By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 13, 2007

I am not making this up. I couldn't make this up. My imagination isn't powerful enough.

I just saw a movie in which a pack of french fries, a wad of ground beef and a milkshake save the world -- or at least, New Jersey -- from a psychotic giant exercise machine built 70,000 years ago by aliens.

"Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters" is a work of either a profoundly transgressive genius or a goofball high on Pez and patio sealant. It could come from no normal collection of brain cells.

The film, the work of Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis -- unclear which is the genius and which the sealant -- is an outgrowth of their below-the-radar (or shall I be honest and say, below- my- radar) television show on the Cartoon Network.

The animated 87 minutes feels pretty much beyond description; only its repercussions can be charted, and they include spastic laughter, drool collecting in your lap, defibrillation, oxygen debt, panic attacks, loss of bodily fluids, until, abruptly, about minute 72, when everything is replaced by tedium, though hilarity returns in the last minute with the line, "I am your mother, a nine-layer bean burrito."

That line also more or less sums up the non sequitur nature of the enterprise, which relies for its considerable humor power on almost-free-associative, bizarre jumps of logic. It's like it was written on a mouse, not a keyboard. It was clicked, not typed.

Does anyone out there really want to watch me try to describe a plot? What are you people, sadists? The movie is too young for plot and I'm too old for it. It seems, more or less, to have to do with three musketeers of the fast-food family who live in a run-down New Jersey house. Hmm, some of it doesn't make much sense. Meatwad moves by turning himself into a wheel and rotating. Shake appears not to be ambulatory but is towed places in a "danger cart" with one real wheel and Meatwad rolling, rolling, rolling up front, providing the go-power. But what about Fries? He just seems to float, although he can lift stuff with his fry-arms, fight martial arts style, run machinery and so forth. And why does he have a goatee and a kind of satanic cast to his face, which is inscribed on the cardboard front of his packet (which encompasses the fries)? Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

Where we are, it seems, is in the post-Robert Smigel world. Smigel, the fabulous wit behind "Saturday Night Live's" TV Funhouse, has pioneered the use of short, logic-free, surrealistic blasts of comedy, usually built around a profoundly lame "story" pushed relentlessly to its logical conclusion and expressed in animation that is, again, profoundly lame and therefore profoundly humorous. Smigel's "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" would be the "Brothers Karamazov" of this niche, though some of the tricks he plays with ambient sound set to anarchistic imagery is also genius beyond description.

Maiellaro and Willis only occasionally rise to Smigel's heights, and the length of their endeavor really presses the patience limit of most non-clinically-diagnosed people. But for a long time -- even most of the time -- it's funny when, say, the Insane-o-Flex machine goes on a "Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" jag in an amusement park and Mr. French Fry (I think; I didn't take any notes, as it seemed ridiculous to be writing down hamburger dialogue) manages to shut it down by riding to the top of the Python Roller Coaster and zapping it with magic electricity.

I should add that the movie begins and ends with a far more conventional bit of animated satire, in which the beloved dancing refreshments are overcome and beaten by a heavy metal band of other refreshments, and sing a song the likes of which you never thought you'd hear from singing ice cream cones.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (87 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for crude and sexual humor, violent images and profanity.