Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie

How much you enjoy Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie will largely depend on how in touch you are with your inner 18-year-old male - and if you are lucky enough to actually be an 18-year-old male, who just loves a toilet gag, then you've certainly got a head start. For everyone else, consuming alcohol before entering the cinema may help ease the pain if nothing else.

For the uninitiated, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are a comic duo who made their name on Cartoon Channel's late-night Adult Swim strand, in a spoof sketch show for which no brow is considered too low. Imagine a more modern, slightly ruder Hale & Pace. Stepping up to the feature-length format, they indulge in more of the same, supported by only the most rudimentary of plot structures that is crumbling from the outset and a Funny or Die backbone of comic acting talent who really should have stayed on higher ground.

We meet the pair just as they have fallen foul of film producer Tommy Schlaaang (Robert Loggia), with the character name telling you all you need to know about this film's joke level. Tommy gave them a billion dollars to make a movie called Diamond Jim, but having blown the lot on, among other things, a Johnny Depp lookalike (Ronnie Rodriguez) and a guru (Zach Galifianakis, reaching a new career low), they high-tail it out of town while they've still got all their limbs. They wash up in a Swallow Valley Mall ('hilarious' names continue to pepper the plot), miles from anywhere, that seems to have been modelled on a cut-rate Dawn Of The Dead. There, they find the denizens are, if not quite zombies, certainly pretty close, having abandoned all hope and being stalked by a wolf. In a bid to earn back their squandered cash, Tim and Eric promise the desperate boss (Will Ferrell) that they can turn it around and enlist the help of consumptive caretaker Taquito (a disturbingly good John C Reilly).

The rest of the film sees the hapless duo - with Reilly in support - bumble their way through a series of sketch-style antics, each delving further below the belt level. At one point, a character says: "Let the brown foaming mess wash all over you." Whatever you are imagining happening at this juncture, I promise you it's worse. Plumbing depths even Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo might have considered beneath him and with its satire on Hollywood all too quickly running on empty, all except the most die-hard Tim & Eric fans are likely to tire of the joke somewhere round the midway point.