Debut of Vince Offer’s Movie Goes as Expected

A week ago today, inAPPropriate Comedy, a film written and directed by infomercial pitchman Vince Offer premiered in theaters nationwide. The content of this movie (low-brow comedy sketches) was similar to the Underground Comedy Movie that Offer had made in 1999…but this time things were different.

In 1999, Vince Offer (whose real name is Offer Shlomi) was an obscure struggling actor with an equally obscure public access cable show in Los Angeles. But by 2013, the ShamWow and Slap Chop infomercials had made Offer a cultural icon and his 2009 arrest after an altercation with a prostitute only served to make him even more buzzworthy. The publicity and money from the infomercials provided inAppropriate Comedy the advantages of more movie theaters, bigger stars, and greater hype.

But, in the least surprising news of the year, inAPPropriate Comedy flopped and the critics hated it. The movie was shown in 275 theaters and made a disastrous $625 per theater—the worst opening weekend since the infamous The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure last year.

The New York Times said, “Sometimes a movie is so awful that the word awful is not up to the task of conveying its awfulness…It is so awful that we are fortunate that ‘awful’ has an adverbial use that means ‘very’ or ‘extremely.’ This movie is awfully awful.” The Hollywood Reporter chimed in, “Offering nary a single funny moment in its seemingly endless 84 minutes, the film — it’s too laborious to retype the inane title — provides evidence that cinematic sketch comedy is clearly a lost art.” Several critics noted the film’s similarity to the flop Movie 43 (an observation made by reader LaryOly in our earlier post) and inAPPropriate Comedy came out worse in the comparison.

It was like everything that happened in the last 14 years made no difference at all. Vince Offer didn’t want to be the next Billy Mays but he might be well on his way to becoming the next Ed Wood.