Movies You Aught Not Watch: Year One

Movies You Aught Not Watch is a weekly, alphabetical look back at the 52 worst films of 2000-2009. "Year One" is the final entry in the series. In reverse alphabetical order, every entry can be found starting at this page.

"Year One" Rated PG-13 2009

Hearing a Cracker song at the conclusion of 2009’s “Year One” was nice, but Harold Ramis should’ve forgone “I See the Light” given its refrain: “I see the light at the end of the tunnel now / Someone please tell me it’s not a train.”

Playing chicken with Ramis’s latest unendurably dreary excuse for comedy proved more hazardous to health than chancing it on the tracks. Although perhaps it’s appropriate that this look back at lame movies concludes with a film ostensibly about the first losers.

Had “Year One” — a Bible-times romp with Jack Black and Michael Cera — arrived on the heels of Ramis’s “National Lampoon’s Vacation” or “Groundhog Day,” he might have attempted something existential or a takedown of organized religion’s more lurid, violent aspects.

Instead, this dreck was Ramis’s feature-length follow-up to “The Ice Harvest,” with which this list has already been acquainted.

In an era when such satire would be welcomed, Ramis was too busy interrupting biblical incidents like Cain & Abel and Abraham & Isaac in a vapid vaudevillian style.

And when in doubt, the man who once gave us “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack” resorts to making Jack Black eat feces and Michael Cera pee in his own mouth. Yes, this is Harold Ramis. Yes, this is comedy at the level of a monkey on YouTube.

You get the sense all involved hoped to offer some sort of ribald spin on a Bing Crosby-Bob Hope movie. In that sense, consider “Year One” the road to hell.