The “appalling” 2002 movie Roger Ebert couldn’t stand: “It made me feel unclean”
While being a movie critic sounds like a cushy job, since you get to watch movies for a living, it’s probably not worth thinking about how much of his life Roger Ebert spent watching some of the worst movies ever made.
He spent over 45 years doing it professionally, and in that time, he reviewed over 10,000 movies. Playing the percentages, very few of those would be undisputed, unadulterated masterpieces, and based on the entire history of cinema, it’s a lot easier to make a bad movie than it is to craft a classic.
As a result, Ebert would have spent what would have equated to weeks of his life, if not months, being forced to sit through pictures that he couldn’t stand. Many of them took a lashing, but there was only one that he hated so much that it made him feel unclean, and it was supposed to be a comedy, too.
Given his famous aversion to blood-splattered, limb-flaying, and gore-happy horror, it wouldn’t be a surprise if it was an R-rated exercise in gratuitous gruesomeness that left Ebert in need of a shower by the time the credits rolled. Then again, gross-out comedy isn’t too dissimilar in its own way, and it shouldn’t need to be pointed out that 2002’s Slackers did, in fact, earn precisely zero stars.
Clearly designed to capitalise on the post-American Pie boom that brought teen comedies roaring back to the forefront of the cinematic and cultural consciousness, director Dewey Nicks’ farce follows a college nerd who blackmails his peers for scamming their way through their education, weaponising the information to try and put the moves on his long-term object of affection. Or obsession, in this case.
The cast is actually pretty decent, with Jason Schwartzman, Jason Segel, Laura Prepon, Devon Sawa, and an uncredited Cameron Diaz all involved, but the execution was lacking. That’s doing it a disservice to be honest, because Slackers might have been the absolute nadir of the turn-of-the-millennium sex caper.
“Slackers is a dirty movie,” Ebert began his assessment. “Not a sexy, erotic, steamy, or even smutty movie, but a just plain dirty movie. It made me feel unclean, and I’m the guy who liked There’s Something About Mary and both American Pie movies. This film knows no shame.”
Running through the expected gags, which involve all of the usual suspects, namely, nudity, masturbation, jizz, mistaken identity, farts, and a guy wearing a sock puppet on his knob, Ebert found himself “appalled by the poverty of its imagination” and summed it up as a mercifully brief 86 minutes of “lurching incompetence.”
At the time Slackers was released, Monster’s Ball, Black Hawk Down, Gosford Park, The Royal Tenenbaums, and A Beautiful Mind were all still playing in cinemas, leaving Ebert to end his review with a pertinent question: “There are lots of good movies in theatres right now. Why waste two hours (which you can never get back) seeing a rotten one?”
