A Man Called Sarge may be the worst film ever made. It's playing on the local Fox affiliate's "Sunday Afternoon At The Movies" type- thing. I cannot make myself keep watching it. It stars Gary Kroeger and Marc Singer, and is ostensibly a Mel Brooks-esque/Zucker- Abrams-esque romp through WWII North Africa movies (e.g. The Desert Fox or The Desert Rats). The problem being that the formula was already a bit calcified by the time Airplane was made in 1980, and this steaming heap was sh...uh, made, in 1990, featuring a never-went-anywhere Saturday Night Live alum named Gary Kroeger from the brutally bad seasons 8-10. And Gary Singer is the Nazi nemesis? This movie makes Top Secret look like Young Frankenstein. The basic difficulty is this: Clichés are not in and of themselves funny. I suppose if you're drunk or stoned this might not be true, but in the cold light of a sober Sunday afternoon this truism applies, and how. Add to that the lack of Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman or even Leslie Nielsen and you get this punishing feature. This is not a "hey, this is so bad it's good" movie. This is just horrible, like a hundred paper-cuts or being surprised by bad milk.
Review of A Man Called Sarge
