OK, so we all know that Alan Smithee is the name that directors use when they want to disassociate themselves from their bad movies, and that Joe Eszterhas is one of the people most associated with such movies. But in this case, a real director named Alan Smithee (Eric Idle) makes a movie so downright God-awful - it stars Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Chan, and Sylvester Stallone as kick-ass mother****ers - that he destroys it. The rest of the movie portrays interviews with insiders putting in their two cents about the whole ordeal.

This is certainly a devastating look at Hollywood, and they pull no punches here. I think that when "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn" came out, some critics said that it was as bad as the movie portrayed. But I thought that they did a good job. A particularly funny scene...well, I'll just tell you that it's associated with Keith Moon.

So why is it that Hollywood likes to make fun of itself so much?

.... Indeed they can sir , same as anyone can put a crap movie on the screen too , but to be able to a film as gut wrenchingly bad as BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN onto the screen must have been the work of an insane genius . Think about the premise for a moment - It`s a mockumentary featuring director Alan Smithee , it`s a mockumentary , a mock documentary , so why bother to cast well known faces like Eric Idle and Ryan O Neal etc in roles ? The reason SPINAL TAP worked so well is because the audience believed they were watching a real documentary about a real heavy metal band from Britain , no one is going to be fooled by this movie which seems pointless

There's enough of a shameful cloud hanging over "Burn Hollywood Burn", but you just have to see it to know exactly why. And it's almost awe-inspiring how badly this has been put together. It's a long 86 minutes, never funny, and it totally squanders its roster of name actors.

Among them, Ryan O'Neal fares the worst, while Richard Jeni and non-actor Harvey Weinstein emerge unscathed. Somewhere in all of this is a film industry satire, but there's no consistency in the cutting and the parade of talking heads gets old very quickly.

The irony in the title (that Arthur Hiller himself became the Alan Smithee gimmick that this is skewering) is the funniest thing about this movie.

I can't recommend this to anyone.

3/10