Hot Rod

I'm a sucker for stupid comedies done well. Hot Rod is one of the stupidest and best I've ever seen, and that makes it magnificent.

Hot Rod is basically the first film from The Lonely Island. Andy Samberg plays Rod, a wanna-be stunt-biker a la Evel Knievel. He wears a cape. He doesn't know how to talk to women. He barely knows how to drive a moped. He can't convince his stepfather (Ian McShane?!?!) that he is a real man. They fight with bow staffs and medicine balls. Rod usually gets his ass kicked.

When his stepfather falls ill and needs a heart transplant, Rod vows to earn the $50,000 required for the procedure — so that when his stepfather recovers, Rod can kick his ass.

Certainly the Idiot Manchild sub-genre of film comedy gains no new ground with Hot Rod, an Andy Samberg vehicle that was intended for (and not good enough) for Will Ferrell, but damn if this movie isn't funny anyway.

Sometimes, that's all I want. Give me a film that flopped in theaters and got dumped to DVD, but still had, you know, a crowd of townsfolk following the main character and doing a big musical number that escalates into a riot. Give me a preposterous plot with characters who are too stupid to be real, yet seem like people I knew growing up.

These flyover states have created their share of Idiot Manchildren. Maybe it's because we grew up on violent cartoons and TV shows like "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "The A-Team." Maybe you combine that with the bombastic, stupid rock music from the '80s, all synth-heavy and screeching. Even movies like The Karate Kid, No Retreat, No Surrender, and Rad taught us that we could be badasses, no matter who we were or how much we sucked at being a kid or growing up. If we tried hard enough, we could do anything.

Informed by all that silly '80s stuff that we totally bought back then, The Lonely Island pretty much makes a living making fun of all that. Awesome. Stupid and awesome.

Here's the first minute or so.  It's pretty much all you need to know:
But here's the musical number/riot anyway, if you still need convincing: Cool beans.