If there’s one thing the movie industry severely lacks is parody. Granted, we’re in an era in which lampshading and snark are practically mandatory in “serious” movies, but there’s nothing like a spoof to make us aware of the absurdity of several elements at once. That’s part of the problem with Quasi. The Broken Lizard comedy doesn’t really have anything new to add to the historical parody subgenre, but its worst trait is that it doesn’t seem to understand how to make its own setting work to its advantage.

Centered around a character that the vast majority of audiences know, Quasi follows Quasimodo (Steve Lemme), a Victor Hugo creation that became popular mostly due to his representation in the 1996 Disney animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame (although it had other relevant incarnations in cinema as well). In this comedy, Quasi lives through 15th-century France and deals with the bizarre costumes and beliefs of humanity at that time.

Quasi chooses one of the easiest eras to make fun of. It is a time when humanity hadn’t really figured out hygiene, people believed leaders were chosen by god, and monarchs behaved in bizarre and entitled ways. This era is occasionally made fun of in sketch comedy shows like Saturday Night Live and Horrible Histories, and fueled one of the most famous comedies ever, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which Quasi draws inspiration from. It’s pretty easy homework to do for inspiration, since there’s plenty of material to draw from when it comes to parodies of older times.

That’s why it’s quite surprising that Quasi takes comfort in simply sticking to a handful of jokes and repeating them for almost the movie’s entirety. The first one is the most frequent: Quasi plays with the fact that its characters are supposed to be speaking French, but the only joke it seems to get from this are characters realizing that some words sound funny and then repeating them out loud several times.

Image via Searchlight Pictures

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Thankfully, Quasi not realizing the potential of its own jokes isn’t the film’s only defining quality. Right in the first scene, the movie establishes Quasi as someone who has completely normalized the bullying being directed at him. This has happened because people are routinely cruel to Quasi and throw stuff at him. The first time something is thrown, you’re shocked at the cruelty, but then it gets repeated so many times that you can’t help but start laughing at how absurd it is. Better yet, you empathize with Quasi because you see how he barely reacts to violence at that point. You’re rooting for him from the get-go.

The problem is, the movie quickly forgets that everyone hates Quasi. From that scene on, peasants treat him quite normally. At a certain critical moment later in the story, a turning point that would make Quasi’s bullying “justified,” the movie never goes back to what it established in the very first scene.

Similarly, Quasi establishes that the torture chamber which the title character and his friend Duchamp (Kevin Heffernan, who also directs) work at is a place that thoroughly stinks. Whenever a character enters the chamber, they comment on that emphatically. But as the scenes progress, those same characters seem to forget they’re lingering in a place they’d rather leave. Soon, you forget it too since the production design makes the torture chamber look surprisingly clean and well-kept.

Image via Broken Lizard

Quasi’s screenplay (co-written by Heffernan, Lemme, Jay Chandrasekhar, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske) knows what it should do, but doesn’t know how to do it. The group of male screenwriters are aware that Quasimodo’s era was a time when women were treated poorly, yet this is not played up to highlight its absurdity through comedy. This results in the only relevant female character in the story (Queen Catherine, played by the excellent Adrianne Palicki) not having much of a story arc except being in love with the protagonist. Ironically, in its attempt not to be cruel to past-century women, Quasi ends up “rewarding” its female lead with an equally outdated representation.

Quasi is the type of movie that makes you feel like you are witnessing the first drafts of a screenplay. With disregard to elements it itself establishes and featuring more characters than it knows what to do with, the film forgets to flesh out its comedic potential and sticks to the repetition of a handful of jokes, even when some of them fall flat. True to the bad comedies’ handbook, the end credits feature a clip of outtakes to suggest that, even though you may not have had much fun, at least they had a blast filming it and their intentions were good.

Rating: C

You can stream Quasi on Hulu now.