#167: Busted

Release Date: February 14th, 1997

Format: Streaming (The Roku Channel)

Written by: Ronald Jacobs and Maria James

Directed by: Corey Feldman

1.5 Stars

What an utter disaster.

The Corey Feldman-helmed Busted is some sort of low-brow hybrid of a Zucker brothers movie and a mid-’90s softcore Cinemax flick. 

It’s hard to describe the vibe of this movie. It’s like if you gave a group of 13-year-old boys a million bucks to make a comedy. They’d probably go out and copy a bunch of jokes they like from other movies, and then use the rest of the money to hire as many Playboy playmates as they could for the supporting roles. That seems to be Feldman’s approach. 

For example, there’s a scene early in the movie where a cop detains a woman for jaywalking, which distracts him from a jewelry store robbery happening directly behind him. Maybe that’s a funny premise in a competent director’s hands, but in Busted, the joke is that the woman is holding a large cardboard cutout of the letter ‘J.’ 

Get it? “Jaywalking”? 

She’s also in a thong bikini in the scene. Why? Because that’s what a teenage boy would do.

But I’ll give it up to Corey Feldman and the other poor suckers in this thing that at least they’re trying. The script, by Ronald Jacobs and Maria James, attempts a thousand bad jokes and Feldman fills the screen with boobs and props and wacky sound effects. 

I’d say it’s all a big waste of time, but here I am watching it on The Roku Channel at 1AM, with ads, almost thirty years after its release.