Grade: D-

If you thought that Ice Cube’s recent Christmas-themed comedy, “Friday After Next,” was mean-spirited, wait until you check out “Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights.” This animated musical modernization of the old “Christmas Carol” formula about a holiday-hating ruffian transformed into a good guy is an astonishingly tasteless combination of gross sentimentality and simple grossness. By turns nasty, smarmy, violent, vulgar, dumb and weepy, the picture is one of those stinkers that virtually compel you to watch them with your mouth hanging open–and not because you’re laughing.

Sandler voices multiple roles in, as well as serving as one of the writers of, this bit of grotesquerie. He is, most prominently, Davey Stone, a thirtyish drunken lout who takes pleasure in destroying the Christmas/Chanukah spirit of everybody in the small town of Dukesberry, and who talks a lot like the regular potty-mouthed Adam himself. On the other hand, Sandler employs a strangulated falsetto that’s grating beyond belief for the character of Whitey, a sweet-tempered old codger who remembers Davey as a good-natured twelve-year old basketball whiz before the tragic death of his parents–the event that soured him on life. When Davey’s arrested for his latest destructive rampage and threatened with ten years in the clink, Whitey persuades the judge to make him do community service instead, as the old man’s assistant ref in the youth community basketball league. Whitey and his pudgy sister Eleanore (voiced by Sandler as well, this time as a thick caricature) also take Davey in when his trailer’s burned down by an irate guy he’s bested on the court. But Davey’s redemption won’t be achieved until he reconciles with his erstwhile girlfriend Jennifer (Jackie Titone), a hard-working single mom to darling tyke Benjamin (Austin Stout), and overcomes his own anger to persuade the town to recognize all the sacrifices Whitey’s made on its behalf for some thirty-five years. (Sandler also provides the “voices” for some deer that show up periodically to offer magical assistance to Whitey when he’s in trouble, but the less said about them the better.)

Theoretically a story along these lines could have been turned into something reasonably attractive, but theory hasn’t become practice here. The script is a dreadful combination of the abysmally sappy and the appallingly crass, with dialogue and song lyrics so blue that they’ll make almost anyone blush, and an avalanche of gags involving flatulence and excrement so overwhelming that they give the word “gag” new meaning. (Amazingly, the coarseness wasn’t deemed sufficient justification for an R rating from the MPAA; “Nights” is listed as PG-13, but parents are advised that unless you’re happy to have your kids hear gutter language, you should keep them well away from it.) Characters that are meant to be adorable are instead intolerable (e.g., the whining Whitey), while those intended to be unpleasant are nasty in spades. And though it’s nice to have Christmas and Chanukah equally involved in a holiday film, both are pretty much trashed here through the crudest kind of commercialization; the local mall is treated almost like a cathedral, and personifications related to stores like Foot Locker and Victoria’s Secret are depicted as almost angelic beings. (The amount of product placement, incidentally, is phenomenal.) Voices for some secondary characters are provided by Sandler’s old SNL buddies, but without any distinction, and the quality of animation, apart from some snowy sequences, is at best mediocre.

There are two extras that deserve mention. The feature is preceded by a two-minute featurette involving Sandler’s bulldog out alone on the town; it’s sort of like a canine version of “Jackass,” but offers a couple of mild chuckles. Then, over the final credits, Sandler warbles a new version of the Chanukah Song. It’s not worth waiting for.

One of the other tunes warbled in “Eight Crazy Nights” is called “Technical Foul.” At least there’s some honesty in that, because the movie itself is certainly foul enough.

D

About halfway into “Extreme Ops,” an extremely silly action movie set in the Tyrolean Alps, ice princess Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, playing a downhill skier fretting over her poor performance on the slopes (not simply as an actress, though she might well bemoan that, too), delivers an extended monologue that’s one of the few reasons to see the movie. She’s absolutely terrible, as usual, and the earnestness with which she tries to deliver the awful lines put in her character’s mouth by screenwriter Michael Zaidan constitutes one of the most egregious examples of unintentional humor you’ll find in a Hollywood product this year.

Otherwise, the only things the picture has to offer are some nice locations and decent cinematography. The sequences of snowboarders and skiers flying down the slopes are nicely photographed, if awfully repetitive. But the plot is so infantile and the characters so uniformly obnoxious that it’s impossible to care about what’s going to happen next. The premise is that a filmmaking crew, headed by a risk-taking cameraman (Devon Sawa), takes up residence in a remote, half-finished resort high in the Austrian mountains, where they intend shooting a commercial showing a quartet of daredevils (Wilson-Sampras, Refus Sewell, Joe Absolom and Jana Pallaske) actually outrunning an avalanche. Unfortunately, the place also houses a Serbian war criminal (Klaus Lowitsch), who’s faked his own death and is apparently plotting to blow up the international tribunal in the Hague. When the crew accidentally catches him on film, he and his repulsive henchmen determine to wipe them out. What follows is a half-hour of chases, as the Americans are pursued by the bad guys who try to shoot them from a helicopter. Much of the action looks very much like bits of “Vertical Limit” intercut with outtakes from “Cliffhanger,” though all the extreme sports stuff will remind you of “XXX,” too (though the avalanche effect in that movie was far superior).

There’s nothing essentially wrong with this kind of implausible, vacuous action fluff, but it really needs human beings who are more interesting than the landscape, and that’s distinctly missing here. Wilson-Sampras’ Chloe is a statuesque joke, and it goes without saying she’s poorly played; Sewell’s super-confident Ian is a strutting bore, and the actor gives him far too much gravity and seriousness. Rupert Graves, in the other hand, is all broad smarminess as the cowardly producer in league with Ian, and Sawa, who’s beginning to look like an unshaven bum rather than a teen heartthrob, overplays the spurned bad-boy bit. Absolom and Pallaske never manage to become even vaguely likable, and Lowitsch, who’s not supposed to, comes across as a cut-rate version of Erich von Stroheim. In any event it’s the stuntpeople who should probably get top billing, since in all likelihood they actually have more screen time than the actors they stand in for. Director Christian Duguay tries all sorts of camera tricks in an effort to inject excitement into the proceedings, but he largely fails; certainly the bad process shots of our heroes speeding in front of the climactic avalanche in the last reel don’t make much of an impression. Special demerits to Normand Corbeil and Stanislas Syrewicz, whose overloud, pulsating score flails away in a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to jazz up the proceedings.

“The whole thing has turned into such a disaster,” one of the crew members complains at one point in “Extreme Ops,” voicing a sentiment with which most viewers will undoubtedly agree. Elsewhere, in one of the more idiotic bits of dialogue, Pallaske’s Kittie instructs Chloe to listen to what the mountain tells her in order to ski well. If you concentrate, you might just hear that mountain sagely warning you to skip this wipeout of a movie.