On DVD

Pauly Shore Is Dead

Reviewed by Christopher Null on Jan 16 2005
DVD Release Date: January 25, 2005

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Christopher Null
Christopher Null
Christopher Null founded Filmcritic.com in 1995.
full bio of Christopher Null
Well, I guess when your career has reached the nadir that Pauly Shore's has, directing a mockumentary about your own death is the sensible thing to do. In the extremely descriptive Pauly Shore Is Dead, Shore finds himself in present-day career hell (and living in his mother's house after the abysmal failure of his FOX sitcom), so he fakes his own death in order to drum up interest in his career. Later, Shore is discovered alive (after a brief resurgence in 'posthumous' popularity), only to find the news of his revival met with disappointment... and legal proceedings.

Shore's movie isn't terribly amusing -- as the single joke wears paper-thin over its 80 mercifully short minutes -- but Shore does pull off a serious coup in recruiting several dozen major celebrities -- Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Vince Vaughn, Pamela Anderson, and more -- to appear in the film as themselves, alongside some lesser-known but equally curious picks -- Heidi Fleiss, Roco Suave, Tommy Chong, and Todd Bridges, to name just a few.

The idea is that Pauly Shore learns about the fickle nature of celebrity through all of this -- explicitly so via a couple of visitations from Sam Kinison's ghost -- and he's convinced by the end to give up his lamebrained 'weasel' schtick and just be himself. What that self is, however, I'm not sure we want to see.

The DVD includes deleted scenes and a commentary track from Shore -- odd, since the entire film is narrated by the guy.

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