"Speed-Dating"

Bottom Line: Incoherent parable about sexual immaturity offers strung-together cliches and a few remarkably bad performances.

NEW YORK -- An amateurish comedy that sets up straw-man playboys to knock them over with the power of love, "Speed-Dating" seems designed to exploit the black indie theatrical circuit but hardly merits even a DVD release.

From its overwhelmingly beige visual palette to a script with no clue how to connect cause to effect, the movie is as clumsy as its heroes' badly explained scheme to get laid by running a Speed Dating night at a nightclub they own. The two central ladykillers will, of course, meet women who tame them but only after a parade of misogynist and homophobic cliches that are interrupted by bizarre subplots whose cluelessness about mental illness and homelessness will give offense on those fronts as well.

A non-sequitur appearance by Chris Elliott, who waddles around as if in gastric distress and is for some reason painted blue, can only have been viewed by the actor as some kind of meta joke, but it's inexplicable even to viewers familiar with his history of surreal pranks.

Opens: Friday, Oct. 1 (Rockstone Releasing)
Production company: Eizzil Entertainment
Cast: Wesley Jonathan, Chico Benymon, Leonard Robinson, Mekita Faiye, Vanessa Simmons, Roxanne Reese
Director: Joseph A. Elmore, Jr.
Screenwriter: Joseph A. Elmore, Jr.
Producers: Mekita Faiye, La Monde Byrd
Executive producers: Faye Banyard, David Woessner, Mikhael J. Davis
Director of photography: David Daniel
Production designer: Kody Busch
Music: Evan Hornsby
Costume designer: Genelle Brooks
Editor: Terry Walters
Rated R, 99 minutes