I Love You Phillip Morris may well have been one of the most underrated Jim Carrey movies ever. With a distribution approach that looked like it was decided via a map of the world and a twelve gauge shotgun wielded by a blindfolded nun at two hundred paces, not too many people got a chance to see this. And though in some senses it’s not hard to see why, it’s still a surprisingly hilarious title. And how do I know? Simple–the folks out at Lions Gate sent out a copy for us to review.

I Love You Phillip Morris follows Steven Russell, a man who, in many senses, is the small town ideal. A good churchgoing police officer, he goes looking for the mother who put him up for adoption. And this kicks off a series of events in which he discovers a few things about himself–he’s actually a gifted con man. And he’s also gay. And both of these are going to get him in a lot of trouble. But they’ll also get him to the point where he meets Phillip Morris, a young man with a kind heart who changes Steven for the better. Well…almost. The rest of the movie will follow Steven and Phillip as they go from rags to riches and back again.

And this is a good chunk of why you didn’t see I Love You Phillip Morris in a whole lot of theaters. Because this movie is not very subtle about its homosexuality–quite the opposite, in fact. Let’s put it this way–you might not have ever wanted to see a naked Jim Carrey have sex with men, even in simulation, but you will here.  A large portion of I Love You Phillip Morris will be intensely uncomfortable.

But another, larger portion will be out and out hilarious. Seriously, this is going to be endless piles of comic glee. It’s hard to hate a movie that makes you laugh so hard, and it’s hard to love a movie that’s as full of really uncomfortable moments as this one is. It’s a strange intermingling of horrible and awesome that’s really hard to pin down.

If you’re prepared to absorb some really frightening moments, some truly awful stuff, you’re going to walk away with this streaming tears from your eyes after some truly magnificent humor. Seriously, the part toward the end where Steven is repeatedly breaking out of jail only to be caught hours or even minutes later is comic gold.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands I Love You Phillip Morris, a blend of horrors and hilarity, an eight out of ten for doing its job wonderfully as a comedy delivery system, but not without deep costs and horrible consequences.