The great fear has always been that Mike Myers would someday make a full-length movie version of "Simon," that awful skit about a boy in a bathtub that he kept returning to on "Saturday Night Live."

Myers, who is capable of such comic brilliance as "Wayne's World" and "Austin Powers," is also responsible for such desolation as "So I Married An Axe Murderer" and "Austin Powers in Goldmember."

And he doesn't seem to know the difference.

Myers' latest, "The Love Guru," is Simonesque. Although it does boast a handful of jokes that one will begrudgingly admit are amusing, they are overwhelmed by a legion of gags that are just appalling.

Many of the jokes are hoary, most are smutty, all are juvenile and far too many are testicular.

Myers stars as Guru Pitka, the second-most popular neo-Eastern self-help spiritualist in America, behind Deepak Chopra.

But he wants to be more popular than Chopra, which will require an appearance on Oprah's show. (If you sense this movie is going to have an unhealthy number of cameos, you're right, though Oprah is not technically among them.)

Pitka's chance comes when he is contracted by the Toronto Maple Leafs to help their star player (Romany Malco), who has lost his touch. The player's wife has left him for a well-equipped rival goalie (Justin Timberlake).

Pitka is full of linguistic self-help aphorisms, such as that "guru" stands for "Gee, you are you," and "It's time to move from nowhere to now here." Yes, they're parodies, but, no, they aren't funny.

His self-help books have such titles as "Does It Hurt When You Do That? Don't Do That," a joke that is so old it has hair growing out of its ears. And a shocking number of other jokes have similarly been around for decades.

I have to admit, though, that one chapter in his book about grieving made me laugh: "He Might Be Sleeping."

All too often, Myers mistakes simple offensiveness for humor. He and co-writer Graham Gordy like to make up Indian names and places that sound like naughty American words, they cruelly make fun of "Mini-Me" Verne Troyer's short stature, and they are way too fond - waaay too fond - of saying "Mariska Hargitay" as if it were some sort of Hindi greeting.

A few jokes work, such as the voice-over machine with the Morgan Freeman setting and an animated battle between a Los Angeles King and a Toronto Maple Leaf that is quite good until the filmmakers go to that particular well much too often.

The biggest problem with "The Love Guru" is Myers himself. Through the entire film, no matter how awful the joke, he has that unbearably self-satisfied smile plastered on his face.

Just like he did when he played Simon.