"I had a father and a mother," Brooks said, "made up to look like half a dog and half a cat as a result of a nuclear meltdown. But the audience was seriously chilled and didn't laugh, so I left it out." The film currently holds an approval rating of 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 31 reviews. The film was nominated for Worst Picture at the 1981 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards but lost to "Tarzan, the Ape Man". The revised ballot, released in 2007, removed its Worst Picture nomination and instead gave it nominations for Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy (for which it won) and Worst Song for "The Inquisition" (lost to the song "Baby Talk" from "Paternity"). Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four and described it as "a rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure from one of the most gifted comic filmmakers around. What went wrong? Brooks never seems to have a clear idea of the rationale of his movie, so there's no confident narrative impetus to carry it along." Gene Siskel, however, gave it three stars out of four and said that even though the film "borrows heavily from [Brooks's ] previous work," it "contains a bunch of solid laughs." Janet Maslin of "The New York Times" wrote, "There are loads of familiarly funny gags in the film ... But the movie is so sour that its humor is often undermined, because so many of the jokes are either mean-spirited or scatological, or both." Pauline Kael of "The New Yorker" was positive and wrote, "It's an all-out assault on taste and taboo, and it made me laugh a lot." "Variety" called it "a disappointingly uneven farce which serves up a fair share of hearty laughs during its first half, but sputters out long before the close." Sheila Benson of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote, "Presumably everyone was so busy doing shtick and reacting off each other that there was no one left to mind the story and to say, 'Not funny.' Not only not funny, but a big, overblown, crashing bore, fellas." Gary Arnold of "The Washington Post" called it "an entertaining mishmash of skits which finds Mel Brooks back in lively form, for better and for worse ... To a considerable extent the funny stuff works in a laughing-in-spite-of-yourself way."