Coming Soon: Parody Movie

The original Airplane! is one of the greatest films of all time. As a parody movie, they just don't get any funnier. Not only is the humor clever (if silly), but they cram in a whole lot of it. Almost every scene is worth at least a chuckle. Even if the actors are having a serious conversation, there's always something going on the the background, or at least a funny sign on the wall.

How brilliant is it? Consider this: A large number of viewers don't even realize that the movie is almost a scene-by-scene parody of a movie called "Zero Hour!". They know it's based on some old airplane-related movies, but a lot of Airplane! fans never saw the specific film it spends most of the time mocking.



Yes, Airplane! would be even funnier to someone who's seen Zero Hour!, and actually got all the references they were making. But the humor in Airplane! is so well-done, you don't even need to have seen the source material to get a laugh. How many of Scary Movie's jokes would have still been funny to those who hadn't seen Scream? Hell, how many of Scary Movie's jokes were as funny as Airplane!, even to those who had seen Scream?

After Airplane!, there were very few movies that captured the same magic. Airplane II: The Sequel was almost as perfect, but to be fair, it did use a lot of the same jokes as the original. Top Secret! was also quite good, and remains one of my favorite parody movies. I enjoyed the original Police Squad! TV series, but the Naked Gun movies weren't quite as funny to me. I also like the first Hot Shots! movie a great deal.

But as time goes on, these parody movies just get less and less funny. The "____ Movie" series has its moments, but overall I can't recommend a single one. Instead of gag-a-minute, they seem to go for gag-every-five-minutes (then stretch it out for another 8), and half of those gags are cheap toilet humor. I'm not offended; it's just not funny. (I might not find it funny because I'm not offended, if that makes sense.) That kind of humor is just too easy, and it does nothing for me.

And now we have Vampires Suck:


Argh! I'm not one of those whiny internet critics who cries when Hollywood makes a movie they don't like. I don't mind the existence of bad movies, because usually I can just skip them. But this one annoys me because I want to see it! Granted, there's no shortage of Twilight parodies already out there, and this doesn't even look like one of the better ones. But I like the Twilight series just enough to want to see it parodied as often as possible. I just wish it would be clever! But it won't. But I'll see it anyway. Ugh.

EDIT: Here's a pretty good Cracked article on the subject of bad parodies.