Worst. Movie. Ever.

I walked out in the middle of a movie last night.

Sadly, that’s a first for me. I cannot recall ever having done that in the past. And I’ve seen some pretty bad movies. I’ve seen some wretchedly offensive movies – Reservoir Dogs springs to mind. I would have walked out on that one, except I was getting paid to review it. Now, when I only see movies that I choose to see, I think I’m generally pretty good at avoiding the fouler stuff.

I can remember turning off movies in the middle when I’m watching them at home. But if I take the effort to get in a car, buy a ticket, and sit down in a darkened theatre to watch a flick, I’ve always been willing to tough it out.

Last night, though, I discovered a film so repugnant, so mindless, so reptilian, so achingly offensive, that I couldn’t stomach ingesting another second of that bile into my system.

What was the movie? None other than Adam Sandler’s latest magnum opus, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

I know, I know. I should have known better. The reviews are wretched. But I ignore reviews when it comes to Adam Sandler movies. For the most part, Sandler is adept at delivering dumb, silly fun that doesn’t click with critics, and, usually, his stuff makes me laugh. I like his pseudo chick flicks with Drew Barrymore – The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates. I really like his dumb macho idiot movies – Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and The Waterboy. I even liked the really stupid Mr. Deeds. There’s a genuine warmth to much of what Sandler does, and the childish gross-out humor usually fits within the framework of my own stunted adolescent sense of humor.

Sandler has disappointed me at least once before, though – his son of Satan comedy, Little Nicky, was a laugh-free exercise in grotesquerie. And Zohan makes Little Nicky look like a Merchant Ivory film.

The premise is that Zohan is a superheroic Israeli commando who wants to be a hairdresser, and, for reasons unexplained and unexplainable, he bangs every old lady that comes into his salon. That’s it. That’s the whole movie. Minus the elderly sex, it might be a reasonably funny premise for a four minute Saturday Night Live skit, but there’s just not enough Hamburger Helper in the world that can reasonably pad this sucker out for an hour and a half.

The first twenty minutes, which require spending too much time staring at Sandler’s naked butt and his artificially enhanced “package,” actually have their moments. But once Zohan arrives in New York and starts humping every geezer chick he meets, the whole thing loses its appeal very, very quickly.

I kept hoping that he’d move on from the joke, that the idea of seeing a seventy-year-old woman licking Adam Sandler’s foam-covered nipples or lingering camera shots of Lainie Kazan’s massive naked buttocks would fade as we got into the real plot. But after a solid half hour of this, it became clear that this was the movie. All of it. And it just kept getting worse. He was simulating ejaculation with conditioner bottles, all the while fondling and groping and diddling. And the licking! So much licking! Somebody stop the licking!

The saddest part was watching these ladies degrade and demean themselves for cheap laughs. Ha ha! You’re old! Who would want to lick you? Many of these women have had respectable careers in Hollywood – I recognized Charlotte Rae from The Facts of Life, for instance – and they don’t seem to mind being the butt of a filthy joke, which usually involves their own very old butts. I guess there might be a natural audience for this - if you’ve always wanted to see Adam Sandler rub up against Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life like a dog in heat, then this is the movie you’ve been waiting for.

It’s rated PG-13, which demonstrates that the rating system is a complete and utter waste of time. I would rather have sat through a slew of F words than five minutes of geriatric canoodling. I went with my brother-in-law, who has an equally juvenile sense of humor. He was the one who first suggested we leave, although I would have been happy to get out of there long before I finally did.

The irony is that Sandler himself isn’t getting any younger. He’s already in his 40s, and he’d do well to attempt a transition to roles that don’t require so much footage of his tuckus. Mocking the elderly doesn’t work as well when you hit middle age.

Kung Fu Panda is still good, though. Go see that.