DVD Review - The Hebrew Hammer

If you haven't heard of this one, you're probably not alone. It's one of those Jewploitation films that... actually, it's probably the only Jewploitation film in existence.

The premise is actually pretty good: Adam Goldberg (possibly best known as Chandler's psychotic roomate from Friends, although he was also in Saving Private Ryan and Dazed and Confused) is a Shaft-like Orthdox Jew fighting the evil "new" Santa Claus (Andy Dick) in a worldwide battle to stop him from ruining Chanukah forever. Yeah, another one of THOSE movies. It also stars SNL's Nora Dunn as the stereotypical Jewish mother and Arrested Development's Judy Greer (Kitty) as the women he loves. This is totally straight-to-video stuff, and I believe it came out a couple of months back.

Believe it or not, I actually made a short film like this some 15 years ago called JewHF (instead of Weird Al Yankovic's UHF) which, alebit was just four people filmed on a Sony Handicam with all the scenes taking place in my basement, ended up using a lot of the same jokes and concepts. I mean, there are only so many Jewish jokes you can make before the whole thing gets tired.

And that's kind of what happens here. There are a handful of cute lines, especially if you're Jewish like me and/or can see the stereotypes in play here, but the movie is not overly funny. It's like one of those 10,000,000 Leslie Nielsen movies that tries to spoof a genre (NOT Naked Gun; but all the other ones) and just ends up giving you a couple of quick chuckles and, for the most part, a lot of groans.

Goldberg is pretty funny as The Hammer (My favorite line, an analogy: "This is your Barmitzvah; I'm just reading part of the Torah"), and the Shaft-like theme song is hilarious. But that's kind of the extent of the brilliance here. The rest is just really lazy humor. In fact, the original short feature that appears on this DVD is perhaps funnier than the entire 90-minute-or-so film, because it accomplishes everything it needs to without overstaying its welcome.

Going to recommend skipping this one, folks, unless you're really into Latke humor.