With a plot perfectly suited to the kinds of sex comedies that were prevalent in the 1980s up until the mid-1990s, the kind you'd have seen hosted by Rhonda Shear on USA Up All Night, CLOUD 9 is an R-rated comedy about a hapless schemer who comes up with the idea of creating a beach volleyball team composed of really hot strippers. Other than two naked strippers in the background during a strip club scene, CLOUD 9 is completely devoid of nudity. The main actresses are scantily clad for most of the film but you'd still see more skin from these ladies in a layout for Maxim or Stuff Magazine. It's a comedy about volleyball playing strippers. CLOUD 9 is a sexploitation film that seems to think it's above exploiting sex. Not being funny is one thing, but how the hell did they manage to mess up the gratuitous nudity aspect? This isn't rocket science, people.

Burt Reynolds sleepwalks as Billy Cole, a down on his luck huckster living in Malibu who is in desperate need of a new cash flow. Along with his limo driver to the stars buddy (comedian D.L. Hughley as the stereotypical wisecracking black sidekick), Cole is always devising get rich quick schemes that generally fail. During a visit to the local strip club to place a bet with the bartender/bookie, Cole divides his attention between watching a stripper dancing on stage and the professional beach volleyball game on the TV screen and brainstorms the concept of having strippers playing beach volleyball because it will be really sexy and, as we all know, sex sells.

Uh, ever see women’s beach volleyball before? It's pretty much very fit young women in extremely skimpy outfits playing volleyball in the sand. I even recall there being some controversy at one of the previous Summer Olympics - it is an Olympic sport - regarding the American women’s beach volleyball team's attire be considered too risqué. The movie isn't about trying to introduce hot babes in sexy outfits to women’s golf; it's about trying to introduce sex appeal to a sport that already has plenty of it. Right off the bat, the film has a fundamental flaw. While there's no arguing that the actresses playing the strippers are gorgeous (although I don't buy them for a minute as strippers do to their fresh faces and lack of unsightly tattoos) the filmmakers have everyone react to seeing them in action like they've never been beautiful women in bikinis before. They're very attractive but they're not that attractive.

Ironically, the movie concludes with Cole pitching the idea for stripper golf. Something tells me that’s a sequel we’ll never have to worry about.

Cole goes backstage and pitches his idea to a couple of the girls and they almost immediately jump at it despite having no clue how to play volleyball. It's here where the screenwriters truly convey just how much of a comedic dead zone the film is going to be as each stripper is introduced with an on-screen graphic giving us some details about them along the lines of a Playboy magazine bio.

Olga is Russian played by a blonde actress doing a lame Russian accent. She keeps pronouncing "volleyball" as "wolleyball". If you think that's funny then just wait until you see the graphic listing her biggest turn-off as "standing in line for toilet paper." Wow, now there's cutting edge comedy. What a country! Champagne is your stereotypical sassy African American from the hood. Her life's ambition is to star in a UPN sitcom. Bam! More cutting edge comedy! Crystal is a bubbly blonde potential jailbait that the movie keeps playing up as being all sweet and innocent but how sweet and innocent can a woman be if she's stripping for a living in Southern California. And then there's as bad a stereotype as you'll ever see in a comedy, Corazon, a tough as nails Latina whose ambition is listed as "to support her two children and 26 brothers and sister". Geez! All these girls are underdeveloped (character wise, not physically) and like far too many characters in the film, their basic stereotype is about all there is to them.

But nothing in the movie is worse than Paul Rodriguez (His appearance in a film is always the kiss of death!) in the offensively unfunny role the Hispanic proprietor of a tree nursery that masquerades as a Fu Man Chu-like Asian that dresses like a China man and talks like Charlie Chan because being he believes being Asian is better for business than being Mexican. The performance brings to mind that Simpsons episode in which Krusty the Klown was doing a stand-up comedy routine where he started doing an old Hollywood racist Japanese stereotype including the "flapping dickie" gag much to the dismay of the audience in attendance.

Look, having fun with stereotypes of this nature would be all well and good if the film was at least funny. It isn't. It's a laugh-free dud from start to finish. So bad that thirty minutes in and I could not believe this thing still had an hour to go. It even tosses in celebrity cameos for no reason whatsoever as Tom Arnold, Cedric the Entertainer, Tony Danza, and Gary Busey all show up very briefly and contribute zilch. One particularly brutal scene has Reynolds and Hughley breaking into what is supposed to be Anthony Hopkins home in the Hollywood hills for a meeting with some potential corporate sponsors so that they'll think Cole is a wealthy entrepreneur. Reynolds comes walking downstairs in this suit and captain's hat combo that prompts Hughley to chide him for putting on Mr. Hopkins clothes. Few things in this world I am certain of but the notion that Anthony Hopkins would ever dress up like Thurston Howell III is one I am most certain of. You know your comedy is a stinker when it makes HARDBODIES look like BLAZING SADDLES.

Gabrielle Reese, a legitimate professional beach volleyball player, soils herself by playing Christina Hansen, a pro beach volleyball player who sees what Cole is up to and is rightly offended by the degradation to both her sport and women in general. You can tell from the moment the character is introduced that the film is going to build to a big final showdown between Cole’s vastly improved team and Hansen's. We're told that the big tournament at the end is the event that helped make Christina Hansen a household name. Umm... Are any beach volleyball players a household name in real life? Gabrielle Reese isn't even a household name and she was famous for being a model, an actress, and a TV hostess too.

But even in this aspect the movie is hindered by a fundamental flaw. The movie's logic is setting up the strippers to be the underdogs but Hansen, no matter how much the movie does to try and make her character come across as a snotty bitch, is completely right about them even after they eventually decide to become legitimate beach volleyball players and not just eye candy for cash.

Time to toss in a ringer in the form of former Sports Illustrated model and Sylvester Stallone hand-me-down Angie Everhart. She's Julie, a single stripper mom who has history with Cole and initially wants nothing to do with his latest get rich quick scheme. Julie eventually relents after Corazon injures her leg and, what a coincidence, it turns out she used to be an all-conference volleyball player in college. Since the tournament is two-on-two competition, Julie and Champagne play while the other girls watch from the stands, most the tension being built not around the strippers making good but about Julia showing up her old college rival, Christina Hansen. And I just have one word to describe my feelings towards the potential romantic coupling of Angie Everhart and Burt Reynolds even in a fictional motion picture like this: ICK!

The term "Cloud 9" refers to a feeling of euphoria. I don't know how they came up with CLOUD 9 as the film's title because the term is never used in the movie and you're hardly going to come away from the experience with feelings of jubilation. CLOUD 9 isn't funny in the slightest, doesn't feature nearly as much skin as you'd expect given the premise, and even fails to deliver any decent volleyball footage, all of which is done in montage form and almost entirely shot in close-up.

Most staggering is the realization that one of the three (!) screenwriters and producers of this fiasco is Albert Ruddy, a guy who just last year won an Oscar for producing Best Picture MILLION DOLLAR BABY. Or maybe it's not so staggering given that he's also the screenwriter responsible for MEGAFORCE, CANNONBALL RUN II, and the disastrous boxing kangaroo flick, MATILDA. Perhaps having worked with Reynolds before he was able to call in a favor and get Burt to star in CLOUD 9. Either that or Reynolds just took the role because he has much alimony to pay off and it guaranteed him plenty of time surrounded by young, half naked women. Just keep in mind that after making BOOGIE NIGHTS, Reynolds was convinced it was the worst movie he'd ever appeared in (This from the star of two CANNONBALL RUN movies and COP & A HALF!) and fired his agent over it. That film he was convinced was so terrible went on to garner rave reviews and got him a Best Supporting Actor nomination. That stunning career comeback has since been followed-up with DRIVEN, WITHOUT A PADDLE, THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, Uwe Boll's upcoming IN THE NAME OF THE KING: A DUNGEON SIEGE TALE, and this sorry waste of time and energy, and yet for reasons only he can explain that agent has yet to be terminated.

FINAL SCORE: CLOUD 9, LAUGHS 0

The audience loses in a blowout.