Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights (PG-13, 2002)

Thirty-three-year-old Davey Stone (Adam Sandler) is an angry drunk living alone and hating the community, the holidays and himself. When his destructive behavior lands him in front of the judge and a jail sentence, Whitey Duvall (also Adam Sandler), the endlessly good hearted youth basketball coach, intervenes to help Davey find his inner-adult. Through flashbacks, Davey at 12 years old (Adam Uhler) is revealed to be a sweet and thoughtful kid with loving parents, a best friend/girlfriend, Jennifer, and a talent for basketball. It was his inability to come to terms with the loss of his parents that took Davey down the path to becoming the heavy-drinking town miscreant. Whitey's attempts to put Davey on the straight and narrow path are aided by Eleanor Duvall (also Adam Sandler), Whitey's twin sister, and the reappearance of Jennifer (Jackie Titone).

8 CRAZY NIGHTS is a bit of an enigma. In the Venn diagram of movie goers, Adam Sandler fans are not an easy overlap with those who cherish holiday musicals. This lame attempt at comedy is more likely to appeal to the former than the latter. Unleashed by the medium of animation, Sandler's raging little boy humor takes on an aura of threatening menace, tempered only by Davey's 11th hour revelation, which does little to heal the wounds inflicted along the way. Unlike his personas in The Waterboy, Little Nicky, Happy Gilmore, or numerous Saturday Night Live skits, Davey -- Adam Sandler's proxy -- is seldom the object of the comical abuse, but it is instead the diminutive and furry Whitey who is the town's whipping boy. While Davey's equal opportunity hatred is (somewhat) explained, the treatment of the physically challenged Duvall twins by the town rings of a darker, crueler humor.

Families looking for something to watch together should steer well clear, unless appreciation of outhouse humor is a family tradition. Clearly, this movie, with its taunting mockery of the physically challenged, its very graphic port-o-potty jokes and its drunken binges, is also not for animation fans seeking Disney's sweet concoctions or Pixar's wry wit. Older teens looking for the extreme edge of South Park will not be appeased by the suburban softness of fart jokes. All of which probably narrows the circle of appreciative audience members to those who want to see a feature length movie along the lines of skits from Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Animation Festival.