Critic confessions: Writing reviews for comedies is not easy. Comedy, more so than any other genre, is very subjective, so it's pretty hard to try to explain why some fall on their faces and others are raucous laugh riots. What one person may find hilarious, another may find juvenile, offensive or just plain unfunny. It's all just a matter of personal preference.

That being said, it would be my personal preference for "Movie 43" to be buried at the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen again by human eyes. It is not funny. It barely even registers as amusing. It's a painfully unpleasant and uncomfortable 90-minute sit that made me angry walking out of the theater. The profane short film compilation doesn't even have the decency to be well made.

The frame story feebly holding "Movie 43" together involves Dennis Quaid pitching terrible movie ideas to an increasingly befuddled movie producer, played by Greg Kinnear. The awful pitches take the form of the short stories that comprise the film. Now, this is the point during the pre-production meetings that somebody should've raised his or her hand and asked "Wait, the entire movie is made up of bad movie concepts? Isn't this a dumb idea?"

Unfortunately, this hypothetical conversation never happened, leaving viewers with the following painful skits: Kate Winslet goes on a blind date with Hugh Jackman, who has male genitalia dangling from his neck; Anna Faris wants her boyfriend Chris Pratt to poop on her; Terrence Howard encourages his basketball team to victory by constantly reminding them of their race; Emma Stone and Kieran Culkin profanely bicker in a supermarket while creepy customers leeringly listen; Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville kidnap a profane leprechaun; Richard Gere invents an iPod in the shape of a naked woman; and an animated cat wants to have sex with Josh Duhamel, which doesn't please his girlfriend, Elizabeth Banks.

There are a few other sketches, as well as a few clumsy commercials that don't fit with the theme. Almost all of it is uncomfortable to watch, as each short embarrasses its stars or becomes repulsively crass. There are no jokes or clever lines, just tasteless situations that start at the bottom of the barrel and then proceed to dig themselves deeper.

Even if this kind of humor is down your alley, however, there's simply no excuse for how sloppily it's executed. Each skit wears out its welcome within a few seconds, as it seems obvious the 11 directors and 15 writers came up with the concepts and didn't bother developing them to fill at least ten minutes. Then, after repeating the same embarrassing joke, the sketches throw up their hands and simply give up. Cue the next abysmal sketch.

The worst is the frame story, which, after building to a conflict between Greg Kinnear and his boss (played by Common), just stops and shows what seems to be a deleted scene in which Kinnear asks if they have any more skits to run. Unfortunately, they do.

The hope with most short film anthologies is that if one sketch fails, it won't last long, and a new, better one will take its place. In "Movie 43," there's no hope in sight save for the end credits. And even that is a fake-out, as midway through, the movie realizes it forgot a skit and plays James Gunn's vigorously ugly piece featuring masturbating animated cats and child murderers. You know what they say: Send 'em home with a smile!

There are faint glimmers of a funny movie scattered throughout "Movie 43" – as you'd hope from a cast and crew so large. The premise of the homeschooling sketch starring Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber has potential, albeit untapped. A skit about a bunch of guys freaking out about a girl's first period is mildly amusing in its mockery of males' fear of the female body. I like Stephen Merchant's dumb grin in an unfortunate sketch about an escalating game of truth or dare with Halle Berry (I'm really stretching for positives here).

Like a dollar bill at the bottom of a landfill, however, these scant tolerable moments aren't worth having to drudge through the dirty, rotten trash surrounding them. If the goal was to make the most offensive film of the year, congratulations "Movie 43," you succeeded. Can we go back to trying to make people laugh now?