The pain certainly passes for Wayans but not for the unlucky viewers of Senseless. The irritation will advance by degrees to low-grade lethargy and listlessness, followed by inflammation of the brain and nerve centers. Then the disease will progress and rapidly overtake the victim (93 minutes to be exact), inducing a witless catatonic coma. A more apt title for the film could not have been chosen since exposure to its criminally unfunny horrors with render you senseless indeed...and that's if you're lucky.
Senseless is a misshapen comic vehicle for Wayans, who plays an intense and determined college kid from Bed-Stuy named Darryl Witherspoon. Darryl's spunk gets him into a top notch New York City center of high learning, Stratford University. But he has problems fitting in with the rich, stuck-up fellow students and he has to take a series of low-grade and humiliating part-time jobs a la Hardly Working -- food service worker, feces remover, blood and sperm bank donor -- to support his ma and to make ends meet. Eventually he finds himself in line for a high profile management trainee job at a Wall Street brokerage firm (remember Wall Street brokerage firms?). But also in line for the same job is the nasty and snooty Scott Thorpe (David Spade... who else?) who is favored by recruiter Randall Tyson (Rip Torn). To win the job, Darryl has to pass a competition along with being admitted to an upper crust fraternity and succeed in a college sport. Failing at everything, he agrees to be a guinea pig and test Dr. Wheedon's (Dourif) wonder drug that will improve his senses to a superhuman degree. Of course, the drug works and Darryl starts eavesdropping on conversations with classmates and rival teams. Feeling empowered, Darryl increases the dosage and begins to lose his senses one by one at inappropriate moments. Comic situations ensue.
Spheeris, director of somber and sobering documentaries about lower class rejects like The Decline of Western Civilization, Parts 1, 2, and 3 is slumming as she had previously done with The Beverly Hillbillies and Black Sheep. But Senseless makes her other comedy abortions look Noel Coward drawing room farces by comparison. Satiric possibilities do exist in the premise of the underprivileged Darryl's attempts to make it in a stuffy WASP university environment, but Spheeris misses the boat completely. Rather than develop this comic premise, she makes a complete U-turn and plays it safe stealing liberally from Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey. The drug gimmick shows desperation and Spheeris's freeloading of riffs from other, greater, funnier film comedies betrays more of a concern for quick box office bucks than any desire for comic invention.
Which leaves the cast holding the bag. The performers are pleasant enough, particularly Matthew Lillard as Wayans's whacked out roommate and Tamara Taylor as the fresh-faced but inconsequential love interest. But Spade is poisonous and amphibious. And while Wayans makes a supreme effort to become a second-string Jim Carrey, despite how awfully hard he tries, he only succeeds in being awful.
So, as one human guinea pig who sat through this experiment in psychological torture, I put in a heartfelt call to Wayans and Spheeris: Please give me a lethal injection and put me out of my misery. I have too many abysmal memories from Senseless to last me to the end of days.
