Pootie Tang

 Spinoffs from sketch shows tend to be weird - and holy crap is this one a particularly weird confirmation of that rule. Mostly in a good way.

 The character Pootie Tang (Lance Crowther) originally appeared as a guest interviewee on the Chris Rock Show, a successful musician whose every other word is some silly-sounding made-up slang, but who's perfectly understood by everyone around him. The film is that amped up to eleven, plus a pretty funny origin story, a super-hero arc, and a buttload of ridiculous characters.

 Pootie is one of those Blaxploitation figures who's impossibly cool and competent: A world-class musician, consummate ladies man and crime fighter, but also a clean-cut Mister-T-style hero to kids everywhere. Trouble starts when he does a PSA commercial telling kids to be healthy; It's so popular it earns the wrath of Dick Lecter (Robert Vaughn), head of Corporate America - which markets to kids such products as cereals, fast-food burgers, crack, switchblades and rat poison... sales of which go down by as much as 20% immediately after the PSA airs.
 Dick sends his main squeeze Ireenie (Jennifer Coolidge) to seduce Pootie into selling his persona to Corporate America and to steal his belt, the source of his powers. She succeeds, and Pootie falls from grace until he gets his mojo back.

 As it usually goes in these type of movies, the plot is only an afterthought threaded in between ridiculous, story-free bits like a gloriously silly action scene where Pootie interrupts some criminals from tricking a dumb kid (the dumbest, the narration tells us) into trying their drugs. One of the villains in that scene - Dirty Dee (Reg E. Cathey) - is so literally dirty he trails a dust cloud like Pigpen from Peanuts, and Pootie bats away his bullets with the end of his pony tail. The movie constantly cuts away to have other characters comment on the action, particularly Pootie's friend Trucky (J.B. Smoove) and would-be-girlfriend Biggie Shorty (Wanda Sykes), who's often shown dancing with huge headphones on like the cheesiest, most cringe-worthy MTV interstitial ever.
 Speaking of MTV, a lot of the filmmaking takes its cues from then-current shoddy rap video filming tricks and MTV 'coolness', including very cheap-looking speed ramping and clipping. Zack Snyder has frequently gone on record to state that his style, as solidified on 300, was heavily influenced by Pootie Tang*.

 Chris Rock produces and plays multiple roles, and of course there's a ton of cameos from MTV and HBO people who were big at the time or would be soon afterward (Dave Atell, Missy Elliot, a teeny-tiny Kristen Bell, Jon Glaser and a lot more).

 I should probably mention this is written and directed by Louis C.K. (then a writer on the Chris Rock show), who's had a pretty public fall from grace since, and includes a bunch of instances of blackface - I wouldn't think that'd be a problem, since it's used here as a dick move by corporate stooges (including David Cross) to impersonate Pootie, but I'm not that clued up on this sort of thing.

 Even at eighty minutes it threatens to overstay its welcome - there's a lot of padding and stuff that just doesn't work. But a likeable tone, a surreal anything-goes sensibility and a buttload of goofy jokes carry it through; No one would ever confuse it with a good (or a non-deeply stupid) movie, but it's bright, chipper, and silly fun.

*: I've shown this sentence to world-class Snyder historians who have said it's amazing. They can't believe it's as accurate as it is.