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It worked, Date Movie making back three times its budget. So smile in anticipation or cringe in agony, there’ll be a lot more [Insert your favourite genre here] Movie spoofs to come.
If
you’re in the demographic the studio are aiming for, best of luck to
you. We can only hope not all teenagers are as brain-dead, because this
is so unfunny it doesn’t even rate as a guilty pleasure if you’re
outside that demographic.
Using the time-honoured method of the
spoof comedy, it lines up a handful of popular movies from a genre ripe
for parody and shreds them the way we all do when it’s late at night on
the weekend and there’s been too much beer and pizza.
But as
many spoof comedies have proven, there’s a reason those sorts of jokes
shouldn’t leave the lounge room – they’re just not funny.
All
the effective parody takes place in the first half hour, after which
the laughs either dry up or descend into puerile sniggers as the film
leaves the broad swipes behind to enter the second act, trying to
advance the story to keep the film from getting boring.
A good example is the Da Vinci Code
send-up of the ultraviolet light message scrawled across the Mona Lisa.
Instead of the Dan Brown-penned tagline ‘So Dark the Con of man’, the
message is ‘So Lame the Hair of Tom’, and we cut to a portrait of Tom
Hanks and his much-derided hairstyle from Ron Howard’s adaptation.
It’s
the sort of thing that’s clever in and of itself, but would be far more
suited to a series of short vignettes. The common problem with a lot of
film comedies is the running time; 90 minutes is a long time for one
joke and it soon turns stale. The South Park and Mr Bean movies both suffered from jokes that suited far shorter formats.
Where most films are edited down to their presentable form, you get the distinct feeling Epic Movie’s
original script ran way short and a mad scramble ensued to shoehorn
mini-skits into the running time to pad things out. Most are in the
form of the same tired hip-hop parodies you see in every silly comedy
made by young white Jewish kids (recall the ‘Jive’ subtitles of Flying High),
and as they frequently run to several minutes, the script has no choice
but to try and insert jokes within them, and jokes within those jokes.
This curious structure of jokes within jokes within jokes as Epic Movie
goes off on ever-greater tangents will however be lost on most of the
audience, not having found the first joke funny and sitting for
increasingly long stretches waiting to laugh.
The parody is not
a bad genre, as the early Zucker brothers showed us. It’s just been put
in the control of bad filmmakers from the Wayans’ brothers (Scary Movie
1 & 2) to Seltzer and Friedberg, whose idea of laughs is frat house
toilet humour. Ironically (and sadly), even the Zuckers themselves
couldn’t scale their old heights when bought back to helm the Scary Movie franchise.
Veteran
comics like Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge are wonderful in the
films of Christopher Guest, just watch their talent in For Your Consideration. A quick paycheque can be the only explanation for how they keep appearing in stuff like this.
Undoubtedly, Epic Movie
will find its target audience of guffawing, popcorn-throwing teenagers.
If you’re one in spirit and you find yourself in a silly mood while
passing the multiplex, go for it. It’ll be the only circumstances under
which you’ll enjoy Epic Movie.
EXTRAS
Plenty of DVD extras - commentary; numerous featurettes, outtakes and an alternate ending - but nothing especially interesting. Conclusion:
Movie 20% Extras: 10%
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