National Lampoon's Lost Reality 2 (2005)

 

Ephemeral Wave

$200 dollars for a tongue bath?

We return to National Lampoon and their sequel to the previous collection, fake unsold pilots for American reality television shows deemed inappropriate or bad to screen. In mind to the review for the last of these being incredibly long, let us cut to the chase and begin, aside from pointing out that this was made a year later, is a longer work in length with no bonus episodes, and that like last time a lot of the humour is dependent on shock or crass material. Trigger and Spoiler Warnings are needed too again as, whilst not as arguably severe as the prequel, this still has moments even to read of and picture that people may not like to consider...

Money returns as a segment, but in a turn where it is made by a rival company. Like last time, this premise is that money can compel a person to do anything, such as let a man spit chewed up food from his mouth into theirs, or a more perverse dare, none of which is anything remotely offensive. It is actually charmlessly charming, the homeless man involved, an old man named Frederick, still effectively the butt of the joke but with a sense the humour could have been so much meaner to him than before. Even if, for $500, the dare to have him urinate on someone does not actually do to plan, he at least had a moment for karmic revenge offered. When one person is dared to wear a dead squirrel on his head, a "road kill hat", it did however evoke in my past in secondary school where someone put a pigeon's head down the back of my neck. It did not thankfully evoke any trauma but a weird moment of passing sympathy for having dead animals around the head as I inexplicably can claim as a personal connection. The one moment which would be seen as problematic, the one dare by a female competitor where she pumps petrol into her car completely naked, is an issue that undercuts the segment, though for a moment clearly meant for titillation, there is a lot to unpackaged in general beyond this segment. Beyond wondering if anyone would dare a man to do this, there is a lot in it about the gaze (of all genders), why nudity would be seen as sexual only from a woman, the presentation of it, even that the woman herself (an actress or even someone off the street) was willing to do the scene, and all the complex emotions she clearly has in the midst of it including the possibly of regret after the camera stopped or, and a lot that is right to question, definitely not something this production would even have considered and is a complex moment in a very dumb production which needs to be considered.

The Amazing Racist returns from the previous Lost Reality as a segment, and it is not welcomed, with the titular figure a white guy insulting and offending minorities, here dressing up in a kimono, insulting anyone of Asian descent in a restaurant. One only hopes non-actors were not actually brought into this joke, such as with the chef offered a live dog because he is Chinese. Even if they sadly were not, most of the people just roll their eyes, the female masseurs in particular just finding him dumb in one sequence where he goes to a parlour. Sadly this segment, like in the prequel compilation, does return throughout, insulting Mexicans in the next. He is antagonising cooks to the point they throw tomatoes at him, rightly as he even endangers food hygiene by trying to have a siesta on a kitchen top or touching the food, and drives men wanting to work on the back of a pickup truck to the immigration offices as a joke. This later segment does, in rare time in Lost Reality 2, lead me to think of more meaningful things from the material, a reminder that whilst this was made in 2005, the relationship the United States has had with Mexico became much more of a political issue into the 2010s, making this unfortunately in its own way still relevant. These segments in general thought, throughout both Lost Reality works, baffled me in how this was deemed good enough material to return to the most, let alone that it's dancing over this touchy material has made it something many would find offensive regardless of taste.

Project Redlight, in which porn meets films students, has the later unexpectedly finding themselves having to film on a porn set. That they mock two male students is actually funny, but if the reviews of segments for this sequel feel significantly shorter, this is likely because not many of them, ironically, stick in spite of the first Lost Reality having been egregious at times to sit through, even in mind that Lost Reality 2 is much longer and, presumably, with more to work with. Beer Goggles though from that title is one not to look forwards to. Meant to be a Japanese show sold to the West, which adds a stereotype, it involves how much a man must drink to find women not deemed attractive so. It is crass, and back to the Japanese game show stereotype, it does not look the part either and is insulting; yes, I once saw, in my youth, clips of a show where poor Japanese contestants were forced to sit on cactus, but Japanese game shows have unfortunately been used as an excuse for a lot of jokes about the Japanese being weird when they are merely a piece of the culture, not even bothering to choose something which might be their type of material, usually with those aforementioned cactus or how Takashi's Castle, a show with Beat Takashi Kitano of all people the host of a show of usually painful obstacle courses, pushed athletic challenges where you could get hurt yourself rather than demean other people. Not helping either is the outro; for this sequel, rather than text, male comedians introduce and epilogue from each segment, most of them trying to be deliberately shocking with very little success, the joke about picking up women from the Battered Women Centre probably the first wince for me in the work by this point.

Scare Me is drunken college males trying to scare random people, running amuck in a bowling alley or at a cemetery, which is meant to look as obnoxious as possible, though it does raise a question of, depending on the target audience, what the target of ridicule is as, to be mean myself, I wonder if the target audience could be similar to these figures of ridicule here. In a similar vein of a work created by unlikable people, Lost Reality 2 then reminds one that, back in the mid-2000s, Bum Fights (2002) and its sequels was once a thing. Infamously a real work where people bribed real homeless men to fight and play a part in humiliating stunts, it was a controversial work which never was even allowed to be released in my country of the United Kingdom and got the creators, rightly, into legal proceedings for the sake of the homeless people involved, becoming something referred in popular culture for a tiny bit of time. Lifestyles of the Poor and the Homeless, parodying this, follows a similar series of humiliating and disgusting competitions for the homeless where the production are secretly going to only pay them a $1 dollar but lie that they will earn more. The question here admittedly is where the joke is - am I too soft hearted to find this dark humour funny, or is it just mean?

By Swing House, which has probably happened in an online show where couples are brought to a house to live together and have sex as swingers, even the introductions feel lazy by now in among the bad jokes and the anti-swinger mentality. A paradox is found too as the tantalising point is imaging a lot of naked beautiful women up to a lot of sex with other peoples' husbands, but suggesting that having a polyamorous and progressive sex life is a bad thing. Thankfully, you get immediately afterwards a quirky and odd segment which was entertaining. Discarded in the trash can according to its lore, Boner Boy is a man who is constantly happy but has a constant boner, probably a medical condition to have checked or is just one he has and has to live with, becoming almost like a ridiculous take on having a life effecting physical condition, one which never comes off as tasteless. It is a childish joke, but it is the more interesting premise throughout this as the titular guy is actually in a state of happiness few ever have. He is doing well, he has a beautiful girlfriend who loves him and, prominently, she does not bat an eyelid in the slightest at his condition, with everyone else taken aback by a comically large submarine in his tiny pants. As he goes to yoga or a tailors' store for trousers, it does not cause medical concerns to his day-to-day life which just adds to the humour. This, in its weird sweetness, playing with an immature joke but at no one's expense baring the people taken aback by him, is what I wished these Lost Reality projects were actually about, unless they bothered to make reality television parodies not for cheap shock jokes but to capture the medium and take the piss out of it.

Dumpster Dinners, following on, is also actually funny even if not laugh out loud hilarious, because for a short weird joke, of a reality cooking game show where chefs have to find leftover food in dumpster bins and re-cook it, hiding it as specials to see if customers will not notice, is again not for shock humour and actually entertaining as a strange joke segment. By this point, the realism of creating fake reality television shows has wavered now entirely, especially as most of these segments have not really come off as material in tone you would even try to sell to broadcast, let alone actually do. This would be the ultimate challenge mind as a chef, even in not hygienic and recommended to try, a reminder of how much food in real life is actually wasted. I do wonder if they got actual chefs for this, or what the leftovers were made of, if not real waste food, or if real customers were tricked into eating these dishes. Even if they look better cooked then you would think, it would probably be not recommended to try these aforementioned dishes unless you were willing to take the risk. It is funnier, rather than a crass un-PC joke, to imagine trying to sneak these dishes onto peoples' tables, strange gross humour which does not neither need the outros either to try to make them funnier.

Payback in contrast, whilst likely to be funny on paper, when acted out is not comfortable with even an amateur idea of how trauma can affect children, in which you have a show where parents get revenge on their children in mean pranks. With the production values in recreating reality television have fallen considerably, the premise is not funny in the least if you have a soul. It does include adult children, which is still cruel, including the abrupt twist ending of a father informing his son he is gay, but it is at least not as bad as traumatising a young girl, even if spoilt, by leaving her intentionally lost in a store looking for her parents. Make of that as you will reader.

Based on a Norwegian show, those presuming Europe is foreign with its own weird cultural habits, we again end up with the paradox of wanting to have scintillating female nudity and casual sex but feeling it has to be a joke, or something weird even to the masculine target audience this was sold too. Foreign Exchange Student has a Pakistani male student with a very sexually open family trying to seduce him. The only really interesting thing to actually say about this is that it is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem (1968), in which a stranger seduces an entire family, if inverted, and yes that is a deeply out of place high minded film reference to try to crowbar into this material, only to try to have anything of worth to go with. M**get Wars does not help, as I am deliberately censoring that title, not because I will do all the time out of respect of any person with dwarfism, but because yes, it is tasteless to use that phrase, and the censorship is to deliberate emphases how Lost Reality 2 just dwindles in crud every time it gets to a passingly fun idea or two. Imagining American Gladiators, or the British show Gladiators, but where people with dwarfism compete is not inherently funny, actually with the potential to be profound as anyone could complete the games in this. The joke though, the gladiators the people with dwarfism, the competitors not and the basketball hoop for one game unfairly too high, is run into the ground to tastelessness. The outros really stink up the place with their more provocative, empty lines at this point as well.

Another Money segment thankfully helped the mood by now, in which we are introduced to Chewie Bravo, an attempt to replace Little Prince in the first Lost Reality; he cannot hold a candle to the later, but bless him he tries, particularly as nothing is spiteful in the money challenges involving him, such as carrying him over a street and back in 30 seconds, or eating a hotdog out of his arse crack, which is just evidence of how, men always taking the challenges, dumb men are. In that later case though, there is even bravery in its own way, in also willing to floss their teeth afterwards with one of Bravo's pubic hairs for additional dollars. It is not mean, cruel or aged badly, just ridiculous. This was the era of Jackass, the famous show of guys like Johnny Knoxville trying painful or dumb stunts themselves, and I would not be surprised that it would age a lot better in hindsight than the more politically incorrect and provocative comedy of the mid 2000s. Somehow, in knowledge to one infamous moment, where one of them inserted a toy car up their own anus for real, whilst not recommended, that act is probably more worthwhile than more Amazing Racist over the end credits, where he encouraging his son to throw things at a Mexican man selling oranges. A lot of the issue with Lost Reality is that, at the time, a lot of this humour was felt acceptable, and even into the 2010s, irony helped make it still apparently palatable when it was clearly not. I would not be surprised, if I went to something like Jackass, the show and the following films, as well as more work like this for contrast, the later is actually less likely to be funny than, as mentioned, a man willing to insert objects up himself as a sign of bravery and not involving anyone else baring a confused doctor.

When Lost Reality, both 1 and 2, just decided to be gross or silly there were actually things of worth; most of the time it was not, and having the hosts admit the work was terrible is just sidestepping of the material your production, created and co-produced by Scott Kalvert, willingly funded to make. Even encouraging people to send their own work in at the end, with an actual address, just feels a desperate sign of this as, notably, this did not involve The Jay & Tony Show, a duo of Jay Blumenfield and Tony Marsh behind real reality TV shows who worked on the first, even its own premise mostly abandoned by the end. The real mistakes of these two projects were that they were just lazy and ill thought-out jokes. For the little fun I did get, there was a lot of pain to endure too.