James Franco, Danny McBride and Craig Robinson find the movie has hidden depths. Photo / AP
Followers of Seth Rogen's career will know his past characters' seemingly superhuman capacity for embarrassment has served him well. Heck, the funny dude's last film was a road movie - with Barbra Streisand! As his mom! Top that! He has!
This time, though he's gone, for a full humiliation H-bomb
and it's one which doesn't just catch him in its blast zone. He and co-director Evan Goldberg have dragged in many of Rogen's Hollywood buds and former co-stars and to play themselves - or magnified needy, egotistical, insecure, over-sexed, Hollywood-hopeless versions of themselves - who are about to find out their partying days are over.
Why? Because the world has just ended and the apocalypse just has no respect for celebrity.
The result is a movie of fitful pace, often puerile grossness, and crossing-the-line subject matter, all set to a vision of the end of days which suggests Constantine done as a Tenacious D video.
But heck, it's snortingly funny, mainly for how the core cast of surviving mates - mostly Judd Apatow alumni - are transformed from life-of-the-party into a collective bumbling mess. They aren't coping very well with the fact that God, who has seemingly invoked The Rapture, sucking all the good folk up to heaven, has left them off the guest list.
