Adam Sandler's Bedtime Stories: Blu-ray Combo Pack ($39.99) wants to be The Princess Bride, a movie about wonderful stories told to adorable tots by an adorable father figure, and Night at the Museum, a series of epic children's fantasies set in the Wild West, Roman gladiator days, and outer space. These scenes look great on Blu-ray and almost justify the price. It's hip that the disk includes a regular DVD, the Blu-ray version, plus another digital version you can watch on your portable player. Very smart policy for a kids' film destined to be watched repeatedly all over the place, pacifying them for months. It's so you don't have to dream up bedtime stories for them yourself.

Bedtime Stories also aspires to a kinder, gentler, less scary PG version of the premise of Coraline: kids' bedtime visions invade real life with real consequences. But really, the movie it's most like is Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part 1, which had no Part 2 because no one could bear it.

Like Brooks, Sandler is a guy who got handed too much money for an episodic time-tripping movie because his movies made so much money before -- over a billion dollars per decade, in Sandler's case. The thing is, as unutterably bad as the movie is in its real-world sequences (full of astoundingly unfunny gags by SNL and Sandler-flick veteran Tim Herlihy), Bedtime Stories is relatively bearable whenever Sandler's character starts telling his bedtime stories to the two kids in his care (who rewrite him at will, adding rainstorms of gumballs and anarchic attack dwarfs).

The real-world part of the movie is insanely complicated. Sandler plays a hotel handyman who's babysitting Courteney Cox's little girl and boy (the phonily cute Jonathan Morgan Heit and Laura Ann Kesling -- why do serial killers and child actors always have three names?). He's also pestered by Cox's neighbor Keri Russell, so he'll have a love interest. But he thinks he wants the Paris Hilton-like daughter (Teresa Palmer, an actress to watch) of his LA hotel-magnate boss (Richard Griffiths of The History Boys). He definitely wants to seize control of the Sunny Vista Mega Nottingham Hotel and take it away from current manager Guy Pearce (in the first role I ever saw him play badly).

The bedtime stories he tells are wish-fulfillment fantasies: in the medieval one, Pearce becomes Sir Buttkiss, and he's Sir Fixalot (a handyman, get it?), seizing control of a castle instead of a hotel. Actually, the first time he tells the story, he calls Sir Fixalot "Mr. Unappreciated," but the boy doesn't understand the word. "What's unameesheated?"

In the nothing-special extras features, we see interviews, bloopers, and deleted scenes revealing that these scenes were hard to shoot. Sandler's lines were more verbose, and child actor Heit confesses that he kept saying girls were "bis-gusting" (disgusting) instead of the line Herlihy wrote, "Girls are bis-crusting," which is slightly dirty in a sniggering way. In one blooper scene, chronic Sandler pal Rob Schneider, who plays a lousy bit part as Chief Runningmouth, ad libs after his horse toots, "My ancestors believe horse fart comes from that direction. Easy! Less alfalfa for that guy." It's as funny as any line in the movie, I'm afraid.

But kids like butt jokes and Adam Sandler in his nice mode. When he hands the kids Cinnabons against their parents' wishes or calls them Mistress Stinky and Master Smelly, medieval kids, or announces, "I smell manure!" the kids watching the Blu-ray may well be in kid movie heaven. I doubt even Sandler fans will like this sort of humor, though he tosses them a few bones: he throws out the books the kids' liberal parents give them, Rainbow the Alligator Saves the Wetlands and The Organic Squirrel Gets a Bike Helmet, muttering, "I'm not reading these Communist books to you guys." He disses Keri Russell for driving a Prius. "Your whole aura reads 'Prius,'" he snipes. Global-warming-denying frat guys love this kind of sentiment. I'm not sure it'll be enough to get them past the aggressive sweetness of the film and its exceedingly uncharming animal hero, the kids' bug-eyed pet Bugsy, a guinea pig with large CGI eyes. "Wow, those eyes would be big on a cow!" marvels Sandler. "Or bowling balls. I can't keep my eyes offa them."

Grown-ups will be able to keep their eyes offa Bedtime Stories. Kids may enjoy it, and maybe they'll like the fantasy sequences better on HD. Nobody will be interested in the extras. But the main advantage of this set is portability.

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