In Shanghai of 1937, smuggler Walter Farraday (Paul Freeman) sneaks five crates of premium opium out of reach of the invading Japanese forces. We know Farraday is nefarious because he sips tea, and doesn’t have an American accent. He’s ambushed by a villainous Chinese officer, whose hands are blown off in a booby trap while inspecting Farrday’s possessions. Farraday is apparently shot trying to escape.

A year later, missionary nurse Gloria Tatlock (Madonna) is looking for the lost opium. As for why, she issues flat non-sequiturs like, “Guns cause pain. Opium eases pain.” Script for movie causes pain. Movie returned to Netflix eases pain.

Her boss hires a washed up baseball pitcher named Glendon Wasey (Sean Penn) to locate the stash. Wasey’s chief qualifications appear to be his ability to speak Chinese, and the fact that he’s been in China five minutes and hasn’t had his head cracked open yet.

Gloria accompanies Wasey as they spring from one adventure to the next. These include a slow speed rickshaw pursuit, and falling into a shipment of raw fish. Baseball loving gangster Joe Go (Clyde Kusatsu) also wants the opium. Kusatsu is too nice to be taken seriously a villain, and isn’t funny, so the comic relief the movie so desperately needs isn’t coming from him.

Directed by TV helmer Jim Goddard and adapted by John Kohn and Robert Bentley from a novel by Tony Kendrick, Shanghai Surprise was intended as a throwback of sorts to The African Queen. That would have required the filmmakers to employ a sense of adventure, wit and intrigue. This movie is having none of that. The only intrigue is why it ended up one of the most unwatchable films ever made.

The backer of this disaster was George Harrison, whose Handmade Films came in to produce it. Harrison also composed the score with Michael Kamen, wrote and performed three songs on the soundtrack, and appears in a cameo as a nightclub singer. After the film’s box office failure was final, the quiet Beatle labeled it “a bloody nightmare” with “the wrong script, the wrong director, and the wrong stars.”

Sean Penn had never been interested in the script in the first place, but appeared because it had been submitted to his then-wife Madonna. She’d never starred in a movie, but thought this would be a good showcase for her love of Marlene Dietrich. Even if she had somehow managed to pull that off, the tongue-in-cheek nature of the material is all wrong for Penn, who takes himself way too seriously as an actor to mock himself.

Recalling her nervous appearances on Late Night With David Letterman, it occurred to me that Madonna is a painfully inhibited public speaker. Most singers – even rappers – make the transition to acting with relative ease. I mean, XZibit did it. But whenever Madonna has been required to speak – especially in this movie – it seems like cruel and unusual punishment for her. Soon, I was sharing the misery.

You know a movie redefines bad when you can’t even categorize it. Romance? No way. Action? Uh, not really. Mystery? Nope. Comedy? Not intentionally. Maybe if they’d done this as a Bollywood musical, it would at least have found a home on video shelves. MGM suspected Shanghai Surprise was a dud and shifted its release date several times before abandoning it in theaters, where the $17 million budgeted film grossed $2.3 million.