Blog - Ridiculous Infomercial Review

I was amazed when I heard about this today…but on second thought I probably should have seen it coming. Vince Offer— better known as Vince from ShamWow and Slap Chop—is rereleasing his awful Underground Comedy Movie, and a pre-prison Lindsay Lohan will play a trigger-happy Marilyn Monroe. Here is the trailer:

From the trailer, it appears that Underground Comedy 2010 is the exact same terrible movie as the one released in 1999 but with the Lindsay Lohan sketch just added to it.

Frankly, I thought a sketch about Vince Offer/Shlomi beating up a hooker would have been a lot funnier.

Check out my review of the original Underground Comedy Movie.

When I first saw this commercial for a product called PizzApartment, I thought it had to be some sort of joke or subtle prank. But after doing some poking around, I have concluded that the PizzApartment pizza box was indeed a real product that had a very short lived launch in April 2009. The official website (www.PizzApartment.com) is no longer online and their Amazon page is not selling the item, but you can still find the PizzApartment for sale on Ebay.

In refrigerators all across the land, wide pizza boxes are crowding out valuable shelf space and no one has ever thought of any way to solve this problem…until now! If there were ever a solution desperately in search of a problem, then the PizzApartment (”Tidy Living Quarters for Your Leftover Slices”) is it.

You gotta love the altruistic theme in the Pizza Apartment infomercial too. “Thankfully, with PizzApartment I can go green and not waste paper products anymore,” the host assures us. And if you get the PizzApartment in “special edition breast cancer pink” then a donation is given to breast cancer research. That will really entice all those bachelors and frat boys who consume leftover pizza as their main food group to rush out and buy.

The large consumption of pizza by bachelors and frat boys may have been what inspired that scene at 1:05 in which one hot girl in a short dress gives a PizzApartment to another hot girl in a short dress. That may count as one of the strangest and unlikeliest moments in infomercial history. And it would have failed to make any sales since the two chicks never actually end up making out.

Sometimes a really dumb product can catch on with the buying public (cf. The Snuggie), but sometimes a dumb product is just dumb—as the makers of the PizzApartment seemed to learn all too quickly!

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An extra-large thanks with pepperoni and onions to reader Chris C. for letting me know about the PizzApartment infomercial.

I recently received and email from Lindsey Brooks touting this woman in the Sticky Wicky roller (www.BuyStickyWicky.com) commercial as the next Vince “From ShamWow” Offer:

There are so many products advertised via infomercial for dog and cat owners. It is great to finally see an ad that acknowledges the long underserved frog owners markets…although I was genuinely unaware that shedding was problem with pet frogs.

Unlike the opening rhymes inspired by the Snuggie commercial, the jingle here is quite brazen:

If you’ve got a
Cat or dog,
A chicken, a frog,
An alligator, giraffe or snake.
You know when they start a-shedding
What a mess those varmints make.
You need a roller, a sticky roller.

A whistled version of the tune plays as background music throughout the spot, and an at the end an encore stanza allows the host to announce the “Mini Roller” free bonus.

Like Vince Offer in the ShamWow and Slap Chop ads, this woman tries to incorporate quips in her sales presentation. At 1:04, she says, “For all that dog hair, cat har, lint, dust, your husband’s youth.” Obviously, the reference to “your husband’s youth” is supposed to be some kind of a joke…but don’t get it. Is she saying that wives normally send their husband’s youth “right down the drain” (as she was previously discussing)? Or that wives would like to clean up their husband’s misspent youth?

Honestly, this woman’s attempt to pitch a product reminds me less of Vince Offer or Billy Mays than of Wendy “The Snapple Lady” Kaufman’s attempt to break into infomercial stardom with the EZ Cracker commercial.

So how would you feel about seeing this Sticky Wicky ad aired during every commercial break?

FreshCloz supposedly uses the power of ozone to freshen and deodorize your clothes. You hang this home dry cleaning product in your closet and place your clothes inside to keep them smelling good as new.

I have no problem with the product, but I do have a problem with the name. When I first saw the name “FreshCloz,” I assumed it was pronounced “Fresh Claws” because of the way it is spelled and the fact that they show it being used in a closet. But when I saw the infomercial, I heard them pronouncing FreshCloz as “Fresh Clothes.” I think some marketers need to get a copy of that direct marketing bestseller “Hooked on Phonics.” In English, a “silent e” indicates a long vowel sound. So if you wanted the name of the product to be pronounced “Fresh Clothes,” you should have spelled the name as “FreshCloze”—the name would still have been stupid but at least it would have been phonetically correct!

Check out the commercial for yourself:

“Flashlight Man” sounds like a really awful comic book superhero, but it is actually the name of a utility flashlight. The most interesting thing about the Flashlight Man infomercial, however, is not the product name but the audio track. The voice of the announcer sounds like it has been sped up:

I suppose they decided to speed up the voice in order to fit more of the script into the spot, but I don’t know how having a commercial that sounds like Alvin, Simon, or Theodore is doing the voice over work will increase sales.

Notice that the voice of the woman who gives the testimonial at 0:48 (”It’s so good looking, I often keep it on the counter where it’s handy.”) is not sped up at all. Also notice that the audio track seems out of sync. (The audio of the woman’s testimonial starts at 0:48 but the woman seems to appear on screen with those lines at 0:53.) The chipmunk announcer voice and this disconnect between audio and video may have something to do with one another.

Check out the official Flashlight Man page for yourself at www.FlashlightMan.com

And look for “The Adventures of Flashlight Man and Battery Boy” at your local comic book store.