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A weak movie that celebrates weak movies, "It Came From Hollywood" presents clips from more than a half-century of movies, most bad, some not, presented in the form of themes hosted by popular comedians of the day.

Sometimes, the result is amusing. Richard "Cheech" Marin and Tommy Chong work their stoner screen personas to solid effect watching clips of famous drug cautionary films like "Reefer Madness." I don't care for Cheech & Chong generally but found their work here entertaining in a low-burn way.

A clip from the Ed Wood classic "Plan Nine From Outer Space" features Dudley Manlove pondering an attack on mankind: "As long as these humans think, we'll have our problems."

Cut to Chong at the ticket window: "I want my money back."

Alas, that's as much as I can offer in the way of positive comment about the interstitial sketches which make up the original content in this film. That's a shame because I am a fan of both Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner from their "Saturday Night Live" heyday and John Candy of SCTV. They make up the other three players introducing the recycled content here. Seeing Gilda and Danny relive their small- screen glories playing SNL characters like Judy Miller and a short- fused detective should be more fun than it is.

Some reviewers here see a connection between "It Came From Hollywood" and "Mystery Science Theater 3000," which ran bad movies over caustic commentary that was often funny. But the blog Dead 2 Rights has it right: This is a cracked remake of films of the prior decade like "That's Entertainment." Producer-directors Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo are out for cheap yuks.

Instead of overblown reverence, you get easy scorn for silly B- movies about rampaging gorillas and brains that fly around and attack people.

"C'mon, honey, you want it and you know it," Aykroyd says over footage of a woman being jumped by a brain in "Fiend Without A Face." "Don't be a brainteaser."

Chuckles do come, but never develop into anything more, the way they so often did on MST3K with their zany sketches and running gags. The clips are more interesting for curiosity value, like a chance to see Rosey Grier try to sell the idea of having Ray Milland's head attached to his body in "The Thing With Two Heads."

"This picture started the black street fad of wearing middle-aged white men," Aykroyd explains.

The inclusion of clips from classic films like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and good genre flicks like "The Creature From The Black Lagoon" is annoying, though, as are any of the sequences featuring Radner, as lost here as she did in any other movie she made.

"The movie theaters just show scary monster movies so you drop all your popcorn and candy on the floor and they put in back in the boxes and resell it," she explains as her Judy Miller character.

A decent sequence showcases two Ed Wood films, "Plan Nine" and "Glen Or Glenda?" It's hosted by Candy, who makes the fair point that it's hard to make a movie when there's no budget. If the rest of the film followed this more explanatory approach, rather than generally commenting on the weak plots and overacting, it could be worth your time.

To be fair, "It Came From Hollywood" came from 1982, the year of David Letterman's late-night debut when snarky irony became suddenly fashionable. Snarky irony is mostly what you get here, and while it works at times, it isn't enough to make it that interesting.

The first "Jurassic Park" was all about the science of bringing dinosaurs back to life. "The Lost World" is about the ethics of same. Ethics have always been tricky territory where Hollywood is concerned. That's true here, too.

Four years after InGen populated an entire island with dinosaurs, the company finds itself on the ropes. Wrongful death suits are expensive; so is bad publicity. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) goes from horrified onlooker to potential hors d'oeuvre when he travels to Isla Sorna to persuade his paleontologist girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) to come back home with him.

Director Steven Spielberg called this film "my first pure sequel," noting his Indiana Jones films are more like installments in an adventure series. But "The Lost World" fails miserably as a sequel, offering none of the joy of discovery while doubling up on carnage. It is a weird, grim spectacle film where logic in thrown out and characterization reduced to the broadest strokes.

The question I am left with: Are we supposed to be rooting for the dinosaurs? The pro-forma good guys are a motley crew of SJWs whose constant virtue-signaling is about the only thing audible over the raptor roars. In between snuggling up to a baby stegosaurus and bringing an injured T. Rex into her trailer, Dr. Harding lectures a photographer not to smoke a cigarette on the island. "We're here to observe and document, not interact," she tells him.

Spielberg could have made a good movie out of this if he dispensed with the idea of making Harding his hero, rather than a big part of the problem. The photographer turns out to be a Greenpeace operative, and we watch him and Harding release some captured dinosaurs which then trample through a camp of fellow humans. They are hunters, so this is apparently positive behavior, even if this "ethical" sabotage winds up killing most of the people we see.

The CGI is more active here than it was in the first film, and much more artificial-looking. Spielberg's A-Team, composer John Williams and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, plod through the motions in delivering a lot of mood and odd triumphant tones which feel hollow even as they are delivered. The whole film fails as a transportive enterprise, reminding you of past glories while adding nothing new.

There's one performance I really liked in the film. It's not Pete Postlethwaite as Roland the hunter, which everyone else including Spielberg loved; he's a cipher too hemmed in by the silly script. Rather, it's Arliss Howard as Peter Ludlow, nephew of John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), who as acting head of InGen is trying to use the dinosaurs to repair his shattered business, and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.

Howard is so smoothly smug and mean, I found myself seeking him out in group scenes. He's really not much of a villain, since his motives are less evil than capitalist (the same thing in Spielberg's world, maybe, but not mine), but he adds the right notes of conflict whenever given the chance, like when Malcolm grabs his arm in an early scene to make a point: "This suit costs more than your education."

Howard doesn't do much villain work, so I was happily impressed enough to give him my 1997 Doe Avedon Award for great performance in a bad movie.

What passes for a plot involves watching the various name characters try to avoid the same brutal fate they bestow on those who meet them, and then try and save an angry T. Rex storming through San Diego. This latter piece is so tacked on it betrays "Lost World's" focus on being an effects film. The original "Jurassic Park" was that, too, but the storycraft was good enough to keep you watching.

No luck here. "The Lost World" is as much a slaughterhouse of ideas as it is of people. We can argue about whether Spielberg ever made a worse film ("1941," perhaps), but this stands supreme as his most disappointing.