On DVD: Singular Mystery Team Dares to Break Comedy Ranks

Comedy, because it's best as a shared phenomenon, like music, is considered successful when you thrum the wires that get almost everybody laughing. But that can lead to a homogenization, a chortle-sausage approach -- and if you're familiar Chevy Chase's career, even at its prime, you've seen the assembly line. Much as I can still get a rise out of the Apatow Paradigm, it's already waning, a joke told 10 times. What's needed are movies with no precedent, that reek of slightly deranged ideas and dare to amuse only of some of us -- the odder few and far between. Mystery Team certainly fits.

Crafted by the online-video troupe Derrick Comedy, the spoof makes fun of a genre no one remembers anymore, doing so with a firehose blast of guileless overacting and countless full tanks of '80s-Spielberg faux-sincerity. The premise is brilliantly ridiculous and right away should suggest the non-inclusiveness of the film's club: The three suburban heroes (played by Derrick's triumvirate, Dominic Dierkes, DC Pierson and Donald Glover) are high school seniors who are inexplicably stuck in their preadolescent glory days of being neighborhood boy detectives.

Dressed in Hardy Boys geekwear from a half-century ago, absolutely ignorant of the teen or adult worlds, and functioning on a juvenile keel that makes the families and neighbors look at them as though they are retarded, the titular Team bike around their town solving missing-cat and pie-theft "cases." It's arrested development taken to a pathology. They carry magnifying glasses and slingshots, and pester the old man on the block (who lives in the requisite "creepy house") even though by now he's on a respirator, waiting to die. So their absurd bell-jar world revolves -- until a little girl "hires" them (with a dime) to solve her parents' double murder.

You don't need to squint to see both the strange distance the set-up takes for granted, not to mention the potential for gaggery. The Derrick crew doesn't stint; the film is dripping with dead-eyed schtick, from decimated cliches (the three always think they get the same idea at the same time, but when they blurt it out in unison, it's always wrong) to SNL's Bobby Moynihan as a groove-skipping convenience store clerk to the trio's hot-on-the-trail infiltration of a sleazy strip club. The three childish nerds, still buzzing with memories of being old-fashioned kids, are confronted with the hazards of the real world. And that's Mystery Team's biggest, richest joke, from the first spit of "Faggots!" to being shot at by drugs hoods to having to reach into the "gentlemen's club" hellhole of a toilet searching for a piece of evidence pissed out by a grungy hooker.

But it's a weird comedy, too, one in which the actors' super-pumped-yet-bland affect often dares you to fall out of the movie's grasp. (Glover, as the group's idiot leader, is the most annoying.) It's extreme comedy, in a way, pursuing a notion of pushing the limits without caring if we're with the program. At least 50 percent of the movie's comic amperage is reactional -- Aubrey Plaza, as the ex-Goth elder daughter of the murder victims, is particularly dependable for slackjawed WTF moments.

Director Daniel Eckman (who co-wrote the film with the stars and Meggie McFadden) shot most of the film in long, wide-angle mid-shots, which itself is daring these days, too; we're allowed to feel out each goofy set-piece in real time. If sometimes Mystery Team jumps off its own cliffs or goes too far with a silly idea, that's part of its charm. Its ultimate saving grace is the fact that it's the only film of its kind, period.