Oh God, why do I do this to myself?

You know what’s funny? Mashing together a whole bunch of pop culture movie references and characters, jam them into an untidy and illogical chimaera of two film franchises, one of which self-destructed thanks to its own sequels and then throw it at the screen to see what sticks. Oh wait, not funny – what’s the word? Oh yeah, terrible. There may be *SPOILERS* ahead, if it’s possible to spoil this fetid, rotting compost heap of a movie.

Principally a cross between “The Hangover” and “The Hunger Games”, the film feels the need to hit such topical targets as “Ted”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, “Avatar”, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, “The Human Centipede”, “The Lone Ranger”, “Django Unchained”, “Thor”, “Carrie”, “District 9” and “The Real Housewives”. Yeah, it’s a real grab-bag of source material. Unfortunately, they don’t have jokes for most of them; they just rely on it being funny that they’re on screen together in a hunger games style game. LOLZ.

Available on DVD and likely coming to a bargain bin near you very soon, “The Hungover Games” is enough to make me give up on spoofs and parodies forever; it’s so gratingly, insistently unfunny, crass and stupid. The most frustrating thing is that the cast, in general, are actually pretty good and should have had much, much better material than this to work with. The main characters are unrefined cyphers of “The Hangover” main cast but the twist is – hold on to your funny bones – the groom is gay. Yep, it’s the stag do before a gay wedding. Crazy (and mostly, it seems, to be the movie-long set up for a weak joke about being a ‘straight man’ in the finale)! The lead actors, though, have the same charisma and chemistry as their more illustrious targets which just lends the whole thing an air of sad desperation. Jamie Kennedy pops up in several guises, reminding us briefly what a likeable comic actor and impersonator he was before “Son Of The Mask” annihilated his career. Cameos from the likes of Bruce Jenner and Tara Reid are understandable but it’s just sad to see Robert Wagner slumming it in stuff like this.

Homophobic, racist and profoundly sexist without a hint of ironic self-awareness, the production has a simple ethos: if the script isn’t funny, fill the screen with tits, drugs, dildos (so many dildos) and jokes about statutory rape. Adding further insult to injury is that, having unconvincingly mashed the Hunger Games and The Hangover together, it resorts to the lamest ‘it was all a dream…or was it?’ ending, rendering the putrid swill you’ve just sat through worse than pointless. I’d almost say this feels like a film assembled from deleted scenes from other crappy spoofs but that would be giving this too much credit. I would have given this a zero score but – through gritted teeth – there was actually one single joke I laughed at (and I kind of just feel bad for Jamie Kennedy).