Starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Jonah Hill. Rated 18A. Now playing

Boy, there are a lot of penis jokes in The Watch. There are even jokes about alien penises, which is handy if you didn’t know aliens have penises, but which also makes you feel kind of weird about E.T. But, just as importantly, the key humans in this movie decide that the goo that oozes out of aliens when you whack them is totally like “green cum”.

There’s a grisly death at Costco—in the movie, that is. Costco manager Evan (Ben Stiller) decides to form a neighbourhood watch. “You can’t kill someone and take their skin. That’s not cool,” he says, which is basically true. Manic motor mouth Bob (Vince Vaughn), police-academy reject Franklin (Jonah Hill), and Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade), an endearing Brit geek, sign up. Moronically funny close encounters of the third kind ensue. Oh, plus, an encounter of the fourth kind: damaging an alien with a garden gnome. The fifth kind? Squeezing an alien’s junk. So, no: no shades of Florida’s neighbourhood-watch murder here.

Director Akiva Schaffer did tons of those SNL shorts (also involving penises). And, yeah, raunch monkeys Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (with Jared Stern) wrote the script. But Stiller, Vaughn, and Hill are born alien-hunting imbeciles. That’s a compliment. And Ayoade, who directed that indie-cool Welsh comedy Submarine, is best of all. If you haven’t seen him before, you’ll want to see him again. Of course, if these guys were actually your neighbourhood alien hunters, you’d be dead soon and the Scientologists—I mean, aliens—would take over the Earth. Oh, right, that’s already happened.

Incidentally, Will Forte and Billy Crudup are also good weirdos. And Costco can rejoice that besides penis jokes, there are many Costco jokes. And, hey, here’s the perfect macabre tune to play if your Hispanic friend gruesomely bites it: “The Sound of Silence”. In Spanish.

Watch the trailer for The Watch.