Originally Posted by carcosa
(Post 17051889)
This thread reminds me of the plot of the 2012 film The Three Stooges. Here's a brief summary for anyone who's interested:
Act / Episode 1: More Orphan Than Not
35 years in the past, the children at the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage are playing soccer with an old soda can in the frontyard. Sister Mary-Mengele, the meanest and strictest nun in the orphanage, tells them to go inside and do their chores. They try singing "Everybody is Special", but she tells them to shut up and go work. Later, three destructive infants, Moe, Larry and Curly, are thrown in a duffel bag onto the orphanage's doorstep from an unknown person's car. The trio subsequently wreaks havoc in the place, terrifying the nuns—especially Sister Mary-Mengele, who has always hated them.
Ten years later, desperate to be rid of the three, the nuns tell a prospectively adoptive couple that the trio are the only three children available. They're then forced to add a fourth for consideration when a boy named Teddy wanders into the room. The couple, the Harters, decides to pick Moe; but when he requests that Larry and Curly join him, they take him back to the orphanage and choose Teddy instead. Hiding his true motives, Moe tells Larry and Curly that he came back because the Harters were only going to make him do chores.
25 years later, in the present, the trio are adults, still living at the orphanage and working as maintenance men. Monsignor Ratliffe arrives and tells Mother Superior that the orphanage must be closed, and she tells Sister Mary-Mengele to fetch the trio. The three are trying to fix the malfunctioning bell on the roof; but when Larry removes the bell's "DO NOT REMOVE" tag (misreading it as "Donut Remover"), it falls and injures Sister Mary-Mengele just as she arrives. When they go to the Mother Superior, another accident causes Monsignor Ratliffe to fall on top of the nuns. Moe, Larry and Curly, thinking he is "getting fresh" with the nuns, attack him, until Mother Superior stops them. Ratliffe will not adopt them either as he is on official business.
Mother Superior tells everyone that the orphanage must close at the end of the month. Ratliffe tells the nuns they will be spread around the diocese and the children will be sent to foster homes unless they can raise $830,000 in 30 days. The trio volunteers to try to raise the money. Some of the nuns think they can't succeed, as they know only nuns and kids, but Mother Superior thinks otherwise.
Act / Episode 2: The Bananas Split
A subplot involves a woman named Lydia, who wants to kill her husband so she can be with her lover, Mac, and inherit her husband's considerable fortune. She finds the trio and offers to pay them the money they need to take care of the hit job, pretending that Mac is her terminally ill husband that wants to be put out of his misery and have him switch with her real husband when the moment comes. They botch the job by promptly letting Curly push Mac in front of a bus and leave Mac in traction in the hospital. When they try to visit Mac in the hospital to finish the job (failing to do so as Mac tells them that the incident cured his illness), they are chased by two police officers throughout the hospital and escape by jumping off the roof using a fire hose. They end up running into a now grown-up Teddy, who invites them to his anniversary party and an opportunity to settle at Teddy's home, but Moe refuses.
It is then revealed that Teddy is actually Lydia's husband. The trio's next scheme for raising the money is selling farm-raised salmon, with them scattering live salmon on a golf range and watering them like produce. But the same police officers from the hospital arrive at the golf course to arrest them and the trio gets chased off the golf course and they hide in an old building (getting in by using Curly as a battering ram to bust down the door). Inside, after having a slapstick fight, Larry and Curly scold Moe for rejecting Teddy's invitation and his father's earlier adoption attempt; they could have used his adoptive parents' wealth to help save the orphanage. Hurt, Moe tells them to leave, saying that he is tired of being with them. After deciding to split up, they leave the old building, with Moe left inside alone. Then it turns out that they were all on stage in front of an audition crew who select Moe to be the newest cast member of Jersey Shore as "Dyna-Moe".
Final Act / Episode 3: No Moe Mr. Nice Guy
Larry and Curly are getting along well without Moe, but then they start to worry about him, and decide to return to the orphanage to find him. There, they find out a girl named Murph is very ill but has not been taken to the hospital because the orphanage has no medical insurance. Sister Mary-Mengele angrily tells them that no one will insure the orphanage due to the trio's numerous accidents and injuries over the years, and the $830,000 is needed to cover medical bills that accumulated over the years.
Larry and Curly later meet up with Teddy's adopted father at his office to talk about what happened with the orphanage. Teddy's father confesses that Moe wanted him to go back for his friends to adopt them, and he thought three kids would be too many to handle, so he gave Moe back and took Teddy in his place. Then Larry and Curly discover a picture of Teddy and Mr. Harter with Lydia and Mac, and realize that Teddy is the husband that Lydia wanted to murder. In addition to this, they feel guilty for rebuking Moe in not accepting the Harter's adoption and decide to go find him.
Meanwhile, Moe has been causing a lot of havoc on Jersey Shore by slapping, eye-poking and head-bopping the cast members and not putting up with their spoiled antics. The cast goes to the producer and tells him to kick Moe off of the show or they will sue him. The producer then informs them that the show is all about the ratings and not them. Larry and Curly finally go to the set of Jersey Shore to reunite with Moe and they all head to the anniversary party where they show up to thwart the murder plot, getting in as balloon men.
When they get inside, Curly gives all the balloons to a little girl and she floats up into the air. Later, they get chased by the angry Lydia and Mac after the same girl's balloons are popped and she falls onto the wedding cake, destroying it. Moe, Larry, and Curly are chased into Teddy's bedroom, finding Teddy on the bed, drowsy. Mac then draws a gun on the trio, but Mr. Harter appears and tells Mac to put his gun down. Mac then confesses that Lydia was "calling the shots", but Mr. Harter corrects Mac and admits that he was the real mastermind and Lydia was working for him. He married into the money and was incensed to find out the money was left to Teddy and not him when Teddy's mother died years earlier.
They are taken for a ride, but the car crashes into a lake when Curly's pet rat Nippy digs into Lydia's breasts. They all escape when Curly farted, and Moe ignites it with some "easy-light, waterproof safety matches" that Larry had, causing enough of an explosion to blow out the windows. Once they are back on land, Mr. Harter, Lydia, and Mac are arrested, and Teddy thanks the trio for saving him. When the trio requests the $830,000 from Teddy, he declines, stating he refuses to help the same orphanage that gave him up to a father that tried to kill him.
A couple of months later, the trio return to the now-condemned/abandoned orphanage. They feel bad for feeling like failures, but then they hear kids laughing, swimming and playing. When they investigate, they find out a brand new orphanage was built next door, complete with a swimming pool, a basketball court, and a tennis court. They soon learn that the money came from the Jersey Shore's producers who consider this as an advance payment in relation to a new reality show, Nuns vs. Nitwits, in which the entire trio will take part.
Murph is revealed to be perfectly fine and her illness was due to metal poisoning (with Larry saying he has always suspected there was too much iron in the water). Then she, along with her friend Peezer and his brother Weezer (the latter thought to have been lost forever to a foster home), will be adopted by Teddy and his new fiancée, Ling, who was Teddy's father's secretary. In the end, after Curly accidentally knocks Sister Mary-Mengele into the pool with a folded-up diving board as the orphange celebrates the adoption, the trio run away, bounce off some trampolines over the hedge and onto some mules, on which they clumsily ride away into the distance.
Post-script epilogue
An epilogue consists of two actors playing Bobby and Peter Farrelly, explaining that the stunts were all done by professionals, showing the foam rubber props used in the film for the trio to hit one another, demonstrating the fake eye-poke trick (to the eyebrows), and advising children not to try any of the stunts at home.
During the end credits, a music video plays showing the Stooges and Sister Rosemary performing "It's a Shame", originally recorded by The Spinners in 1970, interspersed with excerpts from deleted scenes and a couple of brief outtakes. Though credited to "The Spinners and The Three Stooges", Hudson's own distinctive vocals can also be heard.
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