Droning funnyman Ben Stein monkeys around with evolution with the new documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they're losing the "intelligent design" debate because of academic "prejudice."

"Expelled" is a full-on, amply budgeted Michael Moore-styled mockery of evolution, a film that dresses creationist crackpottery in an "intelligent design" leisure suit and tries to make the fact that it's not given credence in schools a matter of "academic freedom."

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"Expelled"

1 star = Awful
Ratings explained

• Starring: Ben Stein
• Rating: PG for thematic material, some disturbing images and brief smoking.
• Web site: expelledthemovie.com

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Using loaded language and loaded imagery, Stein and Co. (Nathan Frankowski is the credited director) equate evolution with atheism, lay responsibility for the Holocaust at the feet of Charles Darwin, interview and creatively edit biologists and others (scientists "cast" for their eccentric appearance) to make them look foolish for insisting that science, not religion, can explain creation.

"Expelled" uses animation (shades of "Bowling for Columbine"), amusing chunks of B-movies and even "The Wizard of Oz" and classic propaganda techniques to undercut 150 years of peer-tested research. Their goal? Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution. It's a classic Big Tobacco/"Inconvenient Truth" denial tactic.

All the loaded references to Stalin, communism et. al reminded me of Khrushchev's famous challenge to the West, "We will bury you," meaning that communism would use the very precepts of Western democracy and capitalism to weaken and break us. Stein and friends use scientists' need to speak in terms of probabilities, rather than absolutes, to undercut a scientific theorem that withstands test after test, from Darwin to the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Stein, a Nixon administration functionary who reinvented himself as a movie and TV buffoon after "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," seems closer to his latter persona in this disingenuous and dishonest doc about something so silly you really wonder if he himself believes it. Or is the former host of "Win Ben Stein's Money" just trying to add to Ben Stein's money at the expense of the gullible?

Rated