Editor's note: It's my pleasure to introduce Dawn Taylor as a new writer here at Film.com. Her fans already know her as a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued film writer at The Portland Tribune, In Focus, eFilmCritic, DVD Talk, and the late, great DVD Journal. Dawn reviewed her first film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, at age 9, pronouncing it "not without charm, but such a deviation from the book that only hardcore Dick Van Dyke lovers will succumb to it's treacly charms." She has continued to take a similarly jaundiced view of popular movies ever since.

The question that film critics are most frequently asked is "Would you rather write a positive review or a negative one?" Only slightly less frequent is the question, "When are you going to pay your bill?" since we're almost always broke and often distracted by weighty matters like how to spell "mise en scène" and whether we have enough Oreos to get through the afternoon.

The answer to that second question is "On Friday, I promise." The answer to the first is that while most of us genuinely enjoy ripping a terrible film to shreds, before we get to that part we have to actually sit through the bad movie. All of the bad movie. No matter how gut-wrenchingly horrid the experience, no matter how intellectually insulting, no matter which former Saturday Night Live cast member is the star, we're not allowed to get up and leave before the end credits roll because it would violate the Honorable Film Critics' Code of Honor. And no one, not even the nastiest film critic with the biggest, sharpest ax to grind, wants to sit through a terrible movie from which they're not allowed to leave.

Which brings us to Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, an appalling, revolting, thuddingly dumb movie to which I already lost two valuable Oreo-eating hours of my life when it was released to theaters. It's actually something of a surprise that it's been issued on DVD, as it's so jaw-droppingly awful that all extant copies should have been burned in a ritual fire, and then the ashes buried in a lead-lined chamber deep below the Mojave Desert so that no one need be exposed to its foul stench ever again. Why this did not happen, I have no idea. Satan may have been involved.

Professional irritant Martin Lawrence plays Jenkins, a smarmy, full-of-himself talk-show host/self-help guru who must return home to rural Georgia for his parents' 50th wedding anniversary. He brings his equally obnoxious Survivor-winning fiancée (Joy Bryant), and the humiliation begins almost immediately when she spills beet juice all over his white track suit on the plane (because who doesn't drink beet juice on an airplane?), the airline loses his luggage, and he's forced to buy hideous clothes in the airport gift shop. Oh, the hilarity.

Written and directed by Malcolm D. Lee (Roll Bounce), the script makes sure that no crotch goes un-kicked, no skull goes un-cracked, and no personal insult goes un-flung. "Jokes" involve Jenkins' desire to eat barbecue but having to hide it from his vegetarian fiancée, the family dog engaging in physically improbable, disturbingly graphic sex with the fiancée's poodle, and a lifelong rivalry between Jenkins and a car-dealer cousin named Clyde (Cedric the Entertainer), which ends up in an obstacle-course race ... where more crotches are kicked, more skulls are cracked, and more lame insults are flung. Throughout, Lawrence seeks to increase the comedy by waving his arms, doing funny voices, and displaying that cross-eyed face that he believes is funny.

Making it all the more unbearable is that Jenkins' siblings are as obnoxious as he is -- and not in a funny, laugh-at-the-jerk way, but in such a manner that invites one to track down the actors who played them, introduce oneself, and then smack them across the face with a month-old dead fish while shrieking, "This is what watching Roscoe Jenkins was like!'" The worst of the lot is his sister, played by the aggressively unfunny "comedienne" Mo'Nique as a Bible-thumping, man-hungry train wreck who's made all the more horrid by the garish, ill-fitting outfits in which she's costumed. On the one hand, it seems a shame that she's the object of so many mean-spirited, idiotic fat jokes. On the other hand, her character is so vile, and Mo'Nique herself is so grating, that one can't feel pity for her. And since she's the engineer of most of Jenkins' more distasteful humiliations, by the time the pair get into a fist-fight it's a toss-up as to which one you'd rather see beaten to a bloody pulp.

It's worth noting that the esteemed actors James Earl Jones and Margaret Avery play Jenkins' parents, because it points out how there still are far too few roles in motion pictures for black actors of this caliber. One can only assume that if either had received offers to act in another movie -- any movie at all, including sequels to Snow Dogs or a big-screen version of The Jeffersons directed by Uwe Boll -- that they would have jumped at the chance rather than appear in something so repulsive, insulting and utterly without merit as this piece of dreck.

Should you be unlucky enough to watch it on DVD, the Universal disc actually offers extended scenes, on the chance that you feel that the dog-humping, crotch-kicking and humiliation comedy just didn't last long enough. There are also a number of outtakes featuring the talented comic Louis C.K., who may have been cut from the film because he's actually funny. There's also an alternate opening, a music video, and a couple of "making of" featurettes.

Dawn Taylor writes about movies when she's not avoiding her own obnoxious family.

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