For the longest time, I was intrigued by Viewer Discretion Advised, namely for the fact that I enjoy sketch-style comedy movies and it sounded to be in the vein of one of my old favorites, "Weird Al" Yankovic's magnum opus UHF.  However, I never managed to pick it up until it's DVD release, packaged with the other Troma sketch comedy title Bacon Head (which I initially panned, but will possibly give a second look sometime soon).  While it certainly wasn't a comedic masterpiece, it wasn't that bad either.

The film is basically a variety of television parodies thrown together, just like you've seen on Kentucky Fried Movie and The Groove Tube, but this one throws a small bit of plot in as well.  Ted Smith (Tommy Blaze, who plays nearly a dozen roles and co-directed this film) is a schizophrenic who is visiting his psychiatrist and each time we see him, he has a different personality, which leads us into a wacky sketch for each character.  But at the same time, they keep the television parody concept, where there is a TV channel change in-between each sketch.  Honestly, it's a pretty baffling structure, leading me to believe that the movie did not have a set script and they just tried their hardest to put together all of the sketches.

With comedy, it's all about whether it works or not and unfortunately, Viewer Discretion Advised only works about half the time.  There's a decent amount of good laughs to be found, but much too many fall flat, unfortunately.  The sequence of the film that works the best is a segment that pokes fun at horror movies.  Though most of the humor is forced and features a bit too much tounge-in-cheek humor that we'd all see years later in Wes Craven's Scream, there's some incredibly funny material there.  Especially when Ted complains to the camera man for cutting point-of-view shots of the monster and the death of the fat third-wheel character.  But at the same time, Tommy Blaze's tough guy character starts to irritating after a while in this lengthy parody.

There's some good gags here and there, including an inspired game show parody and a television network called The Time Channel which tells what time it is various sections of the world, and clever ideas, such as a series of faux-horror trailers called Just Friends where Ted's teenage persona fears girls claiming they only want a platonic relationship.  Moments like these are definitely creative and are quite fun, but never reach the level of comedic gold.  What dampers the film even more are insipid and overlong bits, such as a unit of police commandos which investigate users of condoms and a commercial about prosthetic penises which always stay erect.  Even a clever idea for a sketch which comes early in the film where a group of grizzled cowboys tell stories which grow more and more elaborately painful falls incredibly flat due to poor timing and direction.

Basically, when Viewer Discretion Advised works, it's a fun little sketch movie, but when it doesn't, it's groan-inducing.  Tommy Blaze, who you may remember from the short-lived sketch series The Newz (okay, I'm sure you probably don't remember it... I remember seeing some ads for it when I was a wee lad, though), has the same hit-or-miss nature of this film with his performance.  Maybe a larger cast would have been to this film's benefit, as I'll be quite honest, I got sick of seeing his onscreen hamming after a while.  It's not a great comedy by any means, but Viewer Discretion Advised is definitely watchable and worth giving a look, at least for the inspired bits that do pop up in it's 90 minute runtime.