Metacritic reviews

At its best, Movie 43 resembles a risqué episode of Saturday Night Live - a comparison reinforced by the presence of both parody ads and Jason Sudeikis. At its worst? Let's just say that Hugh Jackman fans who want to remember the actor as Jean Valjean and not as a guy with a scrotum sprouting from his neck should make alternate plans this weekend.

An oddity recommended for only the most fervent, undemanding comedy junkies.

The kindest thing to be said of Movie 43, a star-saturated collection of crude one-joke vignettes made with big-time directors, is that most of the participants seem to relish being naughty.

Quite why A-listers Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman and Emma Stone (among others) aligned themselves with this excruciatingly moronic compilation of shorts is anybody's guess.

Just no.

As sick-making sketch comedies go, this stupefyingly bad one-somehow rife with A-list talent-must rank near the very bottom.

The sketches aren't united by a half-ignored framing device, so much as by an enduring fascination with bodily functions. Movie 43 is the most star-studded collection of jokes involving menstruation, flatulence, incest, bestiality, Snooki, and nutsacks ever assembled, but the stars don't elevate the material-they just descend to its level.

Despite the dizzying array of talent involved both in front of and behind the camera, this godawful exercise is so painfully unfunny, so screamingly bad that it immediately qualifies as one of the worst films of all time.

If you mashed-up the worst parts of the infamous "Howard the Duck,'' "Gigli,'' "Ishtar'' and every other awful movie I've seen since I started reviewing professionally in 1981, it wouldn't begin to approach the sheer soul-sucking badness of the cringe-inducing Movie 43.

This is barely a movie at all, mostly due to its structural similarities to "SNL", but also because it acknowledges the fact that its own premises are inherently unfilmable.