Underground Comedy Movie

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The Underground Comedy Movie was a film directed by Vince Offer and released in 1999, starring the director himself, Slash, Gena Lee Nolin, Karen Black, Angelyne, Joey Buttafuoco, Mongo Brownlee, Rebecca Chaney, Barbara Snellenburg, Lightfield Lewis, and Michael Clarke Duncan. It features music by NOFX and Guttermouth, among others.

The film itself mainly consists of tasteless, lowbrow skits (such as Gena Lee Nolin loudly using the restroom and a superhero named "Dickman", who dresses in a giant penis costume and defeats his enemies by squirting them with semen), created by the director, based on sketches Offer originally performed on a cable access show he had hosted. The film went direct to video and consistently rates in IMDB's bottom 100 movies.

[edit] The Church of Scientology

In 1997, while production was ongoing, the Church of Scientology allegedly began a large-scale smear campaign against Offer and his film (Offer was a Scientologist at the time). The director claimed the Scientologists' "Celebrity Center" in Hollywood labeled him a "criminal" (based on the rules of Scientology) and threatened his Scientology friends in the movie business with "condemnation" punishment that could be lethal to their careers if they did not write malicious reports against Offer.

Although the film was released and screened in 1999, Offer was ruined financially by 2002 and home video distribution plans were shelved. Offer (who had previously been a successful businessman), began selling vegetable choppers at swap meets in order to support himself and raise money to complete his film project. Within a few months, he had earned enough to resume production, and the movie was finally completed, released, and marketed entirely on late-night informercials which Offer funded with his earnings from the swap meet vegetable chopper sales. The film has sold in excess of 100,000 copies and Offer has used the proceeds from sales to file a lawsuit against the Church of Scientology.^[1]