Why won’t I die? I pray to Shiva, “Please, let me die,” and yet I do not.
Disaster Movie is where spoofs enter event horizon. The snake is up its own ass. Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, the dimwit mongoloid cretins whose career high was to have their material excised from Scary Movie, catch their own tails. In their never-ending quest to shove increasing topicality into their alleged parody movies, they discover the limits of that approach.
In half a year following their former nadir (means most badnessest), Meet the Spartans, enough pop culture had happened to allow for another wreck. It’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Movie: 2/5ths of 2008 Edition. The problems with this approach…I mean, the additional problems, exacerbating their career-long accumulation of problems: Mocking movies by timeframe in this way eliminates even the slightest thematic coherence. Plus, though this has been stated by everyone who’s both seen Disaster Movie and satisfies Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum,” there’s no way S&F could have seen the movies they target here. At best, they’d seen the trailers, borrowed some lines and some costumes, then just went ahead letting the pilfered hostage-cast of “MADtv” essentially improvise poorly.
Any effort to engage Disaster Movie as a legitimate motion picture is doomed to fail by definition. Instead, and to minimize my time spent on this one, what follows was written during Disaster Movie exposure. They are the final thoughts of a diseased mind.
Space: The Final Spoofening. It’s 10,001 B.C. (therefore “better” than 10,000 B.C.). A guy (Matt Lanter) runs, and first joke is…getting his face covered in shit. So no mistakes about what we’re getting. And here’s – is that an X-Men/“American Gladiators” parody combo? The cavemen are fighting with padded sticks – I’m not sure what’s going on.
Caveman Joe runs again. A monster chases him, and it’s Amy Winehouse (Nicole Parker) – I know this, because the caveman recognizes her, and calls her name out. Helpful, really. She says “bloody hell” a lot, evidently all S&F know about British people. Apple-brand laptop in her hair, on FaceNook (yeah, no one has clever parody names of that). World to end, on the day of this movie’s release (i.e. 2009 – did it?). Exposition over, Amy has a minute-long tequila-belching gag. Oh, and Winehouse has a crystal skull – because “crystal skull” is a legal way to reference Crystal Skull – The Asylum is cleverer in their plagiary than this.
Caveman dude waves up in bed as Will and – oh fuck, Flava Flav is there for no reason. He repeated “I’m Flava Flav!” to inform us who he, with the clock and Viking helmet, is. Now like Cloverfield (the central parody, only without the essential first-person camera gimmick that defines it wholly), Will has a boring relationship talk with his girlfriend Amy (Vanesa Minnillo).
Oh God, they do cheaper credits for…was there a show called “My Super Sweet 16?” That was totally necessary.
Whatever, it’s the party now – I predict a procession of tagged-on celebrity impersonations, for our sins. Eh, after the “ugly girl with unibrow” “joke.” And another “hairy chick” joke couched in a “Girls Gone Wild” reference. Now Dr. Phil (John Di Domenico) is here, well before I have the speed to type it. But even now, he’s still here.
Next random moment: Anton Chigurgh (of No Country For Old Men) kills a person.
And Kim Kardashian as main character Lisa – I don’t know any Kardashian jokes, so I’m beyond this. Meanwhile, a Superbad reference, and suddenly a Wanted moment added on top of it. With Carmen Electra as a tired, used-up Angelina stand-in. She fights Kardashian in a boxing ring in corsets – How can S&F make even this unappealing? Needless to say, it lasts for well beyond how long it takes to type, but really this moment achieves nothing. Meanwhile, I eat a Girl Scout Cookie.
Note another main character is Calvin (Gary “G Thang” Johnson – that’s your name?!)…he’s fat, he’s black…he’s Fat Albert.
The Wanted thing continues, for excessive deaths.
Now Juno…no, excuse me, “Juney” (Crista Flanagan, S&F regular). She head-bonks the Michael Cera stand-in, and that is that.
Main characters talk about relationship blah blah – this is worse than the first 20 minutes of Cloverfield. Attention…waning!
A marching band enters. For High School Musical, apparently. I could slap randomly at this keyboard for greater coherence. For example, a hobo urinates in the punch. How is that pertinent to the extended musical number we’re now getting? Okay, how many minutes now until Wanted or something puts a bullet in all these people’s heads. I sit silently for over a minute without comment, until rappers are arbitrarily referenced. Then…it’s back to the deathless musical number. Oh goody, it looks like Juney (fuck it, I’m calling her “Juno”) is a main character.
Next musical number! Seriously. I think that’s supposed to be Justin Timberlake.
“Look everyone, it’s Jessica Simpson!” (Nicole Parker, again…) Pointing it out is necessary.
Back to the High School Musical thing. UGH!!! Twenty minutes in, this movie has no point.
Oh wait, here it is! Disasters happen…in that there is “danger.” Not that we ought to care about that, for it’s time for more Juno stuff; S&F attempt to write like Diablo Cody. This goes on endlessly – Okay, it all lasts for too long, so I’m just going to list the running time for tangents from now on.
Well, everyone is on the streets now…that is the single shut-down Montreal street that’ll be our bucolic environs from now on. Asteroids fall, mostly, though other disaster things too. And…
One asteroid falls on Hanna Montana (also Crista Flanagan). Her identity is pointed out. Two minutes later, the bit is over.
Hancock bit – How are they allowed to use the real names?! Same gag as in the Hancock trailer – all they could’ve seen, as this was released, what, two weeks after Hancock? One minute.
Our main characters (Will, Amy, Calvin, Juno) hide in a warehouse set. A “Sex and the City” moment arrives, and it’s arbitrary now to point out how arbitrary is. The joke: The “Sex and the City” girls are played by men. Juno gets involved, and I am not counting her more esoteric references (i.e. Rocky IV, a hugely obscure film, by S&F standards). An unlikable fight proceeds, with a You Don’t Mess With the Zohan moment tossed in, because horrid smacking and groin-hitting and head-bonking is all they know any more. Two and a half minutes.
As a break from the useless parodies of other films, the four characters just stand around motionlessly and try deciphering the plot. This is obviously a fruitless enterprise, so instead everyone just gets covered in Juno’s “water.” Wow, remember when Nickelodeon used to coat its actors in Slime™ on an hourly basis? This is the same thing now, only the Ooze™ is given obscene designations, like pus or snot or mucus or cum.
Will dreams, as good an excuse as any for [rolling The Wheel of Movies Released in the First Half of 2008]…Jumper.
Rolling that wheel again, it “punchlines” with The Chronicles of (G)Narnia: Prince Caspian. The “Jumper” guy is called “the guy that ruined Star Wars.” Presumably they mean Hayden Christensen, who is not the actor here, nor the character he’s playing, and besides, George Lucas ruined Star Wars, so that was a lot of effort to no end.
In my ranting about that, I’ve passed over another jokeless moment of non-movie parody. Now everyone is arbitrarily (I need a thesaurus) in the streets.
And one of them is in the Natural History Museum. I realize I cannot tell the non-Juno females apart, for they’re all the same bronzed, brunette, Kardashianesque slice of skanky blandness. And while I was relating that, an AT&T ad got S&Fed up.
Okay, so…Amy is in the Museum, it’s Lisa who’s with Will, Calvin and Juno. Not that it matters. Like Cloverfield, they’re going to a place now. Plots! And Kim Kardashian is suddenly killed by an asteroid, resolving one of my lesser problems with this movie.
As if by clockwork, Lisa’s absence is suddenly filled in by “Enchanted Princess” (Nicole Parker knows no shame). Because the word “enchanted” is non-copy-writable, though Enchanted is. Great, so two bland guys, Juno and a grotesque Amy Adams rip-off are now all uselessly strolling together. I doubt S&F saw any of these movies (though they had 3/4ths of a year to see Enchanted). This bit persists, with “Prince Edwin” so…two minutes.
Step Up/Step Up 2 both namedropped. You know what this means? Again a dance substitutes for a fight, as in half of Meet the Spartans. Two minutes.
Jesus, these sketches don’t even vary in their duration!
“We need a hero!” “I am Iron Man.” From Iron Man. Remember that?
A cow crushes Iron Man.
Enter Hellboy…from Hellboy (Hellboy II, more likely). A cow crushes him. I sense this movie’s Pit of Death equivalent.
The Incredible Hulk now. I anticipate cow as they instead deliver the same underwear-ripping gag from, oh, two minutes after Stan Lee invented the Incredible Hulk. Then a cow hits him.
They repeat the AT&T ad pastiche thing, having run out of superhero movies specifically released in ’08.
Hiding in another…vague interior setting. Another pause from shenanigans for directionless dialogue. Enchanted Princess eats glass and bleeds profusely – this is possibly the closest thing to a joke we’ve seen so far. Meanwhile, I belch.
The soundtrack would have me believe they’re doing Get Smart now – parodying a parody?! Naturally, it ends in one of the central tasteless gags: Facial shit smearing. It’s gross, but the “shit” looks like clay, so [here I run out of immediate comment]. Three minutes later, I realize the characters haven’t moved their legs once, to excuse S&F from the complexities of blocking a scene.
I now don’t know what’s happening so – Oh sweet tap-dancing Christ, it’s Alvin and the Chipmunks! They rap – rap is inherently funny, in the S&F universe. I hate life. (Then we switch musical genres, for death metal. God, this “joke” could perpetuate endlessly.) I anticipate a two minute duration for this apocalypse, so in actuality…
Well, two minutes in it transforms from singing to a fight, centered around a chipmunk gnawing on the lead’s testicles. I think I saw the Mini Me do this once. It goes without saying that was funnier. And this gonad-centric fight goes on for…three minutes.
Meanwhile, Juno is now dead, which fills me with no emotions whatsoever.
Head On ad? It only warrants one minute. By the repeated use of the classy word “motherfucker,” it’s evident I’m watching the Unrated Version. Why?!?!?!?!
Back on the streets, for second unit shots of 1/50th Armageddon.
Wait, they weren’t out of superheroes – Batman! The Dark Knight, though there’s nothing here to indicate that was the specific intent. Two minutes – two minutes of Batman talking (and it’s not even a Christian Bale impersonation, it’s just a dude discussing masturbation). Cow? No, Batman’s grappling hook gives him the needed slapstick sendoff.
Enchanted Princess murders Speed Racer (from Speed Racer) with a glock for his Mach 5 ½. I’m not sure what I’m watching any more. One minute of gunshots. You know, overly long gags only work when you also include something other than just overly long gags.
A Michael Jackson impersonator is in the trunk – rather, he seems an impersonator of the impersonator from Scary Movie 4 – that’s how far we’ve dropped.
We’re now at the climax, a full hour in, at the Museum of Natural History. Only Will, Calvin and Enchanted Princess remain, finding Amy impaled “comically” on a spear. It having been a while, we get one of those “character” scenes which serve no purpose. I fall silent at the cruel slapstick it contains. One minute (but it felt like two).
Amy pulls the crystal skull out of her vagin- Hey, how ‘bout them Bears? For idiots, they discuss the plot of Crystal Skull, then point out it’s the plot of Crystal Skull, only it really isn’t the plot of Crystal Skull, because S&F hadn’t seen Crystal Skull when they filmed this, so it really has nothing to do with Crystal Skull.
A Night at the Museum? Yeah, makes sense you’d do this in a Natural History Museum setting. No jokes occur, though – not even a groin attack.
“I am Beowulf!” Huh, was Beowulf released in…the winter of ’07? Guess so, otherwise it wouldn’t be here. Oh gay panic jokes, how I missed you since Miss the Spartans! But one mere minute.
Kung Fu Panda (it’s assumed – wrongly – that’s what the Kung Fu Panda hero was called) fights Calvin. What the hell for? Well, nearing the end of the year’s checklist of references, even the scantest justification isn’t coming. Three minutes – god this is predictably unpredictable!
Meanwhile…Will still fights Beowulf. Repeating “I am Beowulf!” apparently stands for a joke, because, well, me might’ve said it once in the trailer. One minute.
More Crystal Skull – in the opening set from Raiders, because why watch a whole series when you can just watch the first ten minutes? Tony Cox (the omnipresent black dwarf who owns these S&F travesties) plays Indiana My-Ass, I think is his name. After a motionless discussion about whoring and sex (the fall-back for every inserted pop cultural character), Cox delivers his Indy-specific joke: Failing to swing on his whip. Take that, Lucas!
Will now does a replay of Cox’s whip joke. But they play it without the “joke” – the only one they had worked out, so…Okay, the skull is on its altar, the needed movie-ending moment, so END END END END END!!!
Will and Amy are wed by the Guru Shitka – Was The Love Guru needed to be – Okay, why do I still have the capacity to identify a Love Guru pastiche here in 2011?!
Now Will has a guitar – NOOOOO! He sings (unrated) “I’m fucking Matt Damon.” Oh, you’re referencing that now?! You do know it was a joke to begin with? It plays like the celebratory song-and-dance number at the end of more joyous comedies (i.e. The Blues Brothers, and not this), with each character announcing whom he or she fucks. Here’s the progression: Amy: Hanna Montana: Flava Flav: Juno: Hellboy: the Hulk: Iron Man: Enchanted Princess: Sabretooth (aka “Wolf”): the “Sex and the City” gals: Batman: Amy Winehouse: Jessica Simpson: Carmen Electra: Anton Chigurh: Justin Timberlake: an underwear model: Prince Caspian: the High School Musical children: Barack Obama: Indiana Jones: Hancock: Beowulf: Kung Fu Panda: Michael Jackson: the Chipmunks: a cow.
Take a bow, all you worthless shitheels!
End credits. Twelve minutes.
I’m starting to think this S&F career is a performance art project which has gotten seriously out of hand.
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