Question: when is a film not a film? When it's Movie 43. Its title may suggest otherwise, but Movie 43 is a collection of sketches, held together by the weakest of narrative threads.

It's not the first of its kind however. Probably the most well known collection of sketches released in cinemas was 1977's Kentucky Fried Movie, with its collection of film parodies. The ingredients may have changed, but the recipe is pretty much the same.

The flimsy premise holding all these sketches together is thus: a young boy plays a prank on his older-and-certainly-not-wiser brother and equally stupid friend, so they want to play one back. But just that bit better. And Bigger. So they come up with the idea of the world's most dangerous film called Movie 43. It's so dangerous that it can't just be picked up at your local shop, or even downloaded from a site on the internet. It has the power to destroy all who watch it, but if you manage to survive it, you'll be rewarded beyond your dreams.

Of course the young boy is hooked, and being a computer whizz, he believes he's up to the challenge. During his search for this elusive film, he comes across a number of sketches, with a large number of famous faces starring in them, including Richard Gere, Halle Berry, Kate Winslet and Uma Thurman.

Happy St Patrick's day you drunk motherf**kers!!!

What's remarkable is how the collective of film-makers (each sketch is directed by a different director) managed to sign up such a large contingency of stars (calling them A-listers would be pushing it) considering the general level of toilet humour involved in each sketch. It's in the ball park of South Park, but nowhere near as funny.

It's genuinely fun seeing all these stars involved, but unfortunately the comedy very rarely hits the mark. The best sketch from beginning to end involves Halle Berry and our own Stephen Merchant. One or two have potential – like the Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman effort – but so many of them soon sadly run out of steam.

Having a large number of stars in one project can work well, as the wickedly funny This is the End clearly proves, but if you're going to make a film of a collection of sketches, then you definitely need a higher ratio of hits than misses, and Movie 43 misses this particular margin by some way.