Biff Basham (Help! My Gumshoe’s an Idiot!)

Created by Michael Webb

Clueless young New Orleans private eye BIFF BASHAM stumbles into a dumpster fire of a case in Help! My Gumshoe’s an Idiot!, a low-budget 2018 turkey that attempts to do to the Shamus Game what Airplane! did to air travel.

Nope.

Not even close. With so many absurd sight gags, wisecracks, snappy patter, and some truly painful puns being tossed at the screen, you’d think some are bound to stick.

Sadly, very few do.

The film occasionally tried to use the Big Easy’s reputation for weirdness, like the ME who gleefully reports, when asked about test results, “I got a B in English!” Or when the villain escapes on a unicycle.

But most of there humour seems to count on the fact that Biff is, as the title tells us right away, truly an idiot.

At least he’s an affable one, thanks to Arnie Pantoja’s likable blend of total bewilderment and misplaced cockiness as the befuddled doofus dick — Panjota’s performance, if occasionally awkward, still stands out from most of the rest of the “where do I stand?” cast, whose mostly brief appearances generally come off as misguided cameos.

Biff lives in a fantasy world where he truly believes he’s a hard-boiled  investigator who stepped right out of a 1940s Raymond Chandler novel — and he has the trench coat and fedora to prove it.

Unfortunately for Biff, it’s not the 1940s anymore, and he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, more akin to Naked Gun‘s Frank Debin than Philip Marlowe. He’s barely making ends meet, and has been reduced to selling off most of his possessions. His best (possibly only) friend is his goldfish. Which he’s had to pawn.

So Biff’s easily suckered in when fine-looking nightclub chanteuse Krista Moretti (Rachele Brook Smith) hires him to look into the murder of her husband, Mauler Moretti, a champion boxer. Oh, and while he’s at it, could Biff also please look into the person threatening to unleash some steamy photographs of her?

From there it’s just a hop, skip and a pratfall or two into a sloppy puddle of blackmail, treachery, mobsters, foreign agents, a few awkward anachronisms, and of course murder. Plus some more sight gags and horrible puns. A tighter script might have given the jokes something to stick to, but as it is most of them flash across the screen and barely land.