“How do you make your backpack, like, rap?”

Justin’s rating: I hope everyone’s looking forward to the major motion picture I’m making with my daughter’s stuffed unicorns.

Justin’s review: Imagine that you’re a filmmaker with no shame and the following resources at your disposal: One stiff alligator hand puppet, a sports bra, one ninja costume, a ticket to the local country fair, a pair of rollerblades, a skateboard, a discount acoustic guitar CD, a completely empty apartment, a few people who owe you favors, and a camcorder from 1987. Really, with that list, you only have two options: stuff all of the above in a garbage compactor, or go for broke and make a movie.

Rollergator, much to all of our chagrin, did the latter.

An incomprehensible mess from start to finish, Rollergator clearly wants to be a sassy adventure with a wise-cracking animal sidekick that we fall in love with and establish as a pop culture icon. What it wants is irrelevant, however, because the product that emerges is so bizarrely unwatchable as to be a potential tool to break the will of captured terrorists.

Sunbathing alone at a beach one day, PJ (Sandra Shuker) hears an annoying voice call for help from a nearby cave. It turns out that this is — naturally — a small purple talking alligator that’s being held up from behind a rock by its not-at-all-talented puppeteer. After some “witty” repartee, PJ and Rollergator decide to team up to help the critter find his owner.

This won’t be easy, and not just because there’s no script direction. As PJ wanders aimlessly around her town, a ninja on a skateboard and a sweaty carnival owner (played by Martin Sheen’s brother) both half-heartedly chase her in an attempt to catch Rollergator for their own purposes.

That’s… that’s pretty much it for this entire movie. You think I’m hiding or glossing over details, but no, it’s a whole lot of shots of people rolling along trying to look cool the way that we all thought we were in the late 1990s. If you wore sunglasses and had a pair of rollerblades — and boy did I ever — then you were part of the club.

So you have a plot that’s all but non-existent — that’s only the start of your troubles in watching this flick. The sound design is just some of the worst I’ve ever heard. Not only does this movie feature a nonstop surf guitar soundtrack, but any dialogue is often lost to the ages thanks to poor microphones and a propensity to shoot this near incredibly loud carnival rides. It’s so hard to hear that I actually had to turn on closed captioning to get a sense of the conversations.

And when you do hear the dialogue, you wish you hadn’t, because the writer tried to inject every bit of X-TREME ATTITUDE into Rollergator. Everything he says is supposed to be like season one Bart Simpson or season eight’s Poochie the Dog, but what actually emerges is the wit and vocabulary of a third grader.

Oh, and he raps. I swear, I am not just throwing that in for comedic value. An actual rap.

With all that said, you’d at least hope that Rollergator would be funny in a mock-worthy, so-bad-it’s-good way, but… no, it’s not. It’s the kind of bad that you’d endure only if you were atoning for very serious sins, and only then if you couldn’t get your hand on a burning iron or a cat-o-nine-tails.