I watched The Jerky Boys (1995)

This movie was great, almost as good as Dirty Work, better than Screwed and has a similar vibe. It’s about 2 lowlifes from Queens in NYC who get in trouble with the mob.

They have a big montage of all their jobs and the different characters they play. Within those two, the actors probably do about 6 different characters, which is impressive when you include their regular characters.

There’s Tarbash, the Native American voice actor who gets hit and makes funny noises when he gets hit, and also Sol Rosenburg who sounds and acts a lot like Mort from Family Guy. There’s also a gay character, I won’t spoil it, but they use that character to get out of trouble when they’re in a bathroom and the mafiosi are chasing them.

The supporting cast was good but it would have been much better if Kevin Macdonald was the bad guy because his performance is so much better than the guy they hired. I wasn’t intimidated by him and he should be the mob boss.

Some things I didn’t like were that they went to an Egyptian restaurant but the accent was Indian, aren’t accents different there? That seemed like a mistake to me because they already had a sign in front of the restaurant or something.

The cinematography was good and I appreciated the aerial shots of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York taken by a helicopter. If that film had been made today, they probably would have just used a drone.

The music was very good and had a rock song in the middle with a band in a club. Also there was Tony Bennet and Ozzy Osbourne. Tony sings a good cover of ‘Are you gonna go my way’ but Ozzy doesn’t sing. The band in the club plays a bit too long which was surprising because the movie is short and they decided to play that song for a while when they could have done more Tarbash songs.

The plot was interesting and flowed well. It was a bit like Corky Romano’s story about the mafia, but overall I liked this better, although that is also good.

My only other criticism would be that this film didn’t get any sequels because of the chemistry between the two rivals Spade and Farley, but in another way it’s not as slapsticky as they are and is more about how they use their intellect to get out of sticky situations. For example, they use an intercom to confuse their attackers and then use sausages as an escape rope, which is something I hadn’t seen before and could appreciate.

Also, at one point there is a flashback of an old man outside the apartment. That should be at least 40 years ago, but in the flashback he is also old because they used the same actor. So that part is wrong.

There are a few parts that might be triggering, such as an old lady who gets cement shoes as a mother, and a section showing how hot dogs are made out of people.

Overall I would recommend it if you like good characters but don’t mind being confused by too many. There’s also a really funny picture of a baseball game and the guy Brett Weir they don’t like is wearing a shirt that says ‘Bat Boy’ in big letters, it’s things like this that really make this unique and worth the price of admission.

The story basically goes like this: Frank Rizzo is a character that they have and they pretend that he’s a real Chicago man. The cops and the mob are working together, so it’s kind of a Catch-22 for them.

Rizzo got a lot of attention, but I wish the movie was more about Sol or Tarbash because when they scream it’s funnier and I don’t feel uncomfortable. I also wish that instead of playing the characters to get out of trouble, they would fully dress up as them and make the characters more like Austin Powers.

I think that would have been a much better direction to go with this, because as it is, the costumes are just disguises and not their real garb. Then they could have used camera tricks to make both characters talk to each other like The Klumps.

I think it’s because there are 4 writers listed, but only 2 of them were the JB’s. So I think the whole mafia thing was done by the other writers and the funny parts were done by the Boys.

Would be an A+ but no sequels and they could have shown the old tracks more as that’s what I liked the most. A