Roxbury should close its doors

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Score! Or not. Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell star in the lame "Night at the Roxbury."

A question on everyone's mind is, "How can Hollywood possibly make a 90-minute feature film out of a four-minute SNL skit about two hapless losers who freak girls at a nightclub to the tune of 'What is Love?'" Well, the obvious answer is that it can't be done well and the film "A Night at the Roxbury" proves it.

"A Night at the Roxbury" brings to the big screen the SNL characters Doug and Steve Butabi, created by and starring Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell. The Butabi brothers are spoiled losers who have just a few goals in life: to meet chicks, to get into the ritzy club The Roxbury and one day, to open their own night club. Dancing into their dreams in a film full of neon glitz but no glamour is their rich workaholic father.

Alicia Silverstone's "Clueless" daddy Dan Hedaya again plays the father as Kamehl Butabi, and is relegated to his similar, previous roles as an uptight, intense loudmouth. Hedaya does his usual shtick in delivering such wonderfully, poetic sentence fragments as, "Useless" and "Idiot boy!"

Idiot boy Doug shares several heated encounters with his father, who at one point orders him to get dressed and go downstairs and Doug whines, "I don't want to," and runs into the bathroom and slams the door. Wait a second, these guys are how old? Just old enough to appease the mall-going high school kids whom the filmmakers are targeting with "A Night at the Roxbury."

Doug and Steve still share the same room and mooch off of their parents, with whom they're living. When Doug's plastic mom kisses him goodbye, he asks Steve, "Did Mom get lipstick on me?" Steve intuitively replies, "Yeah, but it looks like you were making out."

These Butabi brothers are goofball kids who act like they're in the midst of puberty, yet the actors that play them are in their late 20s. They don't have a clue about life, the real world or dealing with people like 1991 award recipient for "Male Star of Tomorrow" Richard Grieco.

After hitting their van with his Ferrari, Grieco, who plays the only role he could pull off, gets the two Butabis into the Roxbury as a favor to avoid any lawsuits. They ask Grieco, "So is Johnny Depp meeting you here?" and he replies with a solemn "No." Ha ha.

Providing other slightly amusing nuances is club owner Mr. Zadir, played by Chazz Palminteri. Palminteri is funny only because 75 percent of his lines are utterly pointless as he repeatedly questions, "Did you just grab my ass?"

Ass grabbin', dance freakin' and neon flashin' surround the Butabis at the Roxbury, a place Doug observes to be on "hottie overload." Here the core of their skit shows through as the guys meander through a colorful sea of babes, saying, "What's up?" to every one of them. When two sexy vixens, played by Elisa Donovan and Gigi Rice, partner up with the boys to dance, Ferrell and Kattan explode into their famous SNL freaky, jerky dance grooves.

These grooves are so wildly uncontrolled, it is funny to watch the twosome accidentally slam and knock the women on the ground. Funny, though, for about five seconds. After this initial wildness the dancing between the two couples becomes very refined and moves into a nicely choreographed (I'm not kidding) dance sequence to the music of another dance party necessity "This is Your Night." Doug, Steve and the two babes shake their booties, flap their arms and dance their goofy hearts out in a scene that has brief excitement compared with the other senseless drivel found in the film.

Joining the song "This is Your Night," the soundtrack of "A Night at the Roxbury" is littered with a plethora of tunes from any of the Ultimate Dance Party albums. Along with No Mercy's "Where Do You Go," The Trammps' "Disco Inferno," and that La-Da-Da-Di-Da-Da-Da song, the Bee Gee's ultimate dancing classic "Stayin Alive" makes an entrance in a series of shots of Doug and Steve strutting down the street - a sequence copied right from the opening of "Saturday Night Fever," canted angles and all.

This music has a small part though, in comparison to Haddaway's "What is Love," the same tune heard in the SNL skit. This song plays constantly throughout the film, trying to bring amusement for whenever the guys hear it they bob their heads left to right - in the car, in the elevator, in the club, etc.

These scenes get old very, very fast and prove again that there isn't much to the characters or the comedy of this four -minute skit that shouldn't have been fully realized on cinematic film.

This shallow, uncomedic picture falls into the dregs of other SNL classics like "The Coneheads," "Stuart Saves His Family" and the direct-to-video "It's Pat: The Movie." Why Amy Heckerling produced this project is beyond me. Then again, she's footing some of the bill for the reprehensible "Clueless" TV series. "A Night at the Roxbury" is a night well wasted.

10-07-98