How many auteurs could spin gold out of a father profiting off the accidental suicide of his son?

The “Police Academy” alum will have to be even more delicate with his upcoming film, “God Bless America.” (Warning: Attached trailer is the red band version meant for mature audiences).

The coal black comedy stars Joel Murray (“One Crazy Summer”) as a fed-up consumer who takes action against our debasing pop culture. Think trashy celebrities, sexually voracious reality show stars and the like.

Easy pickings, no doubt. But sometimes it’s impossible to parody material as over the top as Maury Povich, “Jersey Shore” or any “Real Housewives” scratch-a-thon. And the clip, while humorous at times, hints of the same faux civility debate the Left manufactured to silence dissent in the wake of the 2011 Tucson shooting. We also get a Fox News-like bit where a host paints President Barack Obama as a Nazi.

Let’s not bet against Goldthwait, one of the more uncompromising artists on the scene who doesn’t bow to conventional thinking. This is the same man who gave us an alchoholic clown movie and one about a woman who “slept” with her dog.

The film is heading to Video on Demand in April 6 before its May 11 theatrical bow. “God Bless America” may catch the cultural zeitgeist or go down as a colossal failure. Hard to see it striking a middle ground, and that’s precisely what Goldthwait expects, we bet.

During the Friday night premiere of his new film “God Bless America,” writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait sat in an aisle seat in the middle of Toronto’s Ryerson Theatre. His elation and surprise were obvious as the audience responded with rowdy, pumped-up enthusiasm to the film’s wild rants and violent satire.

The movie itself is something of an oddball roadtrip comedy crossed with a furious social critique. After divorced office drone Frank (Joel Murray, recently of “Mad Men”) is told by his doctor he has a brain tumor, he sets off into a downward spiral. Having also lost his job and realizing his increasingly bratty daughter wants nothing to do with him, he projects his frustration out onto the world, setting off on a kill-spree rampage that targets meanness, rudeness and the coarsening of American culture.

Along the way he picks up teenage Roxy (Tara Lynn Barr, in a performance both sweet and psychotic) and takes her under his wing as the family he wishes he had.

Friday night’s audience loudly received Frank and Roxy’s rants on the state of what’s wrong in the world, which included the Kardashians, talk radio and anger-driven TV newcasts, people who say “literally” too much, phones in movie theaters, high-fives and other assorted annoyances. Even such unlikely targets as the writer Diablo Cody and her movie “Juno” come under fire. ”How can we be a civilization if we can’t even be civilized?” asks Frank at one point. …

“I think people think that I hate and I’m angry at all these things,” Goldthwait said. “And that’s not really my point. It’s that there’s this weird undertow right now of people being disenfranchised, but they don’t know who to react against. And what we really need to revolt against is ourselves.”

Full story here.

The rest of Bill Murray’s modern (well, 80’s) spin on Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol” is absolutely terrific. Taking the story into the world of entertainment for a Network-esque skewering of television is inspired and so is the perfect casting of Murray as the Scrooge character. Murray’s good in both type of roles, but I much prefer when he’s the straight man reacting to the zaniness around him as opposed to creating it (Caddyshack being the ultimate exception).

You drop an understated comedic genius like Murray into a wild story that allows him to be constantly caught off guard by marvelous characters and character actors like Carol Kane, Buster Poindexter (David Johansen), Jamie Farr, Bobcat Goldthwait, Brian Doyle-Murray, Michael J. Pollard, Buddy Hackett, Robert Goulet and a very funny and memorable Robert Mitchum as Murray’s slightly addled boss, and it’s hard to go wrong.

As the two warm hearts of the story, Karen Allen and Alfre Woodard never get lost in the madness swirling around them. But…

…of course, the highlight of Scrooged was also the highlight of all of 1988: An epic cameo with The Mighty Lee Majors. 

And now for a bit of trivia: Did you know that watching David Johansen  aka: Buster Poindexter play the role of  Scrooged’s Ghost Of Christmas Past caused a grown man to attempt suicide by jumping out a window?

Johansen got his start in the early 1970s as the lead singer for the glam-rock band The New York Dolls. Great band, but after only a few years, drugs and ego caused a bitter break up and afterwards the bass player, Arthur “Killer” Kane, was the least successful in making a comeback. So resentful was he at his own failure and the success of the others that Johansen yukking it up in a major motion picture was seemingly the last straw and out the window “Killer” went.  

Kane survived and this hitting of bottom eventually led him to become a Mormon. In 2004, almost thirty years after their break up, the band reunited for a successful reunion concert and made peace with one another. Just a few months later Kane would died of leukemia.

In “World’s Greatest Dad,” the recently-released, extremely dark and sometimes perverse new comedy from writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait (we know, we’re just as surprised as you), Clayton (Robin Williams) is the epitome of the put-upon, browbeaten modern middle-class American man. He’s a high-school poetry teacher with hardly any students, a girlfriend who’s afraid to be seen in public with him, and a son named Kyle (played with an amazing level of scorn by Daryl Sabara) who surely must rank as the foulest, most awful teenager in the history of movies. 

Lance does have dreams of greatness, however. In fact, he’s in the middle of sending off his fifth novel for agent consideration, even though he’s never been published before. But ** SPOILER ALERT ** one night, after finding his son dead from a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation that occurred while watching porn on this computer, Lance suddenly feels a unique burst of inspiration: in order to cover up the shame of his son’s actual cause of death, he moves Kyle’s body, re-hangs him in his closet and writes the perfect suicide note so that the policeman who finds him will think that it was just another, normal teenage suicide. 

But when the note is leaked to his high school newspaper, Kyle is quickly embraced as a misunderstood saint rather than the most misanthropic monster in the building. And with a newfound discovery of his writing’s potential for power, Lance quickly builds lie upon lie, creating an entire book of Kyle’s faux “journals” and watching his words take flight among all of Kyle’s newfound “fans.” ** END SPOILER ** 

With “Dad,” which caused a sensation last January at the Sundance Film Festival, Goldthwait accomplishes several remarkable feats. He manages to take a detestable subject, death by auto-erotic asphyxiation, and still deal with it in a way that won’t drive people from the theater. 

He also pulls out a stunning performance from Williams that easily ranks among the Oscar-winner’s career best. Conveying everything from drudgery to wild-eyed glee with a dollop of perfectly placed tragedy in between, Williams shows that when he wants to apply himself, he’s still one of the most daring and unpredictable actors in the business. 

Goldthwait manages not only to completely reinvent his image from its prior heyday as a B-grade, one-note comedic weirdo with a screechy voice and claim a spot as an astute observer of modern American life whose best qualities easily fit in the canon of the character-based classic comedies of the late, great writer-director Hal Ashby. 

But most important of all, Goldthwait has created a film comedy that offers plenty of fodder for deeper consideration. For even as Lance Clayton manages to deify his son through the falsely glowing tribute of a suicide note, the movie quietly yet firmly points the finger at each and every audience member as well – asking them if they want to laugh or cry, believe or disbelieve in Kyle’s sudden appearance of saintliness. 

While “World’s Greatest Dad” was shot last year in Seattle and debuted in January, its amazingly prescient script addresses a question that all of America should be asking in a summer overshadowed by the deaths of two controversial American icons, Michael Jackson and Teddy Kennedy: Just because someone with a vile or highly questionable past dies, does that suddenly mean we have to make them a saint?

Like any great film, “World’s Greatest Dad” doesn’t have all the answers, but at least it’s asking the right questions.