Movie review: ‘Moonwalkers’ argues moon landing was fake, but flick winds up proving that there’s no comedy in its world

"Moonwalkers” - 1 star

With Rupert Grint, Ron Perlman.

Tricksters fake the moon landing, and create a genuine bomb. Director: Antoine Bardou-Jacquet. (1:34). R: Drug use, nudity, graphic violence, strong language. At the Village East, and on demand.

You know, of course, that they didn’t really land men on the moon. The CIA hired Stanley Kubrick to shoot the whole thing on a set.

No, that’s not your crazy uncle jabbering away again. That’s the plot of the new movie “Moonwalkers.” Unfortunately.

At least your crazy uncle doesn’t charge you $14 to listen.

“Moonwalkers” is supposedly a comedy. So its clever conspiracy quickly goes disastrously wrong. The agency stupidly picks Kidman, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, to be their go-between; he mistakes Johnny, a bottom-feeding rock promoter, for Kubrick’s agent.

Eventually Kidman and Johnny hire an experimental filmmaker instead, who brings along his own commune of deep-fried followers with acid-washed brains. But when they get to the set, things really get crazy — particularly for the ex-soldier, who starts having back-in-the-jungle flashbacks.

Post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a common subject for laughs these days, but then “Moonwalkers” is not much of a comedy. It is common, though, with a lot of gross-out jokes about bodily functions, fat naked people or both.

Ron Perlman is the hallucinating vet with anger-management issues. Perlman remains a great, formidable presence, and he looks at everything going on around him with withering disgust. I’m not sure he’s acting here.

Rupert Grint is the failed rock promoter. He looks like it’s been a lot of butter beer and sleepless nights since the “Harry Potter” franchise. Of course, if you were making movies like this, you might have sleepless nights too.

Neither actor adds much to the movie except the kind of vaguely familiar name that sometimes brings in funds, if not fans.

It’s a shame because the script is by Dean Craig, who wrote the original “Death at a Funeral.” That movie had bad-taste gags too, but at least it was funny. This movie, after a promisingly dirty, “Yellow Submarine”-style credit sequence, just turns stupid, with sloppy gore and sloppier drug orgies.

Obese men lounge around in tiny underwear. Nasty villains shoot each other at point-blank, head-splattering range. At one point, a character even comes home to find his enemies have decorated his flat with a giant turd.

I’m sure the manager of the Village East cinema knows exactly how that feels.