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Critics' Choice
By Brandon Judell

Finally, a drug company, Roritori [sic], has come up with a pill, Gleemonex, that will make us happy all the time, and isn't that what we're all about? The little orange lozenge somehow, once swallowed, digs up the happiest moment in our life and freezes it in our brains, so we'll be always smiling. As one Gleemonex user notes, "I feel like God's rubbing my tummy."

But are there any side effects? you ask. Who knows? Roritori had to rush the product out because its previous winner, Stummies, the tummy medicine, was becoming old hat, and its stock was faltering. But who cares now? Let's just be happy. Here's a product that can outsell penicillin and just think of what the pill will do for ghetto kids, challenges the company's president.

Using this premise, the funniest, most audacious comedy troop of the last decade has boiled down American society, thrown the whole hodgepodge into a colander, then hilariously eaten and excreted the gunk. Wall street businesses, dysfunctional families, closeted gays, scientists caught up in the fame game, exploited cancer children, depressed heavy metal singers, Queen Elizabeth, pet owners, taxi drivers, the media and quite possibly your own Aunt Tilly get the full work over.

If you are not familiar with the five members of Kids in the Hall, whose TV show was first broadcast on HBO in 1989, Lord knows what you'll make of this whole meshugaas. They play women; they play oafs. They write their own material, and they go where few other would dare venture. But unlike the sophomoric foolishness we're so often condemned to see on "Saturday Night Live," there is a combination of intellectual brilliance and humane audacity tiptoeing through all the Kids' sketches.

In this, their first screen offering, the Kids can't help but remind you of Monty Python at their best. What higher praise is there?

DIRECTOR: Kelly Makin
CAST: David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson, Kathryn Greenwood, Amy Smith, Lachlan Murdoch, Nicole deBoer, Krista Bridges, Christopher Redman, Erica Lancaster
PRODUCER: Lorne Michaels (Paramount)
WRITER: Norm Hiscock, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Tom Rosenberg, Sigurjon Sighvatsson, David Steinberg
CO-PRODUCERS: Barnaby Thompson, Richard S. Wright
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: David A. Makin
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Gregory P. Keen EDITOR: Christopher Cooper
MUSIC SCORE: Craig Northey
GENRE: Comedy - R - 1:30

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