… I mean he’s funny to me but insulting bitches has never struck me as effective game when dealing with women you’ve just met. Drew screws this woman after knowing her about a good fifteen minutes thus feeding negatively into the stripper stereotype. Her son is like 8 feet away in the next room which doesn’t help the stereotype. The stripper claims her babies daddy left because he wrongly thought she was a cheater. Considering that the completely unsavory Drew got those drawers without even knowing this woman’s last name… I think she’s lying. But it is love… so… you know, it’s all good. Amazing what a game of Halo and some plastic army men can get you.

I guess the question is will Tucker learn the error of his ways and will he and Dan kiss and make up? This is where the dookey comes into play and it wasn’t funny.

First lets get a shout out to Actress Lena Clark who is one of my Facebook friends and is borderline brilliant in this movie, though she’s no Paul Wall either, but much cuter. Former teenage Porn Star Traci Lords is this movie dookeying up a bathroom. One day the world will speak of actress Traci Lords without the prefix ‘Former Teenage Porn Star’, but today just isn’t that day. So here are the problems with this movie ‘Hell’, which did make me laugh on occasion… but not nearly enough. I don’t have a problem with the fact that it’s tasteless, crass, misogynistic, cruel… all of those things are okay with me, for the most part… with exceptions… What I do have an issue with is that it’s not as funny as it thinks it is, not even close, and as a result it runs about a half hour too long. Somebody somewhere thought this mess was REALLY funny to have it run as long as it did. The character of Tucker , who dominated this movie, was completely irredeemable. Yeah, he gave a nice little wedding speech at the end in full contrition mode, but for this character in this movie to somehow find redemption in an overly long movie filled with this cat being an insufferable asshole, all in two minutes worth of dookey filled introspection… I don’t think so. Even after this wonderful speech they still continued to enable his assholery. Was I supposed to feel sorry for Dan? Seriously? I mean Dan was worse than Tucker in a sense, palming off his gaping human deficiencies on his asshole friend. That’s an asshole move right there. I realize I was supposed to be all hateful towards the bible thumping jerk-off future Mother in Law, but I could see my girls point and babygirl should probably search elsewhere for her life partner. I also understand that this is ‘based on a true story’ and all but the only character that had a hint of anything remotely resembling ‘true’ was Jesse Bradford’s Drew because at least he had a reason to be unsavory. His buddies were just born that way. I guess.

So because this movie is filled with insufferable assholes there’s nothing to root for… and thus… it had better be really funny to make up for the fact that we’re hanging with assholes for a really long time… and it wasn’t. And one of these reasons it wasn’t all that funny was because the filmmakers were under misconception that dookey is funny. It isn’t. Never has been, never will be. Drew’s homage to the McGriddle was funny…