The Cast of Characters:
	Leonard Parker (Bill Cosby). A secret agent for the CIA. Also, a very famous person. And you'd think the two would be mutually exclusive, but not in Leonard's world. Nothing fazes Leonard, but whether that's a result of his years of experience and nerves of steel, or a product of Bill Cosby's absolute boredom with the role remains to be seen. Complicating his efforts to save the world are an estranged wife and rebellious daughter.
	Frayn (Tom Courtenay). Leonard's butler. Also provides the most incessant, nattering, useless voiceover narration since The Beast of Yucca Flats. Frayn is Alfred to Leonard's Batman, meaning he hangs out underneath Leonard's mansion ready at all times to suit Leonard up... and sometimes make out with him.
	Medusa Johnson (Gloria Foster). Leonard's nemesis in this particular "adventure". Wants to induce mind control over all the animals in northern California to, um, liberate them, and um... Well, to be honest, the current US tax code makes more sense than her villainous plot. But she sure knows how to dress.
	Allison Parker (Pat Colbért). Leonard's wife. Left him because of his secret agent job. Oddly, they haven't officially divorced despite being separated for seven years. Leonard desperately wants her back for reasons I can't discern, but I'm pretty sure none of them contain the words "sparkling personality".
	Joan Parker (Victoria Rowell). Leonard's rebellious, soul-searching, navel-gazing (literally) daughter. Has all kinds of romantic notions of what she wants to do in this world, and as a result changes her life goals every week. This week, she's taking a creepy cue from Tony Randall's last marriage and dating a septuagenarian.
	Nick Snyderburn (Joe Don Baker). Leonard's boss at the CIA. Primary purpose is to throw tantrums, be a pain in Leonard's ass, and occasionally get attacked by rabbits. Remarkably, at no point in this movie does Joe Don get drunk, sleep with a hooker, or shoot innocent people in the back.

In the mid-80's, there were few stars in the world bigger than comedian Bill Cosby. He'd already been a well-known personality for decades, starring in I Spy, creating and voicing Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and releasing top-selling comedy records. But it wasn't until The Cosby Show became the highest rated series in America for three straight years that Cosby reached the upper echelons of superstardom. So it came as no surprise when he decided to parlay his newfound fame into a starring role in his own big-screen, big-budget star vehicle.

Leonard Part 6 certainly wasn't Cosby's first movie. Long before playing Cliff Huxtable, he was a memorable presence in small, modest films like Uptown Saturday Night (one of several he made with Sidney Poitier) and Mother, Jugs, and Speed (opposite Harvey Keitel and another Agony Booth favorite, Raquel Welch). But Leonard Part 6, his very first post-Cosby Show role, was a whole different breed of film. The entire production was beholden to Cosby's ego; Not only did he receive top billing (the only billing, as a matter of fact), but he also served as producer and contributed to the story. And thanks to his presence, money (much to the detriment of the movie) was no object.

But after Leonard Part 6 was finished, Cosby did something you don't see very often in Hollywood. Despite being deeply involved with many aspects of the production, Cosby trashed this movie before it even came out. It was a disaster and he knew it, and every talk show appearance originally meant to plug the movie became an opportunity for Cosby to expressly warn people not to see it. Unsurprisingly, the movie tanked in a big way.

I recap a lot of bad movies here, but this is one of the first where the title of the movie is synonymous with "failure". Batman & Robin, Armageddon, Moonraker—all spectacularly bad, but all huge hits. Leonard Part 6, on the other hand, is a movie you hear mentioned in the same breath as Heaven's Gate, Waterworld, Ishtar, Showgirls, Battlefield Earth, and a newcomer to the ranks of synonym-for-flop, Gigli.

And in the case of Ishtar, the connection is even stronger, because both films were released by Columbia Pictures in the dark days when it was owned by Coca-Cola. In the movie industry of the 80's, product placement was big business, particularly after Hershey Foods reaped a huge windfall from putting Reese's Pieces in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Indulging in the same bone-headed "synergistic" thinking that later saw AOL buy Time-Warner, Coca-Cola executives figured that if paying to put Coke products in movies was good, owning their own movie studio and getting free product placements would be even better! Right? Right?

Unfortunately, they realized after Leonard and Ishtar stiffed (along with the shamefully brand name-stuffed Mac and Me) that making hit movies is a lot harder than marketing bubble water. They got out of the game soon after, but Leonard Part 6, one of the lasting testaments to this synergy, is packed so full of blatant product placements that all you can do is sit and stare in abject horror.

The movie, taking into account solely the script and the direction and the editing, is bad enough to be featured on this site. But the fact that it's got the most jacked-up cast since Myra Breckinridge is just icing on the cake. Not only do we have Bill Cosby, but also the late Gloria Foster, best known as the Oracle in the first two Matrix movies. And not only that, but we get one offender, two offenders, three Repeat Offenders! Ah-ah-ah! Joe Don Baker (Mitchell), Victoria Rowell (Barb Wire) and Grace Zabriskie (Armageddon) all make their second Agony Booth appearances here.

In total, Leonard Part 6 is 71 minutes long. Subtracting credits, that's barely more than an hour. When a movie has been cut down to an insubstantial length like that, it's guaranteed that it bombed at test screenings, and the studio was desperately trying to pare the movie down from "shockingly awful" to merely "embarrassingly bad". Unfortunately, they thought this meant keeping only the scenes that cost the most money. So we spend nearly the entire film bouncing from explosion to explosion, from special effect to special effect, with very little story to connect it all.

In theory, that doesn't sound too bad, but in reality, Leonard Part 6 is almost as much of a relentless cacophony as Armageddon. (Almost, but not quite.) Watching this movie is almost like watching a loud, obnoxious montage of another, much longer, much more terrible movie that's out there somewhere. Going on the little we're shown here, I'm sort of relieved that I'll never know what the original cut was like.

The movie starts, and before we even get to the credits, when we're still seeing Lady Columbia holding her torch, we hear an odd, ominous tune that sounds like it belongs in a Halloween kids movie. I mean, it's even got the "spooky" theramin going and everything. It sounds like we're about to watch a haunted house movie featuring the likes of Hulk Hogan or Christopher Lloyd, or god forbid, both. Maybe the soundtrack is just warning us of Joe Don Baker's terrifying, monstrous presence later.

Okay, I really need to talk about these credits. Because frankly, they're like a joke in and of themselves. I'm not sure I can even mock them any worse than they already mock themselves.

They're done in the style of crappy chalk drawings, like a little kid drew them. There are various cartoon drawings of animals (rabbits, turtles, frogs, etc.) next to each credit, which also look like a ten-year-old's scribbling on a chalk board. The cartoon animals are animated, but only in the simplest, most rudimentary way. For instance, a frog lets out his tongue to eat the "6" in the title, and a rattlesnake jerks his rattling tail and a credit goes flying off the screen. This animation, I would say, is only slightly more complex than panning the camera across still drawings.

Lest you think this movie is even more insane than it already is, the whole "animal" theme actually relates to the story, what there is of it. But to me at least, it would seem that if your movie is this bad, about the last thing you'd want to have is stupid, crappy, cheap-looking opening credits that just invite criticism. But amazingly, that's what they went for here. Hmmm. Maybe they didn't realize just how awful this movie is.

Nah. Couldn't be.

Eventually, the theme song proper kicks in, and of course it's a big, loud, brassy "spy" tune, an obvious take off of Mission: Impossible or The Man from U.N.C.L.E., or even, sadly enough, Cosby's own I Spy.

We then see a cartoon fish charmingly burp up air bubbles, complete with the stock belching sound effect. This sends Joe Don Baker's credit flying off the screen. Hmm, Joe Don Baker's name appears and we hear a belch at the same time. Coincidence?

Joe Don, by the way, will be playing a character named "Snyderburn". Please don't ask me why, but Joe Don has the only credit that includes a character name. He must have had a lot of clout in his post-Joy Sticks days. And as mentioned above, Joe Don is the first Repeat Offender in this movie, having already been the world's most repulsive leading man ever in Mitchell.

Then there's an elephant snorting at a credit which says the music is by the late Elmer Bernstein, who passed away in August of this year. Man, is that depressing. Something tells me this particular movie wasn't mentioned in very many of his obituaries.

Then there's more incredibly lame animation, including a kangaroo, an elephant, and a cat that looks like it has some kind of disease. There's also a turtle with an evil laugh. Goddamn turtles. I always knew they were evil.

Next to a poorly animated rhinoceros is a credit for the director of photography, Jan de Bont. After this, de Bont became a director in his own right, directing actual good movies like Speed and... um... did I already mention Speed? Anyway, after an alligator and a puppy stiffly jerk around the screen, the movie itself begins.