Year One (2009)

Elevator Pitch: Zed and Oh are a couple of prehistoric hunters who get thrown out of their village for eating from the forbidden tree. Out in the world they are enslaved by a variety of slavers and end up, having met some biblical characters  in the city of Sodom where they meet up with a couple of girls they fancied back in the village, who have also been sold into slavery and, unless someone can do something, are due to by sacrificed as offerings to the gods because they are virgins. On their side is the fact that people think Zed is “The Chosen One”, but chosen as what?

Content: There is a lot of talk about sex, but even in Sodom not much actually seems to be happening. But a special shout-out to Lacia Manshack, known in the cast list as “Banana Girl”, the perpetrator of the only successful risqué joke in the whole film. Zed and Oh stumble through a variety of biblical scenes. Cain and Able, Jacob and his son and so on, until they get to Sodom when they are participants in a variety of crowd scenes, at one point the centre of attention because they are to be executed.

A View. Up to now I have been a bit of a Harold Ramis fan. All I can say is that maybe the uncut version somehow would have given us more of his vision, which at best looked like an attempt to offer an Old Testament version of “The Life of Brian”. Jack Black did his usual bombastic idiot, and as a sort of counterpoint Michael Cena did his mostly bemused, in his case the joke being that he looked a bit like a woman. It cost a lot and did not make any money. I’m making it an “ALMOST DON’T SEE” because you would expect it to be so much better.

Additional Info: This was to be Harold Ramis’s last film. He died in February 2014.