It’s almost become an annual rite of autumn - buy school supplies for the kids, hunker down to watch the Major League Baseball playoffs, carve a scary face into your Halloween pumpkin and sit through an awful film based on a marginally entertaining skit from Saturday Night Live.

Potential viewers of these films break down into two equally disturbing groups – those that watch SNL religiously and feel some bizarre obligation to see each hastily produced film released by Lorne Michaels' production company, and those that don’t watch the show but want to see the film because they’ve heard from co-workers that the skit is “pretty funny.”  Each goes home disappointed, swearing that they’ll never do it again.  But come the following fall, they’re right back in line to buy tickets for the next skit-turned-film debacle.

The apparent purpose of these pictures is to have the main character(s) repeat their catch phrase as many times as possible over a 90-minute span.  It’s a strange concept, considering that a skit needs to be pretty popular to even be considered as feature film fodder.  If it’s popular, that means the catch phrase has already been rubbed into the ground for a couple of years on the show, which should make regular viewers cringe every time the phrase is uttered.

In The Ladies' Man, the phrase is “That sounds real good,” and it’s spoken by ‘70s throwback Leon Phelps (Tim Meadows), the host of a late, late night radio call-in show in Chicago (it’s a public access television program on SNL, but who’s keeping track?).  “The Ladies' Man,” which logs oodles of complaints yet is supposedly popular, is a show where listeners address questions about relationships to Leon, who has a lisp as thick as his Afro and, reportedly, a mighty “wang.”  More importantly, Leon (like Dr. Laura) is idiotic, unintelligent and uneducated, offering his listeners bad advice that usually involves “doin’ it up da butt.”

In the absence of a typical plot, Man floats between two loosely constructed threads.  One focuses on Leon trying to find a job after he’s fired from his radio station (a head-scratching move, considering his show is so popular), while the second involves the relationship between Leon and his seemingly normal producer (Karyn Parsons, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air), who, for some reason, likes him and supports his career.  Leon’s only redeeming quality appears to be an authentic desire to help people.  “I’m like Mother Teresa,” he explains, “but bonin’.”

Man features a subplot where the husbands and boyfriends of women that Leon has bedded band together to hunt down the despicable cad.  The group is called the VSA, and to explain the initials would deprive potential viewers of the film’s only legitimate laugh.  Among the VSA members are Meadows' SNL castmate Will Ferrell and Lee Evans (There’s Something About Mary).

Man was directed by Reginald Hudlin (The Great White Hype) and co-written by Meadows and two other debut scibes, Dennis McNicholas and Andrew Steele.  The script abandons ideas like comic timing and, well, common sense.  There are also cameos from the likes of Rocky Carroll (Chicago Hope), Eugene Levy (Best in Show), former Kids in the Hall stars Mark McKinney and Kevin McDonald and, strangest of all, recent Oscar nominee Julianne Moore.  Billy Dee Williams also has a small role, playing a bartender in a lounge that doesn’t even serve Colt 45.  The horror of it all.

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