Entertainment
Raunchy, R-Rated 90s Comedy So Filthy That Its Stars Want You To Forget It Exists
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Mid to late 90s sci-fi comedies had a lot of fun with the “unsanctioned medical experiments going terribly wrong” plot, and with pretty solid results. 1996’s PG-13 rated The Nutty Professor cleaned house at the box office with $274 million, as did 1997’s G-rated Flubber with $178 million. Both of these family-friendly remakes proved there was a real market for this kind of humor. So much so that Marlon Wayans wanted in on the action, but with a little more R-rated edge in the form of 1998’s Senseless.
If there’s ever been a word to describe Senseless, look no further than the title. All of the familiar “unsanctioned medical experiment gone wrong” beats are here, but with a whole lot more flatulence, low-brow humor, and sexual innuendo. Senseless earned just $13 million at the box office against its reported $15 million budget, effectively putting it in the red. Even worse, it currently sits on Rotten Tomatoes’ wall of shame with an unthinkable 6 percent critical score, alongside a slightly more forgiving 45 percent approval rating on the Popcornmeter.
If you’re looking for the kind of punisher that performed so poorly it now only exists on ad-supported streaming, probably in a last-ditch attempt to recoup losses, Senseless is exactly what you should seek out. Personally, I don’t hate the film, but you really have to be in the right mood to choke this one down.
Co-Written By Craig Mazin
Co-written by Craig Mazin, best known for Chernobyl and The Last of Us, Senseless is a far cry from what the filmmaker would later prove himself capable of. Honestly, you can say the same about Marlon Wayans, David Spade, Matthew Lillard, and Rip Torn. The problem with Senseless is not the talent involved, but the cinematic experiment they embarked on here. They are all funny people in the right context, but somehow never quite figure out how to channel that energy.
Senseless centers on Darryl Witherspoon (Marlon Wayans), a struggling economics student working multiple odd jobs to make ends meet while also supporting his family back home. To stay in the black, Darryl engages in questionable practices like selling blood, plasma, and other bodily fluids to the appropriate venues for extra cash. When he learns about a controversial drug experiment overseen by Dr. Thomas Wheedon (Brad Dourif), Darryl jumps at the chance to get paid.
The experiment is simple on paper. Darryl injects a glowing green substance into his butt, which increases each of his five senses tenfold. Here’s the catch. If he messes up the dosage, he will lose one sense entirely while the remaining four go completely out of control. As you’d expect, this is exactly what happens in Senseless.
David Spade Doing His Usual Slappable Jerk Shtick
The primary conflict outside of the questionable chemicals coursing through Darryl’s bloodstream comes in the form of David Spade’s Scott Thorpe. Scott comes from a life of privilege and serves as Darryl’s direct competitor in an academic competition overseen by Randall Tyson (Rip Torn). Whoever wins gets fast tracked to a high paying Wall Street job, something Darryl desperately needs.
Spade is fully typecast as the same slappable jerk he played in films like PCU, Tommy Boy, and Black Sheep, and you get more of the same here. As much as I hate Scott Thorpe as a character, I have to give Spade credit where it’s due. He plays this kind of role so convincingly that I genuinely hated him as a person for years because I didn’t think it was humanly possible to fake that level of smugness.
At first, Darryl uses his heightened senses to impress Randall and undermine Scott, seemingly recalling stock figures from memory when he’s actually just reading a newspaper planted across the room that he can zoom in on. But things quickly spiral when Darryl is struck with sudden bouts of blindness, hypersensitive smell and taste, and the ability to hear what goes on in the women’s room in graphic detail as his love interest, Janice (Tamara Taylor), chats with her gassy friend behind closed doors.
Meanwhile, Darryl’s roommate Tim (Matthew Lillard), a straight-edge punk and hockey player, suspects he’s abusing hard drugs and intervenes whenever possible to keep him from going down the wrong path. If I had to describe Lillard’s vibe here, it’s what Machine Gun Kelly thought looked cool and then based his entire pop punk persona on.
Why It Failed
Senseless is a fascinating failure because everyone involved reliably brings exactly what you expect from them. The problem is that in this context, we get too much toilet humor and too many gross-out gags without fully leaning into their characterization. There are plenty of cheap laughs, most of them built on farts and funny faces. As a concept, Senseless has potential, but it simply does not work as a feature-length film because those gags can only stretch so far without being properly grounded.
I could easily see Senseless working as a recurring sketch where Darryl, or someone like him, keeps getting into ridiculous situations thanks to the drug, with the whole thing wrapped up in a few minutes. Some of the standalone gags would absolutely work in that format, but that’s not what we got. Instead, the film becomes an exhausting exercise in seeing just how far it’s willing to push things.
Senseless is streaming for free on Pluto TV as of this writing.
Entertainment
Hurdle hints and answers for April 19, 2026
If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.
There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it’ll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.
An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
If you find yourself stuck at any step of today’s Hurdle, don’t worry! We have you covered.
Hurdle Word 1 hint
The edge.
Hurdle Word 1 answer
BRINK
Mashable Top Stories
Hurdle Word 2 hint
Moody.
Hurdle Word 2 Answer
POUTY
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
Hurdle Word 3 hint
America’s bird.
Hurdle Word 3 answer
EAGLE
Hurdle Word 4 hint
A platform.
Hurdle Word 4 answer
FORUM
Final Hurdle hint
Cheapskate.
Hurdle Word 5 answer
MISER
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Most Ambitious Villain Helped Create The Franchise’s Most Complex Hero
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Star Trek: Voyager first came out, the most fascinating character was the Doctor. While Robert Picardo’s performance was superb, it’s fair to say this character was mostly fascinating on a conceptual level. We had seen things like hypercompetent Starfleet captains and exotic aliens before, but what we hadn’t seen was a fully holographic chief medical officer. Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram seemed like the perfect embodiment of the Star Trek ethos. He’s a technological strange new world and new life, all rolled into one.
However, what casual audiences didn’t realize is that the Doctor wasn’t completely unique. Long before Picardo’s character ever sawed bones in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Picard dealt with another extraordinary hologram: Moriarty, the brilliant foe of the famous investigator Sherlock Holmes. Over on The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge accidentally created this villain as a sentient hologram when he asked the holodeck to create a challenge worthy of the android Data. Later, Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor revealed that, in-universe, the holographic Doctor was created because Starfleet took advantage of the same accidental breakthrough that created Moriarty!
It all started in “Elementary, My Dear Data,” the Next Generation episode in which the titular android and Geordi LaForge recreated Sherlock Holmes’ adventures on the holodeck. Thanks to his positronic brain and his encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, Data is able to easily solve every mystery that is thrown at him. That’s when Geordi makes a seemingly simple request. He asks the Enterprise computer to develop a holodeck foe that could actually defeat Data, one of the smartest beings in the entire galaxy.
The computer obliges and creates a sentient version of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ greatest foe. Following Geordi’s instructions, the Enterprise computer included much of Data’s vast programming, which resulted in the holographic character becoming self-aware. Moriarty ended up threatening the Enterprise on two different occasions, and Picard eventually got rid of him by trapping the unknowing villain in a simulation where he thought he had left the holodeck and could explore the stars. This was meant to be a happy ending for Moriarty, but in the show’s typically bleak fashion, Star Trek: Picard later showed us a different, more hostile version of this character created by a malevolent Section 31 AI.
How A Villain Created A Hero
What does all of this have to do with Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager? Elementary, my dear reader! Very early in Voyager’s development (the show didn’t even have a name yet), executive producer Jeri Taylor was inspired by Moriarty to create a new character. As reported in A Vision of the Future-Star Trek: Voyager, Taylor wrote down notes for a holographic doctor “who, like Moriarty, has ‘awareness’ of himself as a holodeck fiction. He longs for the time when he can walk free of the Holodeck.”
A few days later, she wrote down additional notes that contain a startling bit of Star Trek lore. “The Holo-Doctor represents a new, state-of-the-art technology which has capitalized on the serendipitous incident which created Moriarty, and has programmed a holographic character which has self-awareness of his situation and limitations.” While Moriarty is name-dropped on Voyager a couple of times, the show never mentioned what Taylor’s notes seem to confirm: that Lewis Zimmerman could never have created the Emergency Medical Hologram program if not for Geordi LaForge accidentally creating Moriarty on the holodeck.
From Villain To Leading Man?
If that’s not strange enough, there was a period of time when Voyager’s producers were considering making Moriarty a mainstay character on the show. As reported in Star Trek–Where No One Has Gone Before, Taylor’s notes mentioned that “everyone agreed that was a little too broad, and we couldn’t figure out why anyone would take him along.” After dismissing the idea, they decided “that having a holographic doctor with the full consciousness of being a hologram might be fun, and we’d never done anything like that before, except for Moriarty.”
There you have it, gentle reader. Without the character of Moriarty on Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’d never have the Doctor on Voyager. In this way, Trek’s most ambitious villain helped create the franchise’s most complex hero. Thanks to Jeri Taylor’s notes, we also know that, in-universe, Lewis Zimmerman would never have been able to create the Doctor if not for Geordi accidentally creating a sentient Moriarty so Data could have fun. In retrospect, this does make Zimmerman’s arrogance that much weirder. After all, he has a lot of attitude for someone who owes his entire career to the two biggest book nerds in the galaxy!
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 19
After days of almost (and complete) darkness, the Moon is finally starting to reappear. We’re currently in the Waxing Crescent phase of the lunar cycle, which means each night until the Full Moon we’ll see it get more illuminated from the right side.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, April 19, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 5% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Despite more of it now being illuminated, the percentage of surface is still too little to be able to spot any surface details. Check again tomorrow.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
NASA states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. We call these the lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
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