Never have an opinion about a film you have not seen. Prior to this week I never had one about Jason Bloom’s Biodome, a 1996 comedy starring Stephen Baldwin and Pauly Shore. Certainly I knew of the film by its repute – and by its 4 per cent Rotten Tomatoes score – and that reputation had me fairly convinced that I would not enjoy it. That said there have been plenty of films over the years that I have expected to dislike and wound up enjoying very much, and I like to think that my taste is fairly broad, so when given the opportunity to watch Biodome¹ I was happy to try it.

It is a terrible film. This is not simply a matter of taste: Biodome belongs to a specific sub-genre of movie comedy known as the ‘stoner comedy’, dominated by silly jokes and drug references, and I have enjoyed plenty of these films in the past. I have even enjoyed examples of the form that critics and general viewers alike seemed to loathe, and will continue to maintain David Gordon Green’s Your Highness (2011) is an underrated comic gem. Biodome fails to impress because its jokes generally just aren’t very funny.

More importantly, its protagonists aren’t enjoyable characters with which to spend 90 minutes. Bud (Shore) and Doyle (Baldwin) behave appallingly, neglect their girlfriends, and lack any of the sort of deluded confidence or charm to make up for it. The core problem here is a weak screenplay. Baldwin filmed Biodome after delivering great work in Threesome (1994) and The Usual Suspects (1996), and there is no reason to believe a funnier script wouldn’t have resulted in a more enjoyable performance. He is, I think, the most underrated of Baldwin brothers, even if his private life devolved into for-profit ministries and right-wing politics.

Pauly Shore, on the other hand, is something of a mystery. He enjoyed a brief period of popular success through films like Encino Man (1992) and Son-in-Law (1993), so there is clearly an appeal to him for some audiences, but here his idiosyncratic delivery serves to deflate every joke that he tells. Comedy is, I think, the most subjective of film genres, so I can only reflect my own opinion: Shore has a perverse talent to actively leave comedy less funny than when he found it.

The supporting cast, which includes William Atherton, Henry Gibson, Joey Lauren Adams, and (oddly) Kylie Minogue, fails to make any effort to rescue the picture. It is all either disinterested labour with one eye on a pay cheque, or simply wooden vacancy.

There is a place for this kind of silly adolescent fare in screen culture. There is a clear and enthusiastic market for it, and a valid niche in which it can excel. Biodome does not fail because it is scatological, or stupid, or silly. It fails because it’s bad. I will happily watch anything once, but some things I will watch only once.

1. I am sure you will appreciate that this is clearly code for ‘my partner used to watch it as a teenager, and wanted to revisit it’.