“Wanna know what a cockroach is called in Algeria?”

Justin’s rating: I think this movie’s budget may have matched the contents of the coin dish in my van. And that’s including the Canadian quarters.

Justin’s review: In theory, the concept of doing a spoof of popular indie movies from the ’90s — and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in particular — is an interesting idea. After all, this was both the era of High Spoofery and runaway indie successes. Stock it with comedians like Sandra Bernhard, Julie Brown, Dan Castellaneta, and Jennifer Coolidge, and you might end up with a profitable video store rental that all the college kids snapped up to see.

Yet it also was the worst idea, because Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and their contemporaries weren’t mainstream enough to work for a parody. That’s kind of why we liked indies back then: They felt unconventional and cool for those “in the know” while most people hadn’t seen them. You can’t spoof that and expect to draw in huge crowds.

Another choice was to go as hard an R with Plump Fiction as could be. Sure, it fits the source material, but box office history bears out that spoofs only work at the PG-13 or PG level. So in between some tepid homages to famous films and scenes, this movie curses like a sailor on shore leave while juking the camera around until you’re exhausted just watching it. Because it’s what Quentin did, didn’t ya know?

It’s so hard to convey the awful acting and directorial tone of Plump Fiction except to say that it’s nowhere near your Leslie Nielsen or Charlie Sheen (or even the Wayans) level of comedy. This style — if we can call it that — is so weird and awkward that the movie never telegraphs when you’re supposed to laugh. You just guess wrong and make everyone around you uncomfortable when you let out a nervous titter.

I suspect that even the cast and crew had no idea if there were jokes present. For example, there’s a long sequence of “Reservoir Nuns” sitting in a warehouse swearing at each other. Nothing’s funny or interesting being said, just bank robbers dressed up as nuns yelling as if curse words were invented the week prior and they were worried the world’s supply would get used up before the end credits.

For the most part, Plump Fiction follows the format, conversations, and characters of its source material. It jumps around chronologically with various stories intersecting while also rolling out pastiches to various indie flicks. Reservoir Dogs, Forrest Gump, Clerks, Natural Born Killers, Nell (Nell?), and Reality Bites all makes an appearance so that you can excitedly point at the screen and squeal, “I know that reference!”

The one thing that I’ll say in faint praise of Plump Fiction is that it doesn’t skimp on the overly excessive dialogue that is a Tarantino trademark. Occasionally it is even vaguely amusing, such as the patter between the two “exterminators” or diner robbers that chews on pop culture with the greatest of pretention.

But that’s not nearly enough to fool you into thinking that Plump Fiction is (a) clever or (b) funny, especially considering how dated (and often obscure) most of these references are. It’s seriously not funny at all. It’s almost as if they weren’t trying for jokes most of the time, preferring to play movie dress up and hope that the reference alone would make you snort milk out your noise in hilarity.

What Plump Fiction is happy to be is excessively meta. Everyone in this movie talks about movies, quotes movies, and mimics movies. It’s not just on the nose, it’s a finger jammed up to the third knuckle inside its own nostril. Probably while swearing in a nasally accent.

The only virtue to this experience is that it’s just short of 80 minutes. You can endure almost any movie if it’s that short. But should you? Not if it’s this one.

Intermission!

• The narrator gets offed during the opening crawl
• Ever wanted to see Forrest Gump in a Tarantino flick? Here you go.
• This is a new way to look at I Dream of Jeanie
• Scarlet A? That’s a contemporary reference
• I did like the radio dial change-up of the credit music
• Mermaids should be fat like Free Willy
• Natural Blonde Killers… and no blondes are present
• Threatening the camera for being too obnoxious
• The Independent Cafe is so subtle
• A Waterworld sandwich is just a cheese sandwich but it costs $270
• Clerks gets an upgrade to color
• “It’s TACO TUESDAY!”
• Didn’t think I’d see Nell in a gimp suit
• That’s a whole lot of feathers
• People report that this film only made money in rentals because people accidentally mistook the cover for Pulp Fiction
• A Mexican standoff with a crossbow, sword, and blowtorch