“Am I not turtley enough for the Turtle Club? Turtle, turtle, turtle!”

Justin’s rating: Didn’t think I’d be watching Abraham Lincoln getting funky to “I Like To Move It”

Justin’s review: Dana Carvey, whatever happened to you? You had an amazing run on SNL and even latched on to a great one-two punch with the Wayne’s World movies, but that’s kind of where it ended for you. Your other movies were forgettable-to-middling, your TV show a failure, and your attempted comeback in 2002 with The Master of Disguise kind of the nail on the coffin of your headlining career. Man, you deserved better than this.

Don’t get me wrong — I think Carvey’s a very talented and funny guy, and I’ve enjoyed some of his other stuff. But The Master of Disguise is such a painful misfire that even if forces were conspiring against him, it nevertheless dragged his career down into a stygian underworld of comedic has-beens. I’ve been procrastinating for years on rewatching this for a review, that’s how much I find it bafflingly bad.

On paper, this movie seems to play to Dana Carvey’s strengths as an impersonator. He plays Pistachio Disguisey (seriously), the latest in a lineage of disguise-masters who use their talents for an extremely vague good. When his parents are kidnapped and Pistachio forced to acquire artifacts for a smuggler, he’s going to have to learn from his famous grandfather how to go as conspicuously incognito as possible.

Learn the trade, get the artifacts, and defeat the bad guys to save his family. Oh, and Brent Spiner shows up to fart a lot. Simple enough.

Except that rather dull summary gives more credit to the script than it should. I honestly think that The Master of Disguise should be shown in film schools so that aspiring creators can learn why editing is so vitally important. Because when you see this movie, you learn first-hand what it’s like when there’s no skill at the editing machine.

It’s a jumbled mess of scenes that start wrong, end wrong, and are often stitched together in the most confusing manner possible. Even narration, freeze frames, and a spinning manhole cover (?) splicing scenes do more to puzzle than perfect.

But we can’t put all the blame on the editing, as bad as it is. Carvey’s Pistachio is so dang weird even when he’s not affecting some sort of unbelievable outfit. He’s sort of doing an Italian accent but also as a chattering grown man-child.

It kind of reminds me of his bizarre accent he affected in 1994’s Trapped in Paradise. Funny for about five seconds, then increasingly disturbing. I guess that’s fine for a side character, but it’s lethal to a protagonist’s appeal that makes him hard to watch.

Mostly hard to watch. See, here’s where The Master of Disguise takes a strange turn for anyone trying to pin a verdict on it. It’s objectively a bad movie. Yet sometimes it dives down so deep in that badness that it emerges into actual comedy. I think it’s the willingness of the filmmakers to go bizarre at the most unexpected moments, creating actually amusing non sequiturs.

More than once, this film startled a laugh out of me, leaving me feeling vulnerable and ashamed. Did I just laugh at this movie? Does it mean it’s good now? Can a flick be awful yet entertaining? Is all truth relative? Did that guy just bite off another guy’s nose? Did he just disguise himself as a cow pie? WhaT is haPpeNiNg?

It’s also so dang weird how many well-known actors are in this film, such as James Brolin, Bo Derek, Jessica Simpsons, and Jesse Ventura. Here I have to assume that Happy Madison productions was pulling strings to rope people into Adam Sandler’s latest executive-produced project.

The weird train continues right through the ending. The Master of Disguise is an incredibly short movie — 70 minutes, all told — but at the end they shove 10 more minutes of cutscenes and bloopers over the credits to pad it out. Some of these scenes look like they really should’ve been edited into the actual film, but as we’ve established, the editor was likely a first-year grad student who worked for “experience.”

Listen, I’ve seen so many bad movies I could probably teach a doctoral-level class on the subject. And while this one is so, so dumb and poorly constructed, it’s not anywhere near the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I say that if a movie can make you laugh a couple times with juvenile jokes, come up with some original visuals, and still remain embedded in pop culture memory today, then it can’t be completely without worth.

Intermission!

• I’ll give the movie this: I like the magical opening credits and flip book
• Bo Derek flying across a road, why not
• A punching baby
• Why DOES he have underwear on his head?
• And now he impersonates Donkey from Shrek
• That’s pretty impressive you can spill spaghetti on four people’s heads at the same time
• Everyone likes a copycat
• Quoting “Papa Don’t Preach” confuses everyone
• “Hello? Police? My home is full of ransackery!”
• And now we’re at The Exorcist
• “Sorry George Washington, no cherry tree for you!” haha
• Abraham Lincoln was a boring speaker, I had no idea
• Presidents liked to tag-team in a dancer from time to time
• The Disguisi book is a pop up
• I didn’t think I’d see Dana Carvey as a schoolgirl. An ugly schoolgirl.
• I’m sure that brownface won’t come back to haunt anybody
• Kenny G on a recorder
• Buttercup the Cobra, who likes the kissing. And the cheese.
• Michael Johnson is allowed to borrow the Constitution
• He’s got a minion hidden in the flour?
• All of Brent Spiner’s farts that end scenes
• The creepy slapping puppet
• “I’m your daddy. I’m your daddy.”
• Master of Disguises need assistants
• This movie is obsessed with butts
• The assistant asking about her dental plan. The response? “You sicken me.”
• The turtle outfit. I’ll admit that this whole scene had me laughing how stupid it is.
• FEAR THE TURTLY HARM!
• Dude, he bit off that guy’s nose… and spit it back onto his face?
• “Why would I call you lovecake? Your hindquarters are hideously scrawny.”
• Jesse Ventura is allowed to take the Liberty Bell
• The slap puppet pantsing Pistachio
• And now he’s Scarface, because that’s a reference all little kids would immediately understand
• “With your attitude, they should be called crabby cakes.”
• And now we’re into Jaws
• He’s a pile of cow poop now?
• The Bavarian Tax Authority
• Bruce Willis’ hairpiece from Die Hard 2
• He hid… in a cherry pie
• “It’s the cherry pie man, get him!”
• And he spits cherries at them like a machine gun
• There are like four different “Master of Disguise” songs in this movie