Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have come a long way from their post-college days of producing crudely animated web shorts about Batman being too stoned to answer the phone, but you’d be hard pressed to say they’ve evolved much. If a sequence that comes about two-thirds of the way through their first feature film involving four boys, a man, a bathtub and a gratuitous amount of diarrhea is any indication, they haven’t let their success get in the way of incredibly bad taste.

Still, it’s a long way from Philly to LA. They’ve gone from one Adult Swim series to the next, released two short films, held countless live performances, produced those Old Spice ads (yep, that was them), produced music videos, put out a couple of musical releases, made a couple trips to Sundance and, finally, on March 2, they released their first feature-length motion picture in select theaters nationwide.

The movie is called “Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie” (or, for those familiar with the aggressively-marketed viral campaign that led up to its release: “B$M”). In it, Tim and Eric are an eponymous two-man entrepreneurial team. Inept, oblivious and a little south of amoral, they’ve squandered a $1 billion budget as Hollywood film producers, so they purchase a failing mall to pay back the money they owe the studio.

If this is sounding like the sort of god-awful, thinly-veiled excuse for onscreen filth you might associate with the premise for a mid-2000s Rob Schneider gross-out vehicle, your instincts are right, but don’t let that scare you away. The garish lowbrow sheen that coats every frame of this movie is both a misdirection from the satire’s brunt and a crucial aspect of the aesthetic. This is crass, disgusting humor, but it’s also cultural criticism. It’s a dumb buddy comedy, but it’s also a delicately arranged tragedy.

Mostly, it’s a Tim and Eric creation, which means three things. First, it draws its humor from a very specific and repetitive set of themes and relationships – public access television, body horror, business partnerships, stilted expression, consumerist excess, dads, etc. Second, it is guaranteed to be a confusing and excruciating viewing experience for those uninitiated to the duo’s increasingly esoteric comedic style (see Roger Ebert’s half-star review of the film for a demonstration). Lastly – and this is important when attempting to understand the whole “Tim and Eric” thing – it is unquestioningly embraced by a fan base whose intense love – not only for Heidecker and Wareheim, but for all the small-time actors who perennially appear in their productions – has been proven and reciprocated time and time again.

Friday night at the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton, it wasn’t hard to feel the love. When the theater’s general manager George Myers peppered his energetic introduction to the film with references to the duo’s previous television work (“does anybody have any shrimp and white wine?”), the crowd response was loud and immediate. The hysteria mounted as Myers hurled dozens of novelty $1 billion notes bearing Tim and Eric’s likenesses into the air. At long last – the real thing: the Tim and Eric movie.

The titular “Billion Dollar Movie” only takes up the first six minutes of “B$M,” and even then more than half of it is gobbled up by a Jeff Goldblum-hosted advertisement/instructional video for the Schlaaang Corporation’s violently invasive “Super Seat,” followed by an interminable series of branded and re-branded Schlaaang logos. In case you didn’t get the point – once the fake film starts in earnest, the opening credit “Directed By Tim & Eric” lingers onscreen for a full 30 seconds. Right off the bat, the film gets a lot of mileage out of meandering.

Soon enough though, the plot is off and running, literally – Tim and Eric trot out of Los Angeles on foot – with corporate overlord Tommy Schlaaang (Robert Loggia) vowing to track down and disembowel the disgraced protagonists. He captures and tortures their mothers, a side plot that starts out with a Lynchian ominousness but too quickly gets bogged down in its own rhythm, punctuating the central mall plot with occasional reminders of Tim and Eric’s impending doom.

Still, it’s hard to call Schlaaang the villain of the film; there’s no evil without good, and there’s not much good to be found anywhere in the “B$M” universe. Even the nastiest of comedy protagonists (think “Dirty Work” or “Shallow Hal”) tends to betray their raunchy demeanor with some warm, gooey morsel of compassion at the heart of their character’s motivation, but when Tim and Eric buy out the failing S’wallow Valley Mall and gut it for (they assume) a profit, it’s not to save a community theater or buy medicine for an ailing pep-pep – they’re doing it because they think it’s the most convenient way to reclaim their lost billion.

So it’s no surprise when the team’s attempt to cure the S’wallow Valley Mall of its many nightmares – a man-eating wolf, a haunted yogurt stand and a gaggle of squatters, to name a few – ends up generating a whole new set of nightmares for themselves and everyone they come into contact with. They rule with a saccharine fist, gently separating families and suggesting that a shopkeeper switch to a more janitorial line of work. But that’s not the half of it – they’re constantly undercutting one another in small, revealing ways. The joke – whatever it is – is everywhere.

Despite the pervasive atmosphere of satire and the inherent humor of tackling a high-stakes plot at a dawdling pace, the film genuinely drags in the 20-minute stretch encompassing most of the mall-improvement sequences. One tiresome gag that comes to mind was done earlier and better in one of the “Austin Powers” movies – the one about the unwieldy vehicle that’s too big for the passageway. Yeah, it was pretty dumb then, too.

The lull doesn’t last long though, and the magnificently brutal finale wraps things up nicely. The comedic highlights, as is always the case with Tim and Eric, are the tightly edited video segments – like Will Ferrell’s televised plea for “a man or possibly two men who need to make a billion dollars” to take over the S’wallow Valley Mall or the duo’s exuberant video presentation for their two-man company, DOBIS P.R. (Wareheim flinging his head back and forth inside his own mouth as he spells out “D-O-B-I-YES” remains an almost hauntingly funny image).

Will Forte and John C. Reilly have been two of Tim and Eric’s most reliably funny guest performers in the past, but in their “B$M” roles, they quickly outstay their welcome. Each actor earns big laughs in his first and last scene, but flounders for the rest of his time onscreen. Forte is overbearing in the wrong ways as the perpetually furious sword salesman Allen Bishopman, and Reilly delivers his one-note joke best when he explains the deliciously sickening derivation of his sickly man-child character’s nickname, “Taquito.”

Meanwhile, Will Ferrell, Ray Wise, Jeff Goldblum and Zach Galifianakis all give stellar supporting performances. Ferrell, in particular, shines as the mall’s jittery former owner, Damien Weebs. The scene in which Weebs first meets Tim and Eric and subsequently forces them to sit through repeated viewings of “Top Gun” before badgering them into taking over the mall is one of the funniest in the movie.

In terms of pure shock value, the team reaches a new personal high (or low) with a sequence involving an almost-convincing prosthetic phallus (think “Boogie Nights”) and a few approximately urethra-sized sharp metal objects (think “Hellraiser”) – not to mention the previously referenced four-boys-one-tub sequence.

Musical highlights include an LMFAO-inspired electro-parody song, which is almost certainly produced by Doug Lussenhop aka DJ Douggpound (who ambles past the camera in club-trash garb at the beginning of the song’s debauchery montage) and a gloriously cheesy contribution by Aimee Mann (who previously provided the song “Hearts” to an episode of “Awesome Show”).

The film’s success with fans can be partially attributed to the fact that it had already been released at the end of January through on-demand and iTunes. This is a release strategy we’ve seen before with studios like IFC and Magnolia, who distributed “B$M” via Magnet Pictures. Then, after being released to theaters on March 2, it didn’t reach the Pioneer Valley until Friday, when it was screened at the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton as part of its weekly “Midnight” series.

Even before the on-demand release, fans were made familiar with the healing power of the “Shrim” mantra thanks to an early teaser and a Twitter-centric marketing campaign spearheaded by Wareheim, the group’s self-appointed publicist. The most impressive moment of the marketing campaign came about a week before the movie’s on-demand release when celebrities like Paul Rudd, Elijah Wood, Michael Cera, Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg were captured on video signing the duo’s recently unveiled “Billion Dollar Movie Pledge.”

The pledge stipulated that its signers would agree to see “B$M” in theaters if it came to a cinema within 50 miles of their home (or at least on-demand, if going to the cinema was out of the question). The pledge further stipulated that those who signed it would agree not to go see the film “The Lorax,” both because it shared a March 2 release date and because, according to the pledge, “it looks BAD.”

According to most critics, “The Lorax” was indeed bad. And regardless of what critics are saying about “B$M” (it’s a mixed bag), it’s fair to call the movie a success just for existing. As declared by the lyrics to the song playing over the closing credits:

“Tim and Eric have done it, yeah. They made the movie that they wanted to make.”

So congratulations, Tim and Eric. You put a grown man in a tub full of fake diarrhea.

Garth Brody can be reached at [email protected].