REMEMBER THAT TIME I WON AN OSCAR? Gooding, Shannon (Photo: Getty Images)

It's a tale of a 13-year-old boy (Spencer Breslin) with male pattern baldness, a tiny version of a 50-year-old, who's trying to fit in at a new school in a new town. The concept is hysterical on paper, but the execution did not work at the film's premiere in Manhattan this week. Exacerbating problems with the predictable script, clichéd jokes, and atrocious acting were producer Morris Levy and director T. Sean Shannon, who ruined nearly every moderately humorous scene (and there were precisely four, that we counted) by shouting, "Hey. HEY! Watch what he's gonna do with his hands!"

We should have seen this coming when Shannon cracked awful jokes before screening the movie. "I rode in a limo over here, which was the first time I've been in one. It was cool because it had a bar, but it was a gay bar." (Try the veal.) Add to the experience the atrocious sound in the theater—staff couldn't get it loud enough during the first 20 or so minutes. Top it off with one Steve Gutenberg appearance, and you're in hell.

The film's supporting cast—Ally Sheedy, Cuba Gooding Jr., Rachel Dratch, Chris Parnell, Colin Quinn and more—do their best to make the movie watchable, but they weren't given much to work with. The film looks like it was shot in a backyard with dad's 1998 camcorder. We overheard Breslin at the after party tell one reporter, "Everything I do is old man. I act like an old man all the time, which is why I think the movie worked so well." Poor kid ... wonder if he disliked it as much as we did.