Imagine being trapped in a roomful of hyper actors who won't stop shouting bad jokes until you laugh, goddammit, laugh. A nightmare? No, it's Oscar, a strenuously unfunny farce that stars Sylvester Stallone as Angelo "Snaps" Provolone, a Thirties gangster trying to go straight.

The action icon is understandably eager to show his lighter side, but ham-handed director John Landis (Coming to America) can't channel the energy of his star or anyone else in the large and misguided cast, including Ornella Muti as Snaps's wife and Peter Riegert as his gunsel. Clumsily adapted by Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland from a French play by Claude Magnier, the film takes its name from Snaps's former chauffeur, who makes a brief climactic appearance. Any association between this Oscar and the award is purely a mad daydream.

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.