I asked my wife whether she wanted to see Mask of Zorro, starting at 7:30, or There’s Something About Mary, starting at 7:50. The latter gave her twenty extra minutes of rest after dinner, so that’s what we went to see.

This movie is a total turkey!

Actually, it isn’t; but if you go to see it, you should go assuming that it is. That way you may be pleasantly surprised. If you have any higher expectations, you won’t be. After all, remember that There’s Something About Mary is made by the same people who made Dumb and Dumber.

The young Ted is a nerd with a mouthful of glittering braces; but he’s a good-hearted nerd, willing to stand up for the less fortunate such as Mary’s simple-minded brother Warren. Mary, it turns out, is the school fox; she has been dating a jock known only as “Woogie” from some other school, but has dumped him because he was “getting weird” and is now looking for somebody in her own bailiwick with whom to go to the prom. Finding somebody suitable is difficult — just take a look at the collection of half-humans Ted hangs around with — but Ted attracts her attention and she invites him.

Ted’s visit to her home to pick her up is, however, an unmitigated catastrophe, whose culmination and cinematographic high point is a 300-millisecond view of a human testicle caught in a zipper. Ted is rushed to the hospital and never sees Mary again.

Thirteen years later, she is still on Ted’s (Ben Stiller’s) mind, especially when he sees the familial bliss in which his friend Dom Wujakowski (Chris Elliott) lives — pleasantly hard-working little hausfrau wife, joyful kids, happily-mortgaged home … Ted decides to go out and find Mary (Cameron Diaz) — knowing only that she lives somewhere in Miami — and Dom, who works for an insurance company, puts him in touch with one of their investigators, the sleazy Pat Healy (Matt Dillon). Healy has no problem finding Mary. In fact, he has no problems whatsoever in listening in on her conversations, watching her undress through her window … Healy quickly decides that Mary, about whom there seems to be something, is too good for wannabe novelist Ted, and, after temporarily returning to Providence, RI, informs Ted that Mary never married, has four kids, looks like a beached whale, and lives in a wheelchair. He then resigns his job and moves permanently to Miami to begin his siege of Mary. Ted, however, is not about to give up, and with the continued encouragement and help of the happily-married Dom, he sets out on an odyssey to Miami where — when and if he arrives — he will have to compete with Healy, a quarterback named Brett, and a couple of others for the affections of Mary …

Yes, there were a couple of amusing scenes in the film, most notably Healy’s revival of the dead dog (you’ve already seen the whole thing in the previews, though). NOTE FOR YOUNGER VIEWERS: as you saw in the film, feeding tranquilizers to a dog should only be done by professionals. Don’t try this at home, kids! Feeding them speed is probably not a good idea, either.

Nice to see Martin “Show No Mercy!” Kove in a film again, too, even in a bit part. Chris Elliott’s role is slightly different than the ones I’ve previously seen him in (technodweeb in The Abyss, total idiot in that short-lived TV series Get a Life! — next year, I understand, he’ll be the voice of Dogbert in the Dilbert TV series).

The film also has a couple of things to say (and says them not at all well) about a quality known as “privacy” — some of you may remember this concept, if you are old enough. Today, it seems, there is none. Ben Healy, as I mentioned, has absolutely no problem listening in on any conversation that Mary has so that he can learn which of her buttons to push (“What? You have a condo in Nepal? Gee, I’ve always wanted to go to Nepal! What? You’re an architect? Gee, I have this thing for architects …” Though Bruce Campbell did it better in the Hercules episode “Men in Pink!”). Still, the viewer may feel that Mary is getting just what she deserves; after all, she and her circle of friends don’t hesitate to buy into her roommate Magda’s (Lin Shaye’s) belief that it’s perfectly legitimate to listen in to the neighbors’ cell-phone calls to find out which ones can be trusted — a practice of which Healy also takes advantage.

The word “stalker” is also thrown around with great abandon, but the film has little to say about stalkers. These guys aren’t really stalkers (though Healy is definitely a wannabe), not Ted, not that other old flame, not the pizza delivery boy — they’re just idiots.

By and large, though, the film was not worth the price of admission. Next time, I’ll choose Zorro. At the very least, There’s Something About Catherine Zeta Jones …