IT’S NOT often that two films open the same week that are as ideologically antithetical—and pander as gratuitously to their respective foot-soldiers—as Religulous, Bill Maher’s snooty takedown of religion, and An American Carol, Dave Zucker’s repulsive conservative-revenge comedy. The propagandistic pair opened on opposite sides of 42nd street in New York last week, with each of the two monolithic Times Square cinemas, which face each other ominously, choosing to champion only one. I decided to see them back to back. What’s better than an afternoon of thought-provoking political film?

I kid, of course. By the end of the four-hour marathon, I felt as if every last vestige of my intelligence had been trampled upon, every last hope for constructive political conversation in my country beheaded in two fell blows. But the respective audiences weren’t bothered by the one-dimensional ideas and caricatures permeating both movies. They heard a rallying cry and roared back.

With that wildly original premise as its foundation, and to the predictable strains of “Sweet Home Alabama,” An American Carol starts on a tear through every right-wing cliché, every racial, religious, ethnic, and sexual caricature, and every conservative misreading of America’s political climate. Michael Moore hates America, anti-American films win Oscars, Hollywood loves terrorists, Ronald Reagan was the best president in history, and New Yorkers are a foreign (probably un-American) species. Worst of all, real Americans only live in small towns and listen to country music. (Never mind that the 3,000 American martyrs used to justify all the warmongering were—gasp!—New Yorkers). Carol’s politics are soul-crushing to anyone who ever hoped to make conservatism look intelligent, but its humor is worse: the ghost of General Patton repeatedly slapping Michael Moore in the face, coroners playing tag with Moore’s severed buttocks, and thousands of rednecks converging on Manhattan for a Trace Adkins concert.

The gags, stereotypes and clichés are most unfortunate because they painfully illustrate what a movie like this might have been in the hands of a less obtuse director. Rare moments find sharp points beneath the lard of bawdy bigotry—for instance, Michael Malone’s younger brother, a marine, sadly telling a psychopathic protester: “I think all sailors are against war. But sometimes fighting isn’t a choice.” Hollywood is rightfully speared as applauding the downfall of America “for its own good,” and Patton makes a funny remark likening the halls of American academia to backward time travel. Sometimes it’s funny just because you never hear anything like this in a movie theater, and, hey, you know what they say about payback. But more often the cringe-inducing insults feel like conservatives, too, are living two or three decades in the past. (Additional evidence for this are reports that audiences are overwhelmingly over 40. Two elderly men were the only ones in the theater at my showing in Times Square).