I am such a sucker for these movies. I always know they’re going to be awful, awful, awful, but I still go and I still laugh. Hell, I own the Scary Movies, Epic Movie, and Not Another Teen Movie. The only one I don’t have is Date Movie, but I watch it every time I stumble across it. So, there I was, opening night, at Meet the Spartans.
And it was everything I expected it to be. Awful, awful, awful, and I still laughed my ass off.
The theater was damned packed, too, which surprised me.
It was worth it just to see Kevin Sorbo (damn, he’s still in great shape) yell, “That’s it! I’m going Hercules on your ass.”
And even though I thought all the gay jokes of 300 had been done to death, they actually had some new ones that were pretty darn clever.
Anyway, to sum up, I’m the person who is ruining cinema by paying to see these movies, and I don’t care.
You know, I was going to start a thread “Meet the Spartans - who watches these movies?”
Consider my ignorance fought!
When the parody film genre started out, there were good ones out there - Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane!, Spaceballs… but now there’s one out every week! Do they parody different movies or the same ones?
They’re not really parody or satire anymore. Usually, they go along the lines of “POP CULTURE REFERENCE!” and throw in some character from some other movie, but don’t ever actually develop the concept. The humor is along the lines of “Have you ever seen this man?” for an hour and a half.
Yeah…it’s not like there’s a huge genre of 300-like movies to parody - but they do a pretty good job of parodying the plot and basic tropes of 300 (the characters of Traitor-o, Loyal-o, Captain-o, and Sonny-o was clever, as was the slow-motion scene of Leonadis tearing through the Persians one by one, except now he’s vanquishing them with wet towels, titty-twisters, and melvins. And the difference between how Spartans greet men and women is pretty inspired with a great payoff). Unfortunately, they do throw a bunch of non-300 references in there that are just throw-away, although it does culminate in a giant American Idol “I Will Survive” number that it’s pretty obvious the cast had a ball doing.
I will say, though, that **Not Another Teen Movie ** is an old-school parody on par with Airplane!
Jason Friedburg and Jerry Seltzer were minor writers on the first Scary Movie, which was actually a good parody. It spoofed a number of movies of its day, like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and did it well – with a coherent plot and amusing dialog to go along with the gross-out and stoner jokes.
The talented writers left around the second or third installment, and Friedburg and Seltzer have been cranking these things out ever since. They no longer have any particular story, and rather than mocking a genre, they just consist of a series of five minute sketches involving “HA HA HA THAT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S FAMILIAR!” humor. I’m just waiting for Brandine from The Simpsons to sit in the audience and yell out “AH RECOGNIZE THAYAT!” at each joke.
Yah, when Scary Movie first came out I thought it was a brilliant idea and funny comedy. Since then I’ve done my best to avoid any and all parody/contemporary pop culture reference movie.
ETA: Sorry OP for sounding like a threadshitter. Not my intention. Many people have a bunch of different tastes for humor. I, for one, can still not get enough of lolcats, while some others loathe them.
I would like to hear some more from others who have seen this movie.
Not a good movie by any means, but I’m a sucker for jokes about gay Romans/Spartans/whatever, and this film had tons of them. The pop culture jokes were all pretty lame, but the homoeroticism was the saving grace. The predominantly young black crowd I saw it with though, seemed to find men kissing and holding hands a lot less funny than I did.
Forgive me in advance for threadshitting, but as someone who paid $8.00 to see this … “film” earlier tonight, I just thought I’d weigh in.
I hated every second of it. I wanted to walk out around, oh, 5 minutes into it… turns out, the crowd I came with did, too, but didn’t want to say anything in case anyone was enjoying it.
It was beyond godawful, and anyone acting in these excuses for films should be forever banned from working in Hollywood. Ever. I actually felt queasy in my stomach when I realized that this movie was the highest grossing film this past weekend, and that people were actually making money on this dreck. I honestly felt entitled to a refund, if not compensation for enduring that thing.
Anyways, to each his own, carry on.
ETA: I agree about Not Another Teen Movie. That and Scream are the only parody movies I’ve ever enjoyed. We actually did walk out on Date Movie about thirty minutes into it when it hit theaters.
The parts that actually parodied “300” were pretty funny, but all the stupid pop culture celebrity stuff that came in after every other scene was just lame.
Not to mention the sets were the cheapest I’ve ever seen for a movie with a decent budget, and there were only two of them- the one with the big rocks, and the courtyard.
Hot guys running around in leather briefs . Other than that the movie was complete and utter crap. Did anyone else think most of the pop culture references already felt dated?
What I don’t understand is, unless you have seen ever other movie that has ever been released and absolutely can’t imagine living without seeing every single movie ever made, why would you waste precious moments of your rapidly fleeting life watching something like this? Why doesn’t everybody have the same exact sophisticated taste in movies that I do? It’s a puzzlement.
In concept I tend to agree with the idea that parody movies are lame, but whenever I find Spaceballs being shown I have to turn it on. It’s so damned silly in its lampooning of the SW franchise that I laugh helplessly every time.
Of course, now that we’re talking about it, I realize that all the Austin Powers movies are parodies, too, and they mostly make me giggle as well.
. Other than that the movie was complete and utter crap. Did anyone else think most of the pop culture references already felt dated?