Fellman's Movie Reviews

Red = Spoilers

What’s it About? Overall, the plot of the movie is that The Three Stooges have to get $830,000 to save the orphanage they grew up in from being shut down. They have 30 days to get the money, and nobody expects them to succeed because of their dimwitted nature. Their journey to get the money leads them to cross paths with a man they were in the orphanage with as children named Teddy. Meanwhile, Teddy’s wife and his best friend are trying to kill Teddy and steal his fortune from him. As far as the plot goes, that’s really all that there is. The rest of the movie is filler material. Slapstick, bad acting, and egregious imitations of The Stooges that would make the Howard brothers roll over in their graves if they saw what Hollywood was doing to them and their legacy.

What’s Good? Nothing. There is nothing good about this movie. I should stop right there because that’s really all that needs to be said, but I can keep going because it really bothered me that I had to finish watching this thing. From the first scene, which, is as poorly written and conceived as the rest of the movie, to the very end, they couldn’t work in anything that could be considered good filmmaking.

What’s Bad? Everything. This is quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life. The writing, the acting, the makeup, the camera shots. Even the special effects, for what they were worth, were second hand at best. It fits into that rare space of film where it’s not bad enough to be satire, but not good enough to be campy. It’s just bad. Just plain bad.

The Acting? It’s funny how you can look at a child actor and go “well, you can’t expect much, they’re just a kid.” But even with child actors, there’s good child actors and bad child actors. And this movie got the bad ones for their roles. Once again, you see something this bad, you think it’s satirical, but when you know it’s not, it just becomes plain bad. The rest of the adult actors were just as terrible. The lead roles of The Three Stooges were shameful imitations of the real Moe, Larry, and Curly. A true disgrace to the comedy legends this movie was trying so hard to imitate.

The Effects? Second rate, at best. Larry’s hair is so poorly done you could practically see his real hair tucked underneath the plastic skullcap. The special effects of them being dragged away by the truck looked like a colorized version of it happening in one of the original shows. The constant “bonks” and “pings” when they would smack and pound each other reminded you of the actual show. But honestly, what would The Three Stooges be if those sounds weren’t there?

Why is the nun a man? Why is that one nun a man? Is it supposed to be a joke that I’m not getting? Is she a mannish nun? Was it an orphanage joke? Whatever it was, it flew over my head.

Babies from a moving car. They just threw the bag containing the baby Three Stooges out of the window of a moving car and kept driving. Whoever it was didn’t even bother to stop and drop them off. Why even throw them at the orphanage? It’s unlikely a sack of babies is going to survive being thrown out a window anyway.

The kid playing Larry is already balding. The kid playing Larry at 10 years old already has the haircut of Larry Fine as an adult. That must be heartbreaking for a 10 year old kid. Talk about male pattern baldness.

Language from the 30s. They wrote the script to make the Stooges talk like it was Brooklyn, 1939. But they were the only ones talking like that. Everybody else was talking like it was the modern day. The Stooges were like time travelers. They were using outdated lingo and slang and phrases that nobody would use or even understand if they weren’t already familiar with the actual Three Stooges.

Why do they have a Brooklyn accent? If they grew up in an orphanage with all those nuns and other children, how come they still have that early 1920’s Brooklyn accent? By all accounts, it doesn’t make any sense.

Larry’s hair is just awful. The effects in The Three Stooges are all around pretty terrible. But one thing that really sticks out to me is the job they do on Larry’s hair. These are supposed to be professional makeup artists. They get paid to do this for a living. He looks like he’s about to do a high school performance that had enough money to spring for THE GOOD makeup this year.

A cringeworthy imitation of the Stooges. Throughout this movie, all I kept thinking to myself was “this is an insult to everything the Stooges did in their careers.” To take iconic figures like The Three Stooges and make a mockery of them like this is literally spitting in the face of not only stage and film, but of comedy itself. I can only imagine what the real Stooges would think if they were to see this travesty themselves.

Openly discussing killing. When they meet up with Teddy’s wife and Teddy’s best friend Mac, they’re openly talking about killing Mac and committing murder for money in the middle of the street with people walking by. Larry then shoves him into a moving bus, and nobody ever seems to say anything about it.

Their plan is murder. Now that their plan has hit a roadblock, The Stooges have to finish the job. Their plan is to literally go and murder this guy, in his hospital bed, in the middle of the day, and then what? Just walk back out again? What exactly were they going to do if that plan didn’t go awry before they got there anyway? Go to prison for killing that guy in his room? You would think somebody would notice that three guys just killed the guy in the full body cast and are casually walking out.

The writing gets worse. I don’t know if I can explain it, but I think the writing of the movie actually gets worse as the movie moves along. It seems to really drag out. Maybe it’s because I just wanted it to end so badly. But the dialogue and the conversation gets even more trite and ludicrous than it was in the beginning the further and further you get into the film.

I feel sorry for the babies. I feel kind of sorry for the people who are going to grow up and find out they were the babies in the hospital scene in The Three Stooges movie. Like, I would be ashamed of that, if I found out when I was older. “I WAS WHAT?! OH MY GOD!!!”

A pocket full of dynamite. Moe calls on Curly to blow up Mac while he’s in his body cast, and Curly opens up his jacket to show and whole jacket full of dynamite. Why is Curly carrying around a jacket full of dynamite? And with all the damage and pratfalling these three do, how has that dynamite not exploded yet? It seems like a dangerous situation.

Selling fish on a golf course. Their next plan involves selling “farmed” fish on a golf course. This joke doesn’t do so well in this time period, as most people probably didn’t get the joke. That’s probably why the segment itself was only about two minutes long at most.

An entire segment of slapstick. There was a part of the movie, somewhere near the middle, where they just beat on each other for a good minute. Just a full minute of slapstick, Three Stooges style. It turns out they had wandered onto a stage and inadvertently walked onto an audition for a reality tv show, thus furthering the storyline.

The best part of the movie. Literally the best part, and probably the only good part of the movie, is when Moe is on the reality tv show “Jersey Shore” and is constantly beating up on the other cast members like he would his other two cohorts. It might’ve been the worst movie ever made, but at least the people on Jersey Shore got hurt. And that makes it seem all worthwhile.

The three signs at the end. When Larry and Curly go into Mr. Harter’s law firm, they pass several signs on their way there that are a nod to the famous “Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe” law firm from the original Three Stooges shorts. “Ditcher, Quick, & Hyde – Divorce Lawyers” and “Proba, Keester, & Wintz – Proctologists”. Mr. Harter’s law firm itself is called “Kickham, Harter, and Indagroyne”. That one’s a little more uninspired than the others, but it’s still a nod to the classics.

$830k like it was no big deal. They just asked Mr. Harter if he would give them $830,000 and offered to do chores to pay him back like it was no big deal. Like they were bumming a cigarette off of somebody or something. That seems a little one-sided, doesn’t it? How many fences are you going to paint to pay back $830,000?

How did Mac survive that lion? Mac falls into a lion cage, and apparently mauled by a lion after it breaks off its leash. And then, he’s seen soon after with nothing but a broken arm and a scratch on his cheek. Mac is one tough bastard.

They blow the windows out of the car. If that explosion in the car was big enough to blow the windows out and it blew up right in everybody’s faces, wouldn’t it have just blown all of their heads off, right in the middle of the water? Suspension of disbelief at its finest, I suppose.

Using Moe’s money without him knowing. That tv studio built that entire orphanage without Moe’s approval, without him knowing, and without paying him any of the money that he had earned. Moe didn’t even know he had gotten paid. They just bypassed him completely and built the orphanage. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’d be kind of pissed off about that if I were Moe. Sure, it’s good for the kids. But Moe’s still poor and homeless. And he’s the one who made all the money.

The Farrelly Brothers PSA. After the movie is over, The Farrelly Brothers do a short scene talking about the dangers of movie stunts and how the props used are made of rubber so it’s not dangerous. In a funny move, they both got male models to play their roles in the scene instead of doing it themselves while still using their names.

I would like to tell you to go see The Three Stooges for comedic purposes, or to hate-watch it, or as an example of what not to do in the arena of film-making. But in all honesty, it’s truly a waste of time. This really is one of the all time worst movies I have ever seen. I would genuinely not recommend this movie to anyone, because it would make me sad to have to find out that they watched it and it was because of me. And as always, keep on watching, with a smile on your face…