The posters for Burn Hollywood Burn (An Alan Smithee Film) should be a case for the Ombudsman, showing, as they do, Sylvester Stallone and Jackie Chan in a warm embrace - indicating Stallone and Chan star in this film.
But no, Burn Hollywood Burn stars - don't queue up yet - Eric Idle and Ryan O'Neal. I have never liked Idle, but when this film cut to a shot of the actor sitting on a toilet with his trousers around his ankles, addressing the camera, I felt I had hit a low point in cinema.
So did the rest of the audience at Broadway Mongkok, who obviously felt they had been gypped out of their money - I walked into a half-full cinema, but when I turned around as the credits rolled, I realised I was the only person left in the house.
Burn Hollywood Burn, with or without the toilet interlude, is a curiously awful movie written - so, so badly - by the dreadful Joe Eszterhas, who appears in a cameo. When Hollywood directors want to disown their work, they use the name 'Alan Smithee' on the credits. Burn Hollywood Burn is about a British director who is really called Alan Smithee (Idle).
When a dastardly producer (O'Neal) takes final cut on the movie Trio - starring Stallone, Chan and Whoopi Goldberg in the tiniest of cameos - Smithee steals the negative and threatens to burn this US$200 million (HK$1.5 billion) production. Burn Hollywood Burn is supposed to be a satirical look at the process of Hollywood big budget film-making; an insider's view stuffed with cameos and addressed to camera in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge style. I work around the movie industry and I did not recognise half the cameos, did not understand most of the references, and did not care about the few that I 'got'.
You may just leave the cinema thinking Burn Hollywood Burn is filled with bad actors, like the old-time producer or the private investigator who tries to track down the negative. I know the producer is played by the mythic - and scary looking - Robert Evans, while Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein is the PI. That does not make them any better.