Say It Isn't So (2001)

Young man (Chris Klein) sits in a barber's chair, and the hapless cutie (Heather Graham) who is cutting his hair accidentally slices off the top of his ear. (And they're the two nicest people in town.) A stroke victim (Richard Jenkins) rasps obscenities through a robovoice box and gets pelted by bird doo, and a drifter (Orlando Jones) who looks like Jimi Hendrix and talks like Stepin Fetchit gets hit by a car, at which point his two false legs go flying off -- not the last time, either, that he'll be reduced to his stumps.

Say It Isn't So is a black comedy in the form of vicarious serial punishment. The movie, produced by the Farrelly brothers, keeps coming up with new ways to jolt, pelt, humiliate, and generally torture its characters, yet there's so little pace or invention to the way it's all staged that the synthetic mock cruelties barely register as jokes. They're Wacky Pack violations, numbing in their blatant ''Get a load of this!'' overkill. In the ultimate bit of hyped naughtiness, Klein and Graham fall in love, only to discover -- or so they think -- that they're actually brother and sister. The gag might have rebounded more if Klein, the gifted young actor from ''Election,'' didn't have all the presence here of invisible ink, or if Graham's shiny storybook beauty didn't just make you wish you were watching her in a different movie.

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