By request, an interruption of the ordinary alphabetical order of things for a “dumb comedy week of the Neverending Film Festival” — three comedies recommended by readers. None are really dumb, all were fun watching, and a few more remain. After that, we’ll return to every movie ever made, in alphabetical order.

Beetlejuice (1988)
Clifford (1994)
The Nice Guys (2016)
Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

Beetlejuice (1988)

A recently deceased couple have difficulties adjusting to the afterlife, when their house is sold and remodeled. The newcomer’s goth-ish daughter is the only one who can see the ghosts, and eventually she calls “Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse,” because saying it three times pages Beetlejuice, “the afterlife’s leading bio-exorcist,” who’s spending his eternity making supernatural mischief.

Played over-the-top annoying by Michael Keaton, Beetlejuice can wave his hand and your teeth will fall out, he can bring down sandworms from Saturn, or poof, he can occupy the bodies of everyone at the dinner table and force them to sing “The Banana Boat Song” (Day-Oh). Alec Baldwin is all wrong as a geeky dude, but Geena Davis and Winona Ryder shine, and there’s Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O’Hara, Sylvia Sidney, and too briefly Dick Cavett and Robert Goulet.

Tim Burton made this, and lots of people love it. I say meh. I’ve seen it three times, been a little disappointed three times.

The problem, for me, is that a movie about ghosts, hauntings, the afterlife, etc needs to be either scary or funny or both, but Beetlejuice isn’t. It’s definitely odd, crammed with visual effects and stop-motion and things that go boing boing in the night, and it’s not unpleasant, but nothing here is particularly funny or frightful.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Clifford (1994)

Martin Short, age 44 when this was made, plays Clifford, an 8- or 10-year-old genius with a malevolent streak who really, really, really wants his uncle to take him to the Dinosaur World amusement park.

It’s a one-joke premise, and sometimes wears thin, but Short is remarkable. This is a movie unlike just about any other, and it’s successful as entertainment, and at making the audience almost root for cruelty to a child.

Short surprisingly wasn’t involved in writing the script, which is credited to Jay Dee Rock & Bobby von Hayes, pseudonyms unmasked by IMDB as William Porter and Steven Kampmann, who were co-writers of Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School. Directed by Paul Flaherty, who wrote for SCTV and The Martin Short Show. Charles Grodin and Mary Steenburgen co-star.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Nice Guys (2016)

Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe, chubby) is hired muscle, beating up whoever he’s paid to beat up. Holland March (Ryan Gosling, sexy) is a private eye who takes hopeless cases and overcharges whatever he can. Healy is hired to break March’s arm and deliver the message, “Stop looking for Amelia,” because March had been looking for a dame named Amelia, who may have been involved with the recently deceased porn star Misty Mountains.

If the synopsis sounds complicated, relax, the story is nonsense and unimportant. And ignore the title; these are not nice guys.

Healy and March make a lot of noir-style wisecracks, and I like noir, and mostly liked the movie. It’s set in the 1970s, when I was busy growing up, and it’s fun to see a big-budget CGI’d recreation of that time — old cars, even old buses, primo era architecture, die-in protests, and young Earth Wind and Fire.

Written and directed by Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, The Last Action Hero, The Last Boy Scout), the plotting rivals a Road Runner cartoon — random, never believable, everything built on endless coincidences from Act 1, Scene 1 to The End. It’s sordid in a PG way, jammed with clichés and the aforementioned coincidences, fistfights that leave no bruises, a young girl wise beyond her years, and a depressing resolution.

You don’t want Richard Nixon telling you everything’s going to be fine, but… it’s fine.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

Here’s a modestly amusing parody of teen movies, set at John Hughes High School, where no students are under 25 and pimples aren’t allowed. It offers a sense of humor once in a while and half a dozen laughs, with brief, uninspired callbacks or cameos from Ferris Bueller, Porky’s, Almost Famous, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.

It’s no more, no less than what you’d expect from a movie called Not Another Teen Movie, with a surprising reliance on incest jokes.

The credits say Desi Lydic is in here somewhere, but it must’ve been a tiny bit, as I never noticed her.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

And speaking of comedies, my favorite is still…

Roger Ebert, on his way out

The making of Jaws

8/10/2026

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
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No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.