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When we were all having fun making easy jokes on the back of Shore’s fall from grace in the 90’s, he obviously eventually came to a point where he had to make a decision on his future. Based on the traditional Hollywood career crossroads options, he could have gone one of three ways:

1) The Todd Bridges Route: Which involves getting entirely annoyed by continual public exposure of your screw-ups, finding religion and dropping out of the picture entirely.

2) The Corey Feldman Route: Which involves ignoring the bad press and continuing to sell out by making whatever crap will put a few bucks on the table.

3) The Sean Penn Route: Get original, dump the shtick that made you famous and show people that you can actually act some.

And yes, shocking as it may sound, Pauly Shore has chosen option #3. The guy went out and wrote, directed, starred in and paid for a feature film based around his life – and death – and the flick is genuinely funny and very hard to dislike. And it stars the three people mentioned above, amongst nearly 40 others.

You’ll Never Wiez In This Town Again is not a vanity project. In fact, the movie could quite possibly be the very antithesis of a vanity project; this is more like a self-mutilation project, complete with a smart sense of humor and complete lack of ego from all involved.

The concept here is that Shore has given up on his Weasel shtick. Having played his last cards with an awful sitcom pilot on Fox, he’s sacked his agent and manager and decided to go it alone. Only his name isn’t exactly doing marquee business anymore. So one night Shore is visited by the ghost of Sam Kinison and told he should kill himself if he wants to be recognized as a comedy genius. Solid advice – worked for Kinison, and it could well work for Andrew Dice Clay some day.

So Shore decides to wimp out and fake his own death, rather than take a bullet. What follows is a long line of funny scenes and hilarious cameos that I’d gladly list here, only they’re far funnier when you don’t see them coming. Suffice to say that Shore isn’t the only celebrity that makes fun of himself in this film, from porn stars to A-list actors, Rico Suave to Tommy Lee, Jay Mewes to Ben Stiller, everyone involved drops their self-love and makes with the self-abuse.

Look, over the years I’ve been mentally tortured by Pauly Shore’s work as much as the next guy. Anyone who has watched Biodome from start to finish deserves a medal of honor in my opinion, but let’s remember that Biodome also starred Kylie Minogue, and you don’t hear anyone bitching about her now that she shows her ass in music videos.

…Streetfighter who?

So Shore was in some stinky crap over the years. But so were Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd and Jeff Goldblum, yet we got over those bad years because, eventually, those guys stopped making crud and started showing us more. Maybe it’s a stretch to compare Pauly Shore to Tom Hanks, but (I can’t believe I’m saying this) it may well be time to cut the guy a break and give him a clean slate.

Why? Because he didn’t just star in this film, he built it from the ground up and the results are pretty damn good. It’s consistently funny, looks great for a no-budget HD video production, is jam-packed with stars making asses of themselves and, yes, Shore even shows a little acting ability. The star of the show makes no secret of the fact that he knows his previous work is shitty and he’s essentially using this film as a means of saying, “Okay, I’m beating myself up now, are you happy? Can we move on please?”

Granted, there are issues in the film that should be addressed before it hits the big screen in any sort of wide release. You could trim fifteen minutes out of this story and have a much funnier, smoother film at the end of it, and some of the jokes do fall flat. But those that don’t are quite definitely hilarious, and that’s not just some weirdo film reviewer with a secret Pauly shore video collection talking – the entire audience I saw this film with was HOWLING.

The great American one-hit-wonder/over-the-hill actor comedy has been a long time coming – who hasn’t wondered how long it would be until Gary Coleman, Emanuelle Lewis and Soleil Moon-Frye would team up as big screen superheroes? Well, while this film doesn’t include any of those three, but even if you personally can’t stand Shore, who amongst us wouldn’t pay eight bucks to watch Heidi Fleiss spit in his face? Am I right?

There will be plenty of folks with cynical agendas and long memories who will work hard to find reasons to put down this movie, and if you compare it to Lord of the Rings, obviously it will rank a distant second. To be sure, You'll Never Wiez In This Town Again is by no means a high watermark in the history of cinema, but if you compare it to Bringing Down The House, or any other 'out and out comedy' that’s been on your screens in the last year, this film at the very least deserves a theatrical run and a matinee ticket price. Ignore it and you’re ignoring a comedy that will build great word of mouth amongst the college crowd, and will undoubtedly bring some Weasel-Haters back to the fold.

And seriously, I’m not high.

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originally posted: 03/13/03 08:55:16
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