It's a close call on recommending this movie, but Spaceballs does have some big laughs that are not to be missed.Space films are Mel Brooks' latest target in this Star Wars parody that might be appropriately titled Schtick Wars.The crew flings itself energetically through space in search of laughs, but it will never penetrate the galaxy where Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein traced their giddy orbits.The film's low-tech styling is roughly the cardboard inversion of the cinematic machines it parodies, and Brooks seems less inclined than usual to push the overkill urges too far.The spirit of desecration rules Mel Brooks's Spaceballs. Buoyant, unsentimental low comedy, this manic Star Wars parody is continually vulgar without ever seeming smarmy.If Spaceballs lurches erratically from gut laugh to groaner, perhaps it's because the Star Wars movies aren't the most fertile soil for a feature-length sendup... [Still,] when Spaceballs connects, you remember why Brooks was once comedy's MVP.Most of the picture is second-drawer stuff.No one is that interested in Star Wars anymore. So watching Spaceballs is like picking up an old copy of Mad magazine and being puzzled about that Jack Palance parody you found so funny years ago.It probably will do fairly well with kids and younger adolescents, who haven't heard the bad puns and seen the sight gags a thousand times before.Parts of it work wonderfully, but whole stretches flounder.One small step for mankind, one giant step for burlesque.Brooks' own timing as a director doesn't seem up to its usual snuff. Light-years stretch out between the set-up of a gag and its payoff, and for a director who has always depended on the quantity of his jokes rather than the quality, the gap is fatal.If it isn't likely to generate what Mr. Brooks himself refers to as 'Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money, neither is it anything less than gentle, harmless satire that occasionally has real bite.Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do.One gropes in vain to find substantial pleasures in Spaceballs. The film is basically an empty wasteful retread of the self-conscious approach that seemed so fresh 13 years ago in Blazing Saddles.Most of Spaceballs plays at ludicrous speed, and even the parts that drag are funnier than an entire season's worth of Saturday Night Live.For the too-few minutes Yogurt is on screen, Spaceballs is a savagely funny complaint about the kind of movie more memorable for its spinoff products than for itself. The remainder of the airheaded Spaceballs just has no bounce.No matter how dumb it gets, though, Spaceballs goes by so smoothly and briskly that it's hard for a viewer to get cranky. And if parents don't object to a sprinkling of off-color words, the film's silliness could make it a hit with kids.Some of the gags in Spaceballs are screamingly funny. Some are mildly amusing. Others seem forced, pokey or deliberately, of course flatulent.Mel Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Unfortunately, what he does in Spaceballs, a misguided parody of the Star Wars adventures, isn't very funny.