I admit it; I couldn't imagine this being watchable, much less good. Director Todd Phillips was deep in my doghouse for the ultra-ultra horrible ROAD TRIP, Owen Wilson's last film (BIG BOUNCE) was so bad that I feared a repeat, the TV series that S & H was based on was hideous, and the '70s was a time – much like the '50s – best forgotten and excised from the history books. Nevertheless, with premiere and party tickets in hand, and with my faithful Passepartout (the jeremysilman.com webmaster) at my side and ready to be blamed if it turned out to be as bad as I suspected, I decided to give it a shot.

Twenty-four hours later, I'm forced to reassess Mr. Phillips' clearly formidable directing skills. Perfectly capturing the style of '70s badly acted cop shows, he brought out impressive comic nuances from everyone involved, lampooned myriad aspects of the film's TV roots, and showed such a great sense of timing that the movie hopped along at “laugh every minute pace.”

Set in the 1970s in “Bay City,” the story revolves around two bumbling police detectives (Ben Stiller – playing Starsky – is always good in these kinds of frenetic roles, while Owen Wilson – as Hutch – turns in his usual enjoyable, laid back performance.) who drive their captain (Fred Williamson, who made you feel his pain.) crazy. Though the film is really a never-ending series of Saturday Night Live-type skits (which often proves a death-knell in lesser movies), the brilliant comic delivery of an energetic cast almost brought the house down from deranged audience laughter. Vince Vaughan was excellent as a Jewish coke-dealer (the Bat-Mitzvah/pony scene would force laughter from a corpse), Snoop Dogg was perfectly cast as Huggy Bear, and Will Farrell strutted his stuff as a convict with an uncontrollable fetish for dragons.

Against all odds, S & H turned out to be a major success. In fact, I doubt that you'll find a funnier film in all of 2004.

As triumphant as S & H was, the after-film party was a complete disaster. Held in a 15,000 square foot, high-tech, dance your ass off club called “The Factory,” the seething masses were so unforgiving that I felt like a sardine being forced into an already overstocked can. The food, if one can call it that, was so horrific (high school students would throw it on the cafeteria walls if served this swill at school) that nobody (including my starving self) was eating anything. Pounding '70s music rendered my ears, and any thoughts of conversation, useless. That left everyone standing about in statue-like helplessness with nothing to do but drink lots of beer and cheap wine. Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and Snoop Dogg all showed up, but they quickly vanished, making me think that they either left early or were eaten by hungry partygoers.

On a more positive note, there were lots of near-nude dancers gyrating for our viewing pleasure, giving us a few odd moves, jiggling before their energy evaporated, and heroically kicking a foot high in the air even though the sheer weight of their platform shoes threatened to rip a leg from the joint. Staring at the ladies as they earned their rent, I was reminded of a long stay in Budapest. With snow piled high on an off day, a friend insisted we visit a place called Dolce Vita. There too, scantily clad girls danced in a disinterested manner, and when I quickly got up to leave from sheer boredom, one women stopped me at the door and implored me to stay, asking in fractured English, “You no like girl action?”

As I oh-so-slowly made my way out of The Factory (one tiny step at a time, all of us pushed towards the exit together, chest to back, in some sort of surrealistic exodus), Passepartout (who had been lost seconds after we entered) appeared out of nowhere with a beer in each hand. “Hey boss!” he screamed into one of my destroyed eardrums. “Why you leaving? You no like girl action?” And then, just as I guessed that I had died and gone to hell, the door swung open and I was regurgitated onto the sidewalk – me, Passepartout, and my bleeding ears free to scour the early-closing Los Angeles streets for food.