Review by Peter Lynn View This Trailer When Punch-Drunk Love came out earlier this year, audiences were terrified by the seemingly all-too-real threat of Adam Sandler becoming a serious actor of actual artistic worth. Eight Crazy Nights, then, is both the sound of exhaled breath of relief at a crisis averted, and the sound of Sandler apologizing like hell for scaring us like that. One step forward, two steps back, eight crappy nights. Our trailer opens (and I call it "our" in a general sense; don't worry, no one is implying you purposely went out and bought your own copy), we are shown the idyllic little town of Dukesberry, complete with carolers, falling snow, and extremely out-of-scale ice sculptures of Santa Claus and a menorah, suggesting either that Santa is the size of a candelabra, or that the Jewish faith revolves around the maxim "Go big or go home" when it comes to holiday accessories. "This holiday," the opening voiceover promises, "before the trees are trimmed, before the candles are lit... a very special man has something to say." We're then treated (I doubt that's the right word) to the sight and sound of an animated Adam Sandler in a Chinese restaurant, discharging a pressurized stream of concentrated belch fumes for about five solid minutes. I can only hope this scene leaves you begging for more, as I suspect it sets the bar for the level of the humor we can expect for the seventy-one minute duration of Eight Crazy Nights. "Please excuse me while I go take shower!" bellows a waiter in reaction. Only twenty seconds into what promises to be an animated gross-out marathon, I already share a similar sentiment. There isn't enough soap in the world, unfortunately. Additionally, who burps this long and this loudly? Does Sandler's character have some kind of gastro-intestinal virus? Is this a problem for him? It's unclear whether the scene is meant to be tragic, but since it certainly wasn't funny, it's entirely possible. We are told that Davey Stone -- our animated Sandler -- hates the holidays. He demonstrates this by swinging around on strings of Christmas lights (risking electrocution), and by crashing a speeding snowmobile into snowmen and the aforementioned ice sculptures (risking serious head and spinal injury). At the risk of getting into psychobabble here, I put forward the equally reasonable hypothesis that Davey simply hates himself. Or maybe his heightened aesthetic sense was simply offended by the ice sculptures' scale problems. Davey's luck runs out when he's nabbed by the cops for his escapades. He's hauled before a judge, who promises to crack down hard on him this time. Guessing from the judge's accent, he -- like most of the other speaking characters in this little town -- is Jewish. That's all well and good, but it's also puzzling. Where is this Dukesberry, anyway? It's not in Israel, because there's an American flag in the courtroom and it's snowing like mad. But I've never heard of small, snow-covered towns in the U.S. with substantial Jewish populations. This isn't what Seinfeld led me to believe at all. Before this can be pondered further, a giggling hairy little gnome jumps up and offers to "straighten this wisenheimer out!" For the sake of the film's premise, we are to imagine that the judge agrees on the spot to the raving interruption of a senior citizen in the middle of the proceedings. I wonder if anyone else was aware that this tactic worked in the courtroom? Now that a precedent's been set, is there anything stopping anybody from just standing up in the middle of a trial and saying "Listen, why don't I take this arsonist off your hands?" or "I'll give this sex offender a good home." The implications are staggering. The hairy little gnome turns out to be human, and named Whitey (a character recycled from one of Sandler's comedy albums). He takes Davey to live with him and his equally gnomish sister Eleanor, ostensibly to teach him the holiday spirit. So, I guess this is supposed to be sort of like the animated A Christmas Carol. As an actor, Sandler lacks the subtlety and nuance of an Alastair Sim; as an animation, he still pales in comparison to Scrooge McDuck's towering performance in the same role. Sandler supplies the voices of the film's three main characters in either a crass attempt to collect three times the take-home pay, or a bid to wrest the title of "Man of 1000 voices" from Mel Blanc. Unfortunately, Sandler's merely a man of three voices -- all of them sounding exactly like Adam Sandler. He uses his normal speaking voice for Davey, his now-familiar screechy voice for Whitey, and does his mediocre best to channel Fran Drescher for Eleanor. Mel Blanc would have almost certainly done a more entertaining job, and he hasn't been alive since Sandler was in 1989's Going Overboard. Speaking of segues, the trailer goes appallingly overboard on the juvenile humor. Three literal examples of toilet humor occur over the course of only two minutes. In one, Eleanor mistakes a paper seat liner for a lobster bib; in another, a hook-handed Jon Lovitz sheepishly admits to occasionally wiping with the wrong hand; in still another, Davey flips Whitey over in a porta-potty, Jackass-style, then uses a hose to freeze the fecal waste to him while tossing off the pithy, Algonquin Round Table-esque "Smell you later, poopsicle." Yes, thank you, we get it. Poop is funny. Good grief, did I actually accuse Sandler of having a "heightened aesthetic sense" before? In what is intended to be the movie's main selling point, we're also treated to a snippet of "an all-new installment of 'The Chanukah Song'." Sandler is sort of grasping the idea here: namely, "The Chanukah Song" is old. It got old fast after the first couple of times you heard it on his second comedy album in 1996. And it was routine, predictable, and barely amusing when the first sequel popped up on his fourth comedy album in 1999. The solution to making "The Chanukah Song" seem less worn-out is not to rehash it after yet another three years in an animated feature, whose only clear reason for existing is to contain yet a third installment. The solution is to just not perform "The Chanukah Song" anymore. But with the type of mind that revels in poop jokes, it's clear Sandler isn't going to catch on to this anytime soon. So, why not turn all his little comedy-album ditties into full-length animated gross-out films? How about Red-Hooded Sweatshirt: The Roller-Coaster Vomiting? The Beating of a High School Spanish Teacher could make for a great reform-school drama chock-full of sexual abuse, a la Sleepers or Bad Boys. Or set the story in a prison washroom moments before the big football game, and get Burt Reynolds to cameo, in The Longest Pee. As for Eight Crazy Nights, Sandler's excremental vision ought to be able to lure back any of his ballcap-wearing meathead fans who walked out of Punch-Drunk Love in confusion. It also ought to be enough to incite the Jewish Anti-Defamation League to launch a lawsuit against Sandler for completely ruining the name of Hannukah. One thing I know the trailer accomplished for certain is warning me to stay the hell away from this animated trainwreck of screechy voices, retread comedy-album-filler, and unfunny poop gags. This movie isn't just about crap. It is crap. RATING: