Comedy is a matter of taste and preference — it’s a deeply personal thing. Which makes it hard for a critic to give a blanket assessment of a specific kind of comedy, especially if it didn’t work for them, but clearly worked for others (the laughter or lack thereof is the indication). “It’s not funny,” the critic says, “well I had fun,” someone else can reply, and then we’re at an impasse.

Which is the dilemma one finds oneself in with “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” a very strange and shaggy Hollywood satire of sorts from David Wain and The State crew, still riding the goodwill of “Wet Hot American Summer” after all these years. If only this were as funny.

“Gail Daughtry” lives in the same world as that iconic summer camp spoof, as well as Wain’s 2014 rom-com parody, “They Came Together,” in that he’s playing with genre convention and expectation, taking well-known norms to the goofiest extremes. But those films hewed more closely to their respective genres, while “Gail Daughtry” is totally scattered, combining crime and spy movie tropes with a fish-out-of-water comedy and a Hollywood send-up. It has far too many ideas for its own good, and yet no ideas that are good enough to sustain this bizarre curio of a comedy.

What’s ironic is that one of the problems driving this wacky plot forward is the characters have to come up with a movie idea to pitch to star Jon Hamm (playing himself of course), leading them to do some pretty inane and shockingly violent things. It’s almost as if Wain and co-writer and co-star Ken Marino had no idea for a movie, then baked their search for an idea into their script, and then turned it into a madcap adventure about a woman on a quest to have sex with Jon Hamm. What an ouroboros!

OK, about the sex quest. Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is a chipper hairdresser from Kansas born without the part of the brain that recognizes sarcasm or irony. She’s a cheerful, Pollyanna-ish naïf whose literal-mindedness is almost as extreme as Amelia Bedelia. Her childhood sweetheart and fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) is the same. She tells him about the concept of the “celebrity sex pass” as a joke, and he promptly boinks Jennifer Aniston at local book reading.

(Nitpicky aside: why didn’t they use the common nomenclature “hall pass”? Is it copyrighted? “Celebrity sex pass” is clunky and sounds like an off-brand version of the well-known slang.)

That infidelity crisis is how Gail ends up in Los Angeles determined to bang Hamm, collecting a motley crew of similarly clueless helpers along the way. There’s her best friend Otto (Miles Guttierez-Riley), her salon bestie; Caleb (Ben Wang), an overly ambitious intern at Creative Artists Agency; Vince (Marino), a screenwriter turned paparazzo with a heart of gold; and John Slattery, as John Slattery, down on his luck. An accidental briefcase swap has a pair of thugs on their tail, in a forgettable and underdeveloped B-plot.

With a parade of celebrity cameos and collaborators in bit parts, “Gail Daughtry” at times feels like an excuse for Wain and co. to make something at home with all of their friends. Fair enough, it’s great to see all these people employed, but what about what we’re watching? Behold, the Los Angeles of the middle-aged working comedian: the CAA lobby, the Chateau Marmont, Griffith Park, etc. And the plot is as half-baked as the pitch they present to Hamm.

What’s actually interesting about this comedy is the distinct streak of despair and even resentment that reveals itself at the climax, a feeling of helplessness and uselessness. Everyone’s been striving to make it in this crazy town: the intern, the actor, the paparazzo. But not even Jon Hamm can help them get a movie made; even he feels inherently powerless. There’s an unexplored anxiety vibrating there that feels the most thematically fruitful, about what it means, some 25 years after bursting onto the scene with a generation-defining comedy, about maintaining the work, the drive, a sense of purpose, after years of strikes, and in the face of a constricting industry. Do they still have it? Is the dream still alive?

Maybe that’s why Wain and Marino need to invent a dreamer stand-in with Gail, a guileless eternal optimist who knows nothing of the craven Los Angeles and accepts everything at face value (though she is filled with a scary bit of rage too). She might behave like she has a head injury, but she’s going to achieve her goal, dammit. “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” might not be as funny as “Wet Hot American Summer” (for this critic), but reframed, it serves as a fascinating status update on life in La La Land for this troupe.

‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexual content, violence/bloody images and language)

Running time: 1:33

How to watch: In theaters July 10

Wainheads will be delighted to see his alums in cameos: Kerri Kenney-Silver, Michael Ian Black, Thomas Lennon, and supporting roles for Zickel and Truglio. A large portion of the cast are his homies. But with Deutch, Gutierrez-Riley, Wang, Slattery, Impacciatore, and yes, Hamm, it’s as if they’re being inducted into a new mad family. Wain and Marino are basically catching Pokémon and hoping they can hold onto the roster (by that logic, yes, Paul Rudd is a legendary Pokémon). The film is anchored by Zoey — everything everywhere all this summer with Voicemails From Isabelle to Minions & Monsters — Deutch in the Dorothy Gale role, exuding a high level of perkiness consistent with the character’s can-do, wide-eyed, midwestern charm and heart.  

A major standout, Ben Wang finally gets to show off his comedic abilities, portraying a self-assured, quick-witted agent who makes me laugh every time he reveals his sheltered upbringing in snappy whines at every inconvenience. Sabrina Impacciatore, who has proven to be a comedic juggernaut in The Paper, is having so much fun hamming it up as the mob boss-esque wicked witch counterpart, torturing her henchmen and deliciously chewing up the scenery whenever onscreen. I don’t think they use her to the height of her comedic prowess, but she’s a delight nonetheless.  John Slattery is the film’s comedic MVP. The way the writers use his over-the-top character for comedy is downright hilarious every time. They use him as either a punchline or a force of nature, and he’s great. This movie is like Mad Men propaganda, and by God, it works. As someone who’s never seen it, Gail allowed me a better appreciation for Slattery and Hamm. 

Man, we don’t deserve Jon Hamm. This is the second time I’ve seen him play a silly, fictionalized version of himself this year (the other being the SXSW crowd-pleasing rom-com Wishful Thinking, which Gail distributor Sony Pictures Classics acquired), and he also voice-acted in his comedic Mayor Jerry role in Hoppers. Maybe working with Wain in 2007’s The Ten was the canon event, but I consider his weird little sex scene with Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids his awakening. Since then, I’ve only seen him as unserious, and it’s delightful. Oz-like in appearance, he’s funny and befitting the film’s overall light, joyful nature.

LAST STATEMENT

Ultimately, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a campy, delightful romp that succeeds as both a distinctive Hollywood‑centric riff and a Wizard of Oz reimagining, retaining a loving, twisted, demented charm. It’s a weird description, but it’s so high‑spirited and light‑hearted despite being strangely ultraviolent. It might as well be a live‑action episode of Smiling Friends (RIP), yet it’s everything the theatrical market needs today. Ten years ago, this would’ve been a studio production rather than an indie Sundance acquisition, but thank God it exists for the big screen. More absurdist Gail Daughtrys for cinemas (not streaming), please, because this is the most fun to be had in a theater all summer, if not the year thus far.

Sam Raimi‘s Evil Dead films and TV series are a fine example of creativity within constraints, playfulness, self-awareness and outright slapstick comedy. The Evil Dead series after Raimi is very, very different. Starting with 2013’s Evil Dead by Fede Álvarez, followed by Evil Dead Rise by Lee Cronin, the new series takes itself more seriously and emphasises pure horror, violence and gore. Some have considered this praiseworthy as it avoids being a mere retread of the old films, but the reception has been mixed.

In Sébastien Vanicek’s Evil Dead Burn, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) loses her abusive husband (George Pullar) to a motor accident. When she goes home to stay with his family, the consequences of the work of their dead grandfather researching the Necronomicon and the Deadites manifest in terrible ways. One by one, the family are turned into the Evil Dead.

Horror is a genre that depends on you relating to the protagonists so you care what happens to them. In the case of Evil Dead Burn, Yacoub does a decent job with the character she’s given, but the gonzo horror elements manifest so early in the film that she may as well be collateral damage in the onslaught, especially as the film’s early point of view is that of her brother-in-law (Hunter Doohan).

Fans of gory violence will get their money’s worth here, but there’s not a lot going on besides that. The film is a descent into madness and carnage that is so resolutely unpleasant that, after some of the early kills, it becomes numbing. It’s hard to gather what the tone is supposed to be, with lots of callbacks to the early films’ style by setting up inevitable kills with Chekhov’s weed trimmer, Chekhov’s fork and every other potentially dangerous prop the camera lingers on. The family are all deeply unpleasant at some level and so their deaths register as meaningless. Yes, the film has the obligatory something to say about how our tendency to ignore domestic abuse creates demons that destroy families, but then absolutely panders to bloodlust by absolutely revelling in some of the most extreme violence imaginable between family members (and a pet). To say this is not a film for the sensitive is to understate things considerably. This is a film that absolutely earns its content guidance warnings.

Is there any comedy? Some, but it feels out of place given the absolute brutality inflicted on the cast. While most of the other films were self-aware about setting up a ludicrously grisly end for a villain as a payoff, in Evil Dead Burn,the kills have very little flair. It’s also hard to know what the rules for getting rid of a Deadite are, as some of them are still upright and chatty after losing most of the contents of their skull and some are dispatched by the repeated application of a blunt object to the head. Towards the end, a McGuffin is added to make the kills final, but before that, who knows?

Should you watch Evil Dead Burn,? It certainly gets vocal reactions from audiences in a cinema, and if you’re a gorehound you’ll be in for a ride. If you’re a horror fan, it’s certainly a horror film, but violent instead of scary. If you’re just a fan of cinema who likes good films whether or not they’re horror films, then this will be an alienating watch. In Evil Dead Rise the decay of the family was more than background noise and factored into the circumstances of the individual deaths, but not here. It has slight pretences of being a film with Themes and Ideas, but in the end it just feels like an excuse to serve up limbs being mutilated, skulls being crushed and any number of stabbings, slicings and gougings rendered with psychopathic visual fidelity. If that’s what you’re after, that’s what it’s got.