Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is Ben Stein’s documentary about how Intelligent Design has been discriminated against in school science classes. I suppose he tried to put together a Michael Moore-like comedy with biting satire and all that lovely crap. The film opened in 36 theaters in Canada, and grossed around $24,000, according to this source. By some calculations, that means the movie drew ten people or so per showing. Yeah, it bombed. Evidently crationists aren’t smart enough to figure out that the movie is in support of their values. Or maybe they couldn’t find their local theaters?

Here’s some reviews of Ben Stein’s tour de farce. First the review from the New York Times, where Stein actually works. No, the times plays no favorites:

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.

Positing the theory of intelligent design as a valid scientific hypothesis, the film frames the refusal of “big science” to agree as nothing less than an assault on free speech. Interviewees, including the scientist Richard Sternberg, claim that questioning Darwinism led to their expulsion from the scientific fold (the film relies extensively on the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy — after this, therefore because of this), while our genial audience surrogate, the actor and multihyphenate Ben Stein, nods sympathetically.

Prominent evolutionary biologists, like the author and Oxford professor Richard Dawkins — accurately identified on screen as an “atheist” — are provided solely to construct, in cleverly edited slices, an inevitable connection between Darwinism and godlessness. Blithely ignoring the vital distinction between social and scientific Darwinism, the film links evolution theory to fascism (as well as abortion, euthanasia and eugenics), shamelessly invoking the Holocaust with black-and-white film of Nazi gas chambers and mass graves.

I could play this game for a while. The reviews are awful, and it appears the backers of this God-filled paranoid rant lost a bundle of money. Here’s the Montreal Gazette:

Darwin’s theory of evolution has been blamed for a lot of things — for one, it has Ben Stein to answer for — but it’s the connection with Nazi death camps that finally sends Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, over the line.

No Intelligence Allowed is a documentary “hosted” and co-written by Stein, a media gadfly who has previously been, in no particular order, Ferris Bueller’s boring teacher, Richard Nixon’s speech writer and the host of a TV game show. In a way, the film calls on all of these careers to come into play: the drone of a point being made over and over again, a Nixonian sense of exclusion and resentment, a merry-go-round breathlessness that disguises the lack of rigorous argument.

Nixonian! I’ll bet Ben Stien is proud of that line! As to the blame Stein places on Darwin for the rise of Nazism and the gassing of Jews, well, Ben Stein clearly has no shame. He may as well apply for a position in the waning Bush Administration for all his lack of honesty and shame. The real story here is that people are in fact intelligent, at least the Canadians who had the chance to attend the movie that opened there, and they skipped that opportunity to be enlightened by Ben Stein.

I wonder if the film will even open in the states.