Jane White is Sick & Twisted -- 2002 -- R

What I learned from this movie? I've watched way too much TV. This film is basically a TV spoof complete with a cast that were regulars on TV at one time or another. I figured I'd been in front of the tube too much when a) I caught every opening spoof at the beginning and b) when Jane rattled off a list of names, and I knew nearly all of them.

This plot follows a completely clueless girl named Jane who uses TV to escape her messed up mother and life and believes that a talk show host is her long lost father. In order to meet her dad, she tries to be the people he wants to talk to on the show, beginning with her trying to be a "closet tranvestite prostitute."

Like most spoof films, it helps to know some of the spoofed material to "get" a lot of the jokes, but this one is so whacked-out that it is not always necessary, and it provided a lot of laughs as this poor girl worked her way to Chicago and never ended up anywhere near it. She did wind up in a desert, though, where she hoped to be abducted by aliens to enhance her sexual powers...anyway.

The actual production seemed to be very TV-showish, and I hope it was done to enhance the overall spoof effect, cause some of the effects were laughable and what one might expect on the a TV show (my favorite being where the driving movements of the actors, the driving sounds, and the moving background failed to line up during one sequence where Colin Mochrie's character drove Jane home).

The only real problem I ran into was that the movie was basically over when Gerry died. There were a couple loose ends to tie up, I'll grant, but all the steam ran out of the film after that point. My concern then was that the event occurred at 57 minutes. I was grateful that most of the last 30 minutes of run time was playing with the credits and outtakes and deleted scenes and such, but it was a disappointing ending to a film that was carrying itself just fine to that point.

So, if you've watched too much TV in your lifetime, and think you know everything, give this one a viewing and see how many references you can catch. It's quite amusing and has its moments.