There are few directors with a worse track record than Dennis Dugan.

Dugan’s atrocities include Problem Child, a Problem Child sequel, Big Daddy, Beverly Hills Ninja and Saving Silverman.

Out of 13 movies, 12 have been rated as “rotten” on the Rottentomatoes.com film review site.

Make that 13 out of 14 with Grown Ups, a film that could very well be the worst of Adam Sandler’s career.

You can blame Dugan for all that is wrong with Grown Ups, a silly reunion movie of five friends who were pals 30 years earlier, but this is Sandler’s production company, and he should really shoulder the blame.

Grown Ups is reminiscent of all those bad films Burt Reynolds used to make with his buddies in the 1970s. The films generally stunk, but he and his friends were having such a good time, they laughed and sometimes you laughed along with them.

Sandler has surrounded himself with friends from his Saturday Night Live days Chris Rock, David Spade and perennial hack Rob Schneider, as well as Kevin James. The result is the same kind of smug comedy where comedians perform the same tired jokes involving fat black ladies, flatulence and predictable pratfalls.

The five friends have gotten together (with wives and children) to mourn the passing of their basketball coach from that championship team back when they were kids.

After the funeral, they spend a week at a palacial woodsy lodge home on the lake, rented by Sandler’s character, who is rich, lives in Hollywood and is married to Selma Hayak, who goes by Selma Hayak Pinault here. A disguise perhaps, but she needs to try harder than that to distance herself from this unfunny mess.

Sandler also has some very unlikable kids. But just about everyone in Grown Ups is mean-spirited and not likable. Grown Ups does indeed resemble a The Big Chill kind of reunion, but it is a reunion that is best avoided.

Nothing works in Grown Ups, and the things they think are funny (the screenplay was sadly co-written by Sandler) are repeated over and over again. Like the Rob Schneider gag that he is married to a much older woman (Joyce Van Patten). They try every which way to make this funny or at least gross (french kissing with lots of touching tongue), but it does not work. Van Patten certainly deserves better.

And where there is lake, there is always a rope swing, and in lame comedies such as this, that means a tree to crash into.

They repeat that joke later as well when everyone goes to a water park, where it is Steve Buscemi (he was on the rival basketball team 30 years ago) who goes crashing into a wall.

And so it goes... more crotch hits, breast milk jokes, pee jokes, all of them unfunny and done before.

It’s the kind of thing made for a 12 or 13 year-old boy, and they are the only ones (and their older immature counterparts) who will find this remotely funny.

Critic's Rateing: F

Rated PG-13 for language, adult situations